Video uploads [Beta]: Add short-form video to your experience

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#300

To be honest, I think a video feature is a great addition to the engine. It allows us to do a lot more with our games and starts to get us on par with other engines that already have this feature. I guess I could complain about the price-tag, but it makes sense that it would need one.

However, at the current state, I’m not sure how reliable Videoframes really are. As of a few days ago, my opinion of them was very positive. They worked as they were described and I had no issues. I made a very nice intro-cutscene using video frames and was able to hide the fact that I was playing a video in the first place:

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There’s no box or outlines or anything that you can make out that reveals that I’m playing a video as part of my studio introduction.

This changed an hour ago, when my videoframe began to bug out. I’ve tried remaking it, putting it into different games, etc., the issues still occur.

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While hard to see, you can make out that the video frame is actually there because its color has changed. There’s also some weird green bar at the top that completely reveals everything. Also, the video starts to completely glitch out with random colors a split moment before playing at times. This is inconsistent, so I have not gotten a video of this yet. Again, this was not the case before and only began occurring an hour ago.

…Well, this sucks, cause now it’s no longer a cool experience and instead feels very “thrown together”. I’m wondering if this is a compression issue, because if so, it should be made a little more clear that you may experience a sudden change in your video later down the line instead of instantly. I’m not sure what to do in this position regarding my cutscene, and I’m 2000 robux short.

@phri , do you have any insight as to what happened and what I can do?

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#301

The downscaling is intentional, however it still looks like a bug that artifacts are coming up; if you PM me I might be able to post a bug report for you, but you should request to join the @AllowBugReports group in the meantime!

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#302

I’m fine with the downscaling, but it gets frustrating if it means the actual content of the video itself is shifted. Like the colors, I mean. I’ll send you a PM in one moment!

#303

Thank for reporting the issues!

We’re currently looking into it.

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#304

This is such a stupid take on the last part. My type of game requires cutscenes and I’m planning on making them sort of pre rendered as in a video so that they seem more professional and so that they look more realistic since they’ll be taken outside of Roblox. The game can’t be done unless the cutscenes are finished as they’re an important part of the game and they can’t be implemented later on as it’ll be weird to suddenly go from live cutscenes to pre rendered. $20 worth of Robux on a single video is INSANE.

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#305

Have you already released the game before it has been finished? If so, that would fall under early access and still be heavily under development. If not, for what reason could those pre-rendered cut-scenes be added at the end of development?

My point was more that there are lots of developers who want to do the pretty things before they have an actual game. One thing I don’t see many developers doing is creating a gameplay demo where it uses exclusively placeholder content to purely test if their core gameplay loop is actually fun or not. Imagine spending months on a game’s visuals only to realize that the game just isn’t as fun as you thought it would be, all because you didn’t test the gameplay from the start.

I wrote more about this in-depth here:

https://devforum.roblox.com/t/what-do-you-think-is-the-most-efficient-order-to-develop/2205460/13

Now let’s say you’ve already done that and know you want to go through with your project. Let’s also say that you have actually completed the rest of your game and all you have left are these pre-rendered cut-scenes that need to be added. Obviously nobody wants to be paying any amount of money to upload assets, so that doesn’t need to be said. You could look at why it costs money, which I’ve also talked about earlier in this thread. In summary, this is a new feature that they want to rate limit and it also costs Roblox money to store, host, and stream such content. As far as I understand it, this is only a temporary measure that will eventually be lifted when Roblox finish optimizing their platform for video content. So with that out of the way, all that’s left is figuring out how to solve the issue at hand. You don’t have time to wait for Roblox to wait for Roblox.

So what are your options? You can get funding for your game. Once your game is either all complete except for those cut-scenes or at least mostly complete, it’ll be much easier to show it to investors. If that’s not something you’ll be interested in, look what other methods of getting these cut-scenes into your game. It’ll be a lot more hacky, but you can create “Gifs” in Roblox and sync audio to it. It’s more time consuming right now as there isn’t a tool, at least that I’m aware of, to automate that process. But at the very least it’s a free option.

If that won’t work for you either, you might want to evaluate if you really need pre-rendered cut-scenes. You’ve set those requirements yourself, but games don’t require pre-rendered cut-scenes or even normal cut-scenes to be good. Gameplay is more important than anything else, without exception. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t do what you want, but don’t back yourself into a corner if it doesn’t work out for you.

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#306

Game isn’t released but I have everything I need done EXCEPT the cutscenes and the voice acting for it. I’ve written down exactly EVERY cutscene I need to add into the game with everything rigged in Blender. I planned on doing pre rendered cutscenes which would look a million times better than ingame cutscenes since they’d have better graphics and visuals without all of the visual effects needing to be implemented and I wouldn’t have to do as much scripting as a live cutscene would.

I Would much rather not get funding for the games cutscenes alone as I could devex it and find more useful things to Do with the $20 I would be spending on ONE video alone. Uploading at a gif would be terrible due to the compression on Roblox when I upload spritesheets.

it’d be 2x more time consuming if I were to use thousands of images. I get that they have to stream it or whatever but charging $20 especially to young developers is outrageous for only 30 seconds.
I’ve already gotten plenty of peoples opinions mainly because it’s a spin off of other peoples games and they’ve enjoyed the content and the way I want it to go so far.

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#307

I think there’s a bit of misunderstanding here. It might cost $20 to buy that amount of R$, however 2k R$ through DevEx is only worth $7. I don’t think you’d have any issues getting somebody to invest 2k R$ as that’s not very much in the developer community. Obviously new developers won’t have any R$ to work with without buying them, but that’s why you can look towards those that do, if you wish. Now this will definitely add up if you have a bunch of videos that you need uploaded, so I would carefully choose how you want to go about that.

