Adding and extracting movies

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This page deals with the process of extracting movies from the game, converting the files and combining video and audio data so that you can enjoy them in your preferred movie player.


Extracting movies from the game


Requirements

- OS BIG Editor
- VirtualDub
- VP6 Codec
- VP6 Converter


Setting up the tools

First, download VirtualDub from SourceForge and install it. The next step is to download the VP6 codec and installing it as well. This should be really easy. Then, also download the OS BIG Editor (it works without having to install anything).

I advise that you create a dedicated folder in which the converting will take place. Download and copy the VP6 Converter executable (eaconv.exe) into that folder.


Extracting the files

Start the OS BIG Editor and navigate to the Movies folder in your C&C3 installation in the File -> Open dialog. There should be one version folder (1.0) and inside, you'll find 3 .big files: Movies.big, MoviesG.big and MoviesN.big. The latter two contain the mission videos for GDI and Nod respectively, while Movies.big contains everything else, including the Scrin mission videos.

EALA, however, separated the audio data (.snd) from the video data (.vp6) for their movies, so the respective SND files can all be found in Movies.big (even those for the GDI and Nod videos). They have the same name as their VP6 counterparts.

Note: If you do not have the english version of the game installed, the SND audio files are in the lang-YOURLANG/VERSION/YOURLANG.big file (e.g. lang-german/1.0/German.big), together will all the other language-specific data.

Once you have found the video file and the audio file (if there is one) you want, extract them by going to Edit -> Extract. Copy the files to the working directory you have created before. I have chosen to watch the intro movie of the GDI campaign again, so I extracted g01a.vp6 and g01a.snd and moved them to my extra folder.




Converting the video

Now it's time to convert that VP6 file to the AVI format, so you can actually watch it. To do this, start cmd.exe and change to your folder. Run               

Code

eaconv.exe file.vp6

in order to convert your .vp6 file. You'll see that a WAV file with the same name was created.

Don't close the command line yet if you do have audio data you wish to add. If that isn't the case, you can finish reading here and just enjoy watching the movie.


Converting the audio

Identical to converting the video file, you can run               

Code

eaconv.exe file.snd

to convert the audio data to WAV format.

You should now have a working video file and audio file. Don't hesitate to check if both actually work. However, I assume that you will want to combine them. Read on to learn how to do that.


Combining the video and audio data

Start VirtualDub and open up your freshly converted AVI file. Go to Audio -> Audio from other file and select your corresponding WAV file.
Make sure that Video -> Direct stream copy and Audio -> Direct stream copy are selected. Now you can go to File -> Save as AVI... to export your file with sound.



That's it, have fun watching your movie!