Welcome to Ownedcore Product Reviews, where our News Team picks up the latest games, programs, and other cool stuff we deem worthy of promotion and criticism. This time around, we'll be taking a look at one of the most interesting programs to have gone under our rader: Machinima Studio by MachinimaDev.
This program gives you full control over models and animations from a variety of different games from Fallout 3 to World of Warcraft, allowing you to create cameras, special effects, and lighting sources to easily manipulate a scene and record your very own machinima without the hassle of paging through the compressed archive files of the game yourself. In addition, it automatically loads sound files and all of the accessible files from the game, allowing you to import them into a 3D scene.
As with any program, there are a few bugs and glitches, but it isn't unworkable. The only complaint I have is the animation editor for the World of Wacraft module, which can sometimes be a little bit clunky. I spoke with the developer about a movie encoding and export function, which he says will be included in a future version. For now, you must use screen recording software to capture the animation from the Standalone Movie Viewer included with MachinimaDev's Machinima Studio.
Machinima Studio is a full-featured program that gives you more control over the game's files than any other editor I've encountered. If you really enjoy making machinima, I consider Machinima Studio your best investment. You can pick up the program from MachinimaDev's product page, or download and set up the Machinima Studio demo. This one receives a 4.5 star rating from Ownedcore. Machinima Studio streamlines the process of creating your very own machinima productions, without having to hassle with exporting and importing strange file formats. You won't be able to fully dump your editing software, so hold on to it. Unless you really want to work with the sometimes unwieldy animation timeline, you should still be editing your clips together in a proper video editing software studio.