To clarify, I understand that paying any amount is not ideal, but I’m simply explaining why it’s the case and providing possible solutions as this likely won’t change anytime soon.

#308

The only way that it’ll change is if Roblox focuses more on this subject which is VERY VERY unlikely considering they haven’t done many of the grand things show in the previous RDC yet… I’ve got talents in Modeling, Building, Scripting, Animating, and many more things yet unfortunately due to Developer Discord servers being extremely scammy and toxic and Talent hub being extremely underpaying/Cheap for difficult tasks it’s much harder to get Robux to invest in videos.

#309

You can see what’s on Roblox’s current roadmap here:

If you want to do jobs for people, I’d recommend taking the approach of showing your completed work and await for payment before delivering any actual files/assets. I do agree that, even with the Talent Hub, it’s difficult to find jobs or hire people unless you have connections. I don’t particularly like relying on Discord servers either. There’s also contract work, but you’ll mainly only find that from existing professional studios. Meeting and discussing with other developers has been the most influential thing for me, in my opinion.

Alternatively, you can still look for investors. How many of these video cut-scenes do you intent to have anyway? How many do you need to launch? You may also consider what other types of funding you might need, if you want to delve into advertising. Though I’d actually recommend using social media, word of mouth, and natural discovery, for free advertisement that will also likely serve you better, at least from what I’ve seen.

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#310

The whole game should take around 1 - 2 hours to finish for a new player for someone who’s trying to complete all the side questing then it should take around 2 hours or longer. I intend to have at least 5 - 7 cutscenes throughout the whole game. Intro (1 cutscene) (The whole game takes place in an underwater facility.

It’d be better to do it in Blender since I’m not using Roblox’s terrain water but my own water system which the lighting effects only work ingame which is time consuming). Main Questline Cutscenes (5 Cutscenes) Works better in Blender because of the lighting effects and because most of them will be underwater. Particles/Beams/etc have their limits in studio and aren’t well good enough for what I’m trying to make, and the ending cutscene which is something that I can make in studio, but it’ll still be time consuming to script.

I don’t need money for advertising. I have my own channel and other ways of advertising the game since it’s a spin off of Another which I got permission from the owner to make.

As for the talent hub and connection things I’ve done a lot of commissions earlier this year, but it was only with the developers who actually wanted me to work for them since they’re unreasonably Picky and ghost almost all of the people who apply for their posts despite me practically being able to animate anything they want.

#311

How long are these cut-scenes? If they’re all a max of 30 seconds, you’ll be looking at 10k to 14k R$ for all of those cut-scenes. If some cut-scenes are shorter, you could perhaps combine them into a single upload, saving 2k R$ here and there. If they’re longer than 30 seconds, obviously that’s going to add up quite a bit.

It really depends on what you want to do about this. If you really think these cut-scenes are required for your game, and you absolutely won’t settle for in-game cut-scenes, I can’t think of many options other than investors or taking commissions where you can. I assume you have a portfolio? Is there a reason that you wouldn’t look for investors? Investors are normally investing anywhere to 100k to maybe a million or so R$, so smaller investments are typically easier. Just try not to get stuck with a low-ball deal.

The only other thing I can think of is funding your current project with another one, but that’s likely out of the question as game development is time consuming in general. I typically avoid projects that I can’t fund until that changes. But finding investors is easier if you have content to show for the game and a plan for the rest. Investors typically wouldn’t want to invest at the start of the project, but it sounds like you’ve gotten most things done already, which is ideal.

I know this won’t be in games any time soon yet, but I just saw this post that will improve the ease of using a gif system in the eventual future:

With this, you would be able to fit 16 1080p frames into one 8k image upload. You’d still need a lot of uploads if you want to keep 30 or 60 fps (in which you would need 60 uploads for 30 fps and 120 for 60 fps for a total of 30 seconds). 24 fps is probably the lowest standard framerate, which would require 45 8k uploads to fit 720 1080p frames, all for 30 seconds of 24 fps 1080p video.

Obviously, I’m saying this assuming that a tool exists to speed the process up, and that the only thing that would slow the process down is the uploading of 45 8k images. Now if you moved down to 720p, you could do 30 seconds of video with only 20 uploads for 24 fps, 25 for 30 fps, and 50 for 60 fps. Downgrading isn’t ideal, and this isn’t even possible yet in-game, but I just wanted to mention this as it came to mind.

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#312

Please add Alpha Channel support, this would allow for sooo many cool UI things :frowning:

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#313

2000 Robux per video is too much. I made my own system, I've made my own video playback system

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#314

The price is still outrageous.

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#315

please lower the price, i really dont wanna spend 30 euros to upload one five second video

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#316

I really hope they increase this at some point soon, even to like 4 or 5.

It would also be great if Roblox adds more video controls in the properties tab such as being able to control the playback speed.

#317

I have a question, why 2000 robux? It kind of absurd to be honest, with the price being that high it discourages developers from using it. Are there any plans to decrease the video price?

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#318

ngl nobody is gonna pay 2000 robux just for 1 video PER UPLOAD, non ID verified users can’t reach they dreams and roblox didn’t even think abt small and non id verified users, they have to take they mom’s credit card to pay at least 15CA$ or smth else but bro, just for a public beta feature they have to increase more and more robux to be rich, like they consider us as rich people, we have a live, we have to pay food, etc, but not only robux, idk why roblox consider ppl thinking that “Life is Roblox”, roblox take life is roblox too serious ngl

#319

they didn’t even care abt us, like we have to upload images and images until our disk is saturated, and little developpers will never work on roblox again for losing motivation, idk what roblox is trying to do but im losing motivation to make roblox games but hopefully plugins help me