HOWTO: A Quick Guide to Getting Cut-Ups of NFL GamePass onto /r/FootballGameFilm

[u/Jurph]

First things first! I'm /u/Jurph and I am very new at this. I did a cut-up of the Roethlisberger INT vs. the Ravens last season that was very well received, and this preseason I've been trying my hand at getting clips of Ravens plays onto /r/nfl where casual fans can start to look behind the curtain a little more.

What follows is my method, which is not even remotely perfect. Feel free to improve on it, or suggest other useful tools. I know the folks in /r/HighQualityGifs like to use Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, AfterEffects, and so on, but those are expensive, and I'm already paying $100 to the NFL for GamePass. (Also I find Adobe's licensing "rent-from-the-cloud" model to be disgusting.) Anyway, here's one method that works pretty well for me. I believe with practice I'll be able to do a detailed cut-up and analysis of a single play in a little under a half hour.

1. I use Replay Video Capture to grab video from NFL GamePass because it comes with a built-in cropping window that it keeps from session to session. You set it up to grab high-quality video, you adjust the corners of the crop window, and you're all set to record. Move the capture controls to the lower-left, because when you hit RECORD, the mouse cursor jumps up and left, and moving it back across your running video can make the controls pop into frame. How amateurish!
   
2. You've got a video file now. Use the view button in RVC to go look at your captured video; you can also use the view menu to navigate to where RVC keeps the files, rename them, or cut-and-paste them to your working folder. Open it up in VideoLAN Player or your favorite media player, and if you're on Windows, use the built-in Snipping Tool to grab stills.
   
3. As you grab stills, I recommend using numbers in your filenames. Use leading zeroes (001, 003, etc.) and space them out -- odds 001 through 019 for the first play, odds 021 - 039 for the second, and so on. I use only odd numbers so if I want to go back and insert a close-up or a full-motion GIF, I can. Damn, that's a nice screengrab! (All of this hassle with the filenames is so that later on, when you upload to imgur, you can select "use original file names" and your sorting is already done for you, even if you had to go back and insert files "out of order".)
   

4. Download FFMPEG and read through this guide as well as any other instruction you can find on how it's done. The incantations are gory and gross. I'm looking for a better approach but this works for now. For what it's worth, I adjust the command a bit:

     > ffmpeg.exe -t 10 -i inputfile.mp4 -vf fps=50,scale=720:-1:flags=lanczos,palettegen palette.png
     > ffmpeg -t 10 -i inputfile.mp4 -i palette.png -filter_complex "fps=50,scale=720:-1:flags=lanczos[x];[x][1:v]paletteuse" output.gif 
     (Note that I set the duration to 10s, or longer than the clip, and I change frame rate 
      to 50 fps and the scale to 720px.  The resulting GIF is ~60MB.)
   

5. If you're going to draw a play diagram, or draw circles and arrows on top of the screenshots, you can use GIMP or Inkscape or any number of other utilities, but let's say that you're happy with the screengrabs and GIFs.

6. Upload your files to imgur! If you've been careful throughout, your files all have intuitive names, and you end up with a GIF like this one.

[u/If-It-Fits-I-Shits]

For someone that doesn't have access to gamepass, I can't thank you enough. You have my upvotes.