Converting RandomMovies to "baked in" BG Videos

So, I consider myself a preservationist. I love playing songs/charts as close to its original experience as possible. This includes the BG videos. Many years ago I went diving into this topic and put together a collated chart list from DDR and it utilized RandomMovie callouts to make the BG videos work. It went well enough, but as time moved on and the community transitioned from 3.95 to SM5 to ITGm, things are becoming a bear to keep up with. Different versions of the game handle BGs differently and some break.

What I would like to do is create "baked in" videos that sit inside the song's folder as a single BG video. This way, wherever the song goes, the BG video will go with it. My issue is, I have never found a good way to record my songs playing the RM backgrounds without all the in-game UI cluttering it up.

I was shocked when I recently went to ZiV and discovered that someone somehow made baked in videos for most of the early DDR charts (DDR 1st and 2nd Mix). I would really like to know how they did this. Is there a tool/program out there that can read a BGScript callout from a stepchart and compile a video? Did they run it on a modified theme with all the UI stripped out and record it that way? I'd really like to know who and how this was done.

Part of my reason for wanting to know, is I discovered that some of the charts don't have BG videos on them (e-motion, Genome Scream), which surprises me, because I have Beware's versions of those songs, which have BG callouts to Random Movies and it plays the BG of those sons (as they were in Extreme). So, whoever has provided the BG for the previous DDR tracks, I wonder why they did not do it for some of these, and I'd like to help fill in the gaps if possible.

Anyways, sorry about the rambling. The TLDR=who made the video files included in the early DDR simfiles in the ZiV database and how did they do it? I'd love to know.

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You would have to manually edit the videos using a video editor.

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I think it may have been Raavi that edited some of those scripts together as full videos, which is great, but could take up quite a lot of space like those dancer background videos (though we have fully rendered 3D dancers & stages now across the franchise) It's a shame the scripts don't work correctly in SM5/Outfox, people have requested that the video rewind and playback speed features be fixed, but unfortunately I've only seen 3 people ever, and one of those people include myself I'm unsure if it's that they don't care? or if they are that generation that grew up with a static image of the ITG 2 logo behind their customs? newer DDR seems to have gone in that direction too :/

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You could use a theme without decorations in the gameplay screen and record it with a screen recorder, if you don't have a theme with that specifications, just use a theme and with gimp or photoshop, make all the images transparent, or if you know some theming basics, remove the screen files or redirect them to an empty file.

Yep. I'm one of those "preservationist" types who likes to play things as true to the original as possible. I find it interesting that in other gaming communities, there is a good chunk of people who strive to preserve the classic way to play for various reasons. But the dance game community very much does not seem to care about that. Very few people play the classics (according to the Groovestats records) and, as you mentioned, BG videos and stuff like that is nearly completely forgotten about and modern games don't handle to old BG Script callouts properly.

It's a shame, but I figure it is-what-it-is and I'm trying to find decent workarounds. But all of it is incredibly time-consuming.

Yeah, I think this is what I need to do. I've tried it in the past and just could not get it 100% clean. The only thing I can think of is, like you said, replace literally every graphic with a blank and see if that works. Too bad that'll be an incredibly time-consuming process.

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What build of SM are you using?

Preferably, I could strip OpenITG of its play elements, because (IMO) that was the last stepmania build I experienced that played BG Scripts accurately for the old stepcharts.

I went thru and used photoshop to rescale ALL the images in the theme to 1x1 pixel. This makes the play field clean except for two remaining issues that I cannot figure out. (ignore the arrows. I can hide those with options).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1soo6L5COJDQKxmBNHoRwmROAPHyB-aXX/view?usp=drive_link

1) The life bar. I removed all the graphical elements, but it's still showing the remaining health of the bar, so this must be a scripted item somewhere, but I have not been able to locate it. Do you know where this is located so I can kill it and remove it from the play field?

2) The background video brightness; This should be easy. I went into the metrics.ini file for the theme and changed it to BGBrightness=1.000000. I noticed that BGBrightness was called out in two different places within metrics.ini, so I changed both. But the results when I run OpenITG is that the screen is still dimmed. Not sure why this is the case.

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