Wow! I have to say the guys at Blizzard make one hell of a program. If it was not already for the rich, expansive virtual world they have created or the intriguing story line and endless quests in pursuit of cooler weapons and abilities, but now we have integrated VoiceChat and Video capture right at a users finger tips. Both simple to use and take only a few minutes of setup.

First, the Video Capture works. That’s almost all you have to say. Specifically you open the Options panel and click on Mac Options. Then there are options to adjust image quality, capture size, compression, interface viability and a few other things. Then be sure to set up key bindings to set a key or set of keys to start and stop recordings and compress movies. I used the Option key and C. Now, if you are not familiar with digital video capture and compression you may want to read up on it before you try to capture huge battles or raids, my point being if you capture video in too low a quality there is no way to make it look better later for a DVD or displaying on AppleTV and if you set the setting to high your system may not be able to record very smoothly. On top of that, to do this well and by that I mean to record smooth sharp video, you need a power users system with a decent graphics card.

So I made a video of a character on his way to IronForge. I recorded about 5 files, each one no more then a minute long. I had it set for 640×400 (strange size) at 29.98 FPS. The quality was on high as well. I did this on a Mac Pro with 2 x 2.66 GHz Intel, 3GB ram and a ATI Radeon X1900 XT which is the stock board that came with the machine. I got shudders which you will notice in the video. I edited the clips easily in iMovie during my lunch. All I did was add transitions and titles. Check it out from YouTube!

Next, VoiceChat works too! Very well actually. I can see how headset mic’s will be on the Christmas lists for WoW players this year! Here how you set it up. When you open the Options panel, click on Sound & Voice, on the bottom of the panel that opens there is a tab for Voice. Here you turn on the feature, select your microphone and speakers and test the audio level and adjust mic volume. You can even adjust the fade rate for sounds and music in the game so they fade fade down when you are chatting or listening to others. Once again you need to select a key on the keyboard to bind it to and I choose to use the push to talk feature. I selected my tilde key to use for the push to talk,then clicked OK and Returned to Game. I joined a group with a friend that was all set up for VoiceChat and mic, pressed the tilde key and he heard me. He did the same, I heard him. It was not clear always cause we don’t have headset mic’s and you need to stay close to mic’s sometimes if you are not speaking loud. But it worked. Excellent!

I have no idea whether the PC users got the same features or not. But from the Mac consumer/user perspective Blizzard continues to make and support some well made programs. As opposed to so many other things I pay a monthly subscription to, the $15 a month for World of WarCraft continues to be a great value.

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