Just as the name implies this is going to be boring. You will have to select what game settings you want to record. If you use the highest settings possible, you're going to end up with a very short demo clip. If you want to stream a video clip, you may want to select a screen resolution and video settings that are much lower. This is because we are going to write screenshots for every single frame of your demo. The constraining factor you should keep in mind is the number of screenshots you want and the amount of storage space on your hard drive they will consume. For example, at 1024 x 768 resolution, each screenshot is ~2.3 Mb. Reducing screen resolution to 800 x 600 reduces the size by 40%, to ~1.4 Mb, so think about your (recorded FPS X minutes of demo X file size per screenshot) = space required, and you should get an idea of what you can physically record. Going to 300 x 200 will result in .tga files that are only 226 Kb each.

Now load up your demo. From the console, type \demo [demoname] to load the demo. [demoname] is the specific name of the demo we just recorded. Now type \cl_avidemo 30 (30 being the frames per second, this number can be changed to your preference but probably no lower than 30). To make things easier we can bind a button to this.

Here's a simple script to toggle the cl_avidemo function on and off:

//set demoAvi recording
set avion "cl_avidemo 30; set nextavi vstr avioff"
set avioff "cl_avidemo 0; set nextavi vstr avion"
set nextavi "vstr avion"
bind x "vstr nextavi"

Before you start this operation, you might want to first delete or move any screenshots currently in your target folder. The cl_avidemo function is now going to take a screenshot for every single frame of your demo. This will take some time depending on the size and length of your demo. After the demo has been complete, it should take you back to the main screen and we might as well just quit Q3:A now. Let's take a look in our screenshots directory and review our screenshots. If your using Paint Shop Pro you can simply look at the thumbnail and see which ones need to be deleted. If you want a free image viewer, you can download Irfanview. However, Irfanview cannot create .avi files.

You will probably see a few screenshots with the console screen since we started the recording while we were in the console. This goes back to the problem of "we should have bound a button to this". So either delete these or delete them all and bind a key to \cl_avidemo 30 and try again. The only editing that needs to be done to the .tga files is that it must be in 512 x 256 resolution, but only if you wish to do RoQ compiling. 512 x 256 was the only resolution tested by Worthless and it worked. I personally have never used RoQ so I cannot vouch for any other resolutions that might work.

Now I'm going to explain how to make an .avi file. We have a directory full of screenshots, all of which are in .tga format. That won't do while we try to make an .avi, so you can either go through each file individually and save as a .jpg or use Irfanview or Paint Shop Pro's Batch Conversion and save some time. Now that we have our .jpgs, let's make our .avi. Open up Paint Shop Pro, or your personal graphical editor, and go to File. Under File go down to Run Animation Shop. From there, go to File and find the Animation Wizard, because I truly don't know much about Paint Shop Pro. From my continuous plugs of PSP you would probably think that I actually liked the program. Nope, can't stand it but it does have some options that my personal Graphical Editor does not have. So it's either that or doing it the hard way.