This is made from footage over a year old. Yes, it’s from Forza 3. I just had no software to edit it with, or motivation to do so until recently.

I was racing in that black, white, and wine-coloured RX-7 when I lost grip and went into the wall. It bounced me back into that Corvette (which righted me), and this started a nutso chain reaction that affected pretty much every car but the BLUE ONES (the Blue GT-40 and C6 Corvette).

You try to race clean, but sometimes NASCAR happens and you get some fun footage.

So I have a few problems with how this was done that I need to vent about.

By that, I mean the way Microsoft has been, and is continuing to handle media and certain things. They’re kind of in the position that Apple was in, back in the 90s. They have this proprietary technology that NO ONE ELSE wants to support or use, but they continue to push it on everyone that dips into their platform. WMV is the Quicktime codec of the 20-teens.

Microsoft: You’ve lost this battle. It’s time to give up and support .MP4/H.264/AAC/whatever instead of forcing us to use your tech in the most inconvenient fashion. You owned the 90s. Someone else will own the next decade, but for now, this is what we have to deal with, so GET WITH THE PROGRAM. Stop making stuff harder for us to use just so you can keep trying to push your rock up that mountain.

You enable us, the player, to output replays to video, which is FANTASTIC, but you hobble us by A) limiting the clips to 30 seconds max, which one has to B) upload from their console to your website, and then C) download BACK to their computer from your website, D) encoded with a kind of high amount of compression, E) within your proprietary mess of a codec, requiring that we F) need a Windows install to G) convert the video into a usable format, which we can finally use in a video editing application.

How to video?

Now, maybe I’m just bitching a little. I can have a tendency to complain about small details. But God is in the details, someone once said, and I think it’s true. It’s the details that you notice when they’re missing. I can deal with the crappy compression and even the 30 sec limit (which is more of an annoyance than a roadblock), but why the hell can’t we just save them to a USB stick to transfer to our computers, and why aren’t they in a proper video format so that they can be easily imported into a non-Microsoft app?

People will say “Well Apple is just as guilty of this!!” – and yes they are. All the companies are. The difference in this case is that they succeeded, and now it’s the standard. Well, that’s one difference. The other is that Apple’s ‘format’ was made free and open (more or less), which is one reason it succeeded.

—

Anyway! Kvetching aside, I had fun making this, and I’m enjoying learning how to use this software even more! I’ve got a whole bunch of awesome replays in Forza 4 I need to check out one of these days to get more fun footage off of, although I wish less of them had to do with crashing!

PEACE OUTSIDE!