Micro update. Or end of week report:
I've successfully created a 15 minute timeline of clips from the DayZ bullshittery. I think it flows well. I'm happy with it.
I'm also about two thirds of the way through a secondary "phase 2" cut in which timings are tweaked, lines are moved about to make it smoother. Maybe shimmying visuals around to hide cuts, etc.
I'll formally begin the keyframing/animation work next Monday.
Core learnings so far:
The keyframing is probably going to be quite difficult. Like Arma, the presence of wobbling helmets + camouflage is going to be something that's going to confuse the automated tracker.
There's also an interesting DayZ specific quirk for many third person scenes. DayZ features backpacks which can be quite tall, therefore obscuring the head for tracking. Also they can actually swing in the opposite direction. Meaning that's going to be slightly annoying in the relevant scenes.
I'm also noticing a wildly inconsistent resolution, jumping between 1080p and 720p depending on the stream date. This was because storing these streams with limited hard drive space was a bigger concern back then. I'll need to make a decision whether to upscale the footage, or downscale the edit, based on the number of clips.
The presence of the player run radio stations means this video is no doubt going to be claimed to hell by corporate entities on Youtube. Some jokes won't workotherwise. So...that's naff. I wouldn't recommend using Youtube without an ad blocker anyway.
Animation work starts Monday. Will get it done as quickly as I can. Thanks all.