csp-recorder

Recorder for CosmoScout VR

A CosmoScout VR plugin which allows basic capturing of high-quality videos.

Configuration

This plugin can be enabled with the following configuration in your settings.json. The given values present the default values and are all optional:

{
  ...
  "plugins": {
    ...
    "csp-recorder": {
      "webAPIPort":     9001,    // Port of csp-web-api.
      "recordObserver": true,   // If true, the observer transformation will be recorded for each frame.
      "recordTime":     true,   // If true, the simulation time will be recorded for each frame.
      "recordExposure": false  // If true, the exposure of each frame will be recorded. Requires HDR mode.
     },
     "csp-web-api": {           // This plugin is required by csp-recorder.
      "port": 9001
     }
  }
}

Usage

The capturing is done in three steps:

1. Record Something: Setup a scene with as little plugins as possible as frame rates matter. Maybe it's a good idea to only render simple planets. The hit the record button beneath the timeline and fly around. When finished, hit the record button once more.
2. Capture the Frames: Step 1 has produced a python script called recording-<current date>.py next to the cosmoscout executable. This can be executed to capture the frames! Configure now your scene to look as good as possible - enable all the fancy plugins! Move all quality sliders to their upper limit! And make sure to have the csp-web-api plugin enabled, as this is required for the capturing. Then run something like the following in CosmoScout's bin directory:

   # This is only required once
   python3 -m pip install requests
   
   mkdir recording && cd recording
   python3 ../recording<current date>.py

3. Encode the Frames: Using something like ffmpeg, the individual frames can be merged to a video file. Here is an example:

   ffmpeg -f image2 -framerate 60 -i frame_%d.png -c:v libx264 -preset veryslow  -qp 8 -pix_fmt yuv420p recording.mp4