This blog is dedicated to those esoteric activities directly or indirectly related to miniature gaming, boardgaming and Euro-gaming.


Sunday, December 3, 2017

The Battle of Raab, 1809 - 3rd time around

Recently we re-fought 'The Battle of Raab, 1809' for the third time. We used Napoleon's Battles 4th Ed. rule set and a revised scenario, which has since been extended with some 'Additional Options' to provide some options to further balance the scenario.

You may want to read the scenario is available here.

This time, we recorded the game using a time lapse from an overhead web cam.

Enjoy. Comments and questions welcome!





9 comments:

  1. Interesting! I've thought of trying something like that - but have never actually taken the leap. Do you need an expensive camera? How did you suspend it over the table - from a ceiling light fitting? How many MB ... or GB... was the final file? What was the speed-up setting relative to normal time?

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    1. Zardoz, the video footage was captured using an inexpensive (and quite old) logitech 720p webcam and Windows 10 built in Camera app. The webcam was suspended with double sided tape from a length of timber from shelves adjacent the table (definitely a hack job!). We were limited by the length of USB extension cable as well - about 2 metres. It was a last minute decision to capture the images so not a lot of thought went into the filming - pretty good result given this. I ran into a 3 hour limit for the length of the video using this setup, which equated to a 5.6GB file. The video was speeded up to 1500% of original, i.e. 15 times.

      Post processing in Adobe Premier Pro CC, with some sharpening of the original footage to 'help' compensate for the lack of sharpness of the webcam. Final production video uploaded to YouTube was a 3.6GB MP4 file (1080p).

      Let me know if you want to know any more details.

      Tim

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    2. Just realised this was you Tony! Hope you are well. Thanks for viewing!

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    3. Me indeed. I'm very well - keeping busy with various things. I'm back in the PC wargaming world at the moment - there are some new games with first class AI and the option to game without painting zillions of figs is attractive. I still have tabletop wargaming on my mind but. It would be good to record condensed views of games in the manner you tried here. I'll try and set aside a bit of time to have a go at it myself.

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  2. Aaaiii! A missing unit on the Right! Funnily enough it felt like it when I was playing...
    Si

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    1. Must have been the difference! Re-match I say!

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  3. Is there anyway you could add in audio commentary. The music is annoying and I just turned it off.

    I appreciate this kind of video - these actually could be good historical training tools too if you were to make a video recreation of the battles.

    Bill P. - San Diego,CA USA

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    1. Hi Bill P. - sorry you found the soundtrack annoying, perhaps you could elaborate? Not your to your taste, distracting, etc. I could add audio commentary I guess, but I really wanted the images and captions to tell the story. As for making a 're-creation', well I suspect that it would be an interpretation of what really happened at the end of the day - even with great sources such as Gill to draw on. I prefer trying to re-fight than re-create. Thanks for watching and commenting!

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  4. Nice job…and on the scenario too. I've downloaded it to try out when I get round to Raab myself. Have you considered posting it to the NapsBattles Yahoo group?

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