Did video production suddenly become cheap?

What titles says.

I have a (possibly false) impression that there are more games that try to insert segments of live action or try to base the gameplay around it.

For example, this is from journey to savage planet:

Spoiler

I also came across few visual novels based off live footage before, then there was "Her story".

So, did I miss some sort of significant changes in video production or are those just flukes?

 

If you don't try and chase big deal cinematography, it's pretty cheap now, yeah. A lighting rig will only run a couple hundred bucks, phone cameras are genuinely pretty great nowadays, and if a phone camera isn't going to cut it, you can get a 5+ year old Canon and a lens kit for a real decent price. Past that, it just depends on if you have access to on-camera talent, basic cinematography skills, and editing software. You can get editing and compositing software for anything between $0 and $5000, but even the free stuff has come a long way.

 

My impression (based off of the sheer number of YouTube content creators making reasonable videos on a budget) is that "good enough" video production is now affordable. Most of them seem to be spending up to a couple thousand and getting everything they need.

 

Well, the reason for asking is that Savage Planet did this:

There's something like 16 of those videos which provide in-universe adverts all with the same guy, although there are extras on occasion. They don't really DO anything, they just providfe background advertising noise to the piece.

I mean, I saw previously that it is possible to do things like this with blender:

Spoiler

And then there was some russian dude that did this video:

Spoiler

^^^ Some people still think this thing is real.

However, I find the sudden resurgence of live action puzzling and kinda keep wondering what's the budget of one of those savage planets advert clips and whether it would be more reasonable (If I were in their place) to make more creatures, more levels of something like that instead.

Previously this approach was used in select titles which tended to be with larger budget. Like Red Alert.

 

I think you are misreading the Red Alert story.

Command and Conquer included live action video cut scenes precisely because digital scenes were too expensive to produce. Westwood Studios hired one voice actor, who ended up being played Kane and directed the cut scenes. Literally everyone else in the live action scenes were Westwood employees that just got roped into acting in between programming or art tasks.

Live action was done because it was cheap, not because the studio had a big budget to throw around. Live action largely disappeared as animation became cheaper.

Later Command and Conquer titles kept the live action scenes to preserve the tradition and feel of the game. Not because they had the budget to throw at it.

 

Well, the way I see it, there's Red Alert 1 and then there's Red Alert 3.

The story sorta reminds me of escape from new york visuals:

This is carton boxes with duct tape. Because CGI was too expensive.

 

Yeah. What I'm saying is the reason live action was included in Red Alert 3 is because its was included in Red Alert 1. And the reason it was included in Red Alert 1 is because it was cheap.

The fact that Red Alert's budget was high is largely unrelated to the decision to do live action. Live action would have made sense if they had made it low budget too.

 

I'm surprised nobodies brought up Night Trap yet lol.

Night Trap had a budget around $1,500,000.
Not sure if this is considered the same thing as this is more than just simple video footage to tell a story.

EDIT: According to google, it was one of the most expensive games of the time. Sega CD.

 

I still kinda want to know how many more googly eyed birds could be done instead of this video clip. Because while live action was cheaper back then, the situation is different now, and the video is not just unprocessed camera footage.

Steam has a live action visual novel currently, titled "Root Letter Last Action".
Looks like this:

And if we speak about live action, privateer had live-action cutscenes. I think they were mutliple-choices.

 

Adding fuel to the fire

Getting the Hollywood Look Without the Hollywood Crew

Spoiler: Tangent edit:

I wanted to supplement with that too, There is a lof subtleties with colors anyway, that makes all the difference

Color Scientist Explains the Problem with RGB Lights

Why you can't take a good picture of a rainbow

 

The usual. Stuff got way cheaper, and much much better at the same time. Everyone's got a phone that can capture video, 4K action cameras are $40 off Amazon (and the pinnacle of video camera technology is perceived to be a $1500 Canon DLSR). At least twice this year, Humble Bundle will offer to sell you a copy of Vegas or similar for $20. Your bogstandard laptop has more CPU power than ILM had access to for its first 20 years. T'internet has howto videos on every last aspect of video and audio production. An entire industry of content producers grew up to provide premade drop-in assets.
And because Youtube; making videos of stuff is utterly normalised. So there are more people doing it, and thus more people doing it well.

 

Does anything in that video look remotely expensive, though?

All of the sets are places you could find in an office, school, university, etc. quite easily. And all of the people are either talking to the camera or doing literally everyday stuff. The video about the meat clone would be the trickiest of what I've seen from the game, but I suspect it's still fairly easy stuff for anyone with both 3D and AfterEffects (or similar) skills.

As far as I'm aware the expensive stuff in most movies is hiring famous people / high-end experts, making custom sets, and special effects. Most live-action in low budget games I'm aware of only needs the last one, and only a little bit.

 

I think with Journey it was purely a stylistic choice. The game has a pretty cartoony style and you don't see humans at all. and production wise, the total screen time is pretty minimal, it would have likely been more time consuming and expensive to create and animate and art direct a character outside the scope of the game. Likely that guy is a developer or actor and could have shot the entire content for the game (I think... I am only at 60% complete) in an afternoon. Plus it is fun and quirky.

 

The thing is, I don't know how much did that cost. It might be even cheapest of them all. But it wasn't done in one hour.

The trickier videos out of all them would likely be "Mall Monkeys":

Spoiler

Because CG and art assets.

 

When blue/green screen effects become widely available for average customer Joe, for little to no cost, it was already big step forward, in video making. Just look into range of YT and similar podcasts and life streamings, where backgrounds are simply replaced, for whatever like. I think this is as low level as it can get, yet already looks good. Now scaling it up.