How to: Create Amazing, Cinematic Video in Assetto Corsa

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Today on the site we have a very special guest: Sergej Ovad. Sergej deserves your attention, he’s been producing some really great-looking videos on the Facebook Assetto Corsa Drift community. Unless you’re a keen sim racing videographer or a photographer, this guide is an excellent tutorial on how Sergej creates and records cinematic footage in Assetto Corsa already!

On that note, Sergej and I spoke and we decided it’d be awesome to show you the secret of how the Videos are made to such a high standard that they look like movies.

So, without further ado, let’s get right into the tutorial.

How to create a beautifully shaded, cinematic video in Assetto Corsa

You’re going to need to install Cam Tool and Drone Cam. You’re going to find that on Race Department.

So, now you have to register, if you don’t have an account and then just press, “Download”. And for Drone Cam, download it again. So, just drag and drop your zip files into Content Manager and press, “Install”. As an aside, Content Manager is a key component of Assetto Corsa mods, read our full guide to AC Mods here.

Then, go to settings, Assetto Corsa > Python apps and check “Cam Tool” and “IS Drone Cam” so you can find it in your replay when you play it when you want to record your video.

Now, go to the media tab, find the replay you want to play, click on it and press, ‘’Play”.

Replay Mode (CamTool+DroneCam)

The first thing when you’re in replay mode, you want to set your replay duration. You can take these markers and drag them. You see that, you start at 2 seconds. We’re not going to go through whole replay.

Let’s end here and press, “Stop”.

This is your start. Then you can open up your Cam Tool and your Drone Cam. The next step is to press this stopwatch and press, ‘’Sync’’ so that Cam Tool can sync with replay, and you just wait until it is finished and then press this and go back to start.

We’re going to record our flight path or spline.

Drone Camera Controls

The Drone Camera controls are self-explanatory and very easy to learn simply by just playing with it.

On Cam Tool, press, ‘’Spline’’ then press “’Record’’.

Down here, you want to set it to five times slow or six or seven, whatever suits you. I like to use six.

And when we hit record, we hit display and it goes and you can move left, right, left. This is left, this is right. You can come close, go far, and basically, you can play with it until you get the footage you want.

I’m going to speed up this process now and show you the result.

Once it comes to an end just press, “Stop”, or “Rewind”, and now you just want to hit F5, this little power button. And now you can just hit “Play.” That’s it.

add shake to camera for a realistic camera effect

If you want to add shake (which I recommend – it looks awesome!) click on camera.

Go to: Camera, Camera Shake. When I do this scene like this, I always go with 1000%. I don’t know what tracking shake is. Does it work or not, because there’s a lot of shake camera already, so let me show you.

You see how it wobbles? And that’s pretty much it.

If you want to change some, I don’t know, your spline, you can go hit spline. And you have these offsets, so pitch. If you go minus, it looks down. If you go positive, it looks up. Heading is similar, only right and left. And location X is moving your spline more to the right or more to the left. Location z is height. You see, you go down and you go up.

You can change that. So, let’s leave it like this and it affects the whole spline. So, I’ll show you. You see now, path is similar, but it’s a little bit different because of the height and the heading. We can change that.

Once everything is done, you can go to the beginning a little bit.

It’s a new recording. So once everything is done, you can just hide your Drone Cam, and your Cam Tool, and hit “Ctrl and Space” to start your replay.

And hit again “CTRL” and “SPACE” to stop. You can record it with OBS or with Nvidia shadow play. It used to be called Nvidia Shadow play, now just “replay”.

Ctrl + Alt + F10 is the command for record. So, you see this little icon here, it’s saved.

Editing Software

So, the next step is to import footage into your editing software:

I use Adobe Premiere Pro 2020 and just drag and drop your footage into this little area:

So, first of all, let’s start by dragging here. I’m going to just unlink this because this third track uses to record my microphone, and we don’t need that here. And then, link back and let’s see where it starts to move. Okay, it’s here. So just cut it and let’s say it’s going to end up here. And that is the first scene.

So, you just take another one, drag and drop. I’m going to do the same thing because of my microphone. And now you want to see where this angle ends and where do you want the next one to start. So, it’s somewhere here, I guess. And you have this. And editing is cut, make it work, repeat. That’s it.

And now when you’re done editing, when you’ve done all of your scenes, when you’ve done the music, now you just have to go to the beginning, press “I” to mark the “Start”. Go to the end, press “o” so it’s in and out, so that marks the whole clip. Then press “File”.

You see this is in 60 FPS, it looks good, but I like to use 23.9 frames per second. It’s called a Cinematic FPS, so we’ll use that. And it looks a little bit filmier.

So, one more thing I forgot to mention is I like to add black video. Basically, I don’t know how you call it, it’s like black bars on top and end of your video. So, position this one up, 620 and the lower one like this. And you have like movie like…

So sometimes, this program knows to be glitchy, you see like this. Don’t worry, just save that project. Exit, then fire it up again. If it gets too messy, just save, restart the program, and you’re all good to go. You’ll see now, it’s all good. And that’s it.

Here’s an example of what’s possible – it truly is an artform to make these videos look so hyper-realistic::

SKYDC pp filter by ANXMOIA – beautifully produced

Export

Now, we want to export it. We have our “video in” and our “video out”

Now, file, export media. I have a preset for YouTube in 1440p. So far all of this is simply YouTube, just YouTube presets just with some minor adjustments.

And basically, you’ve created a cinematic masterpiece in Assetto Corsa.

Just wait for it to finish. It’s done. Save your project. Close. You can now open the folder where you saved it. And if we play tutorial that is all. I hope you’ve all found Sergej’s work incredibly compelling. Enjoy!