Hacking the Camera

Below is an article from The Sims 2 Official Game guide from Prima.

Want more control of the video capture system's settings? Well, you can! Find the file "VideoCapture.ini" located in "My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Config" (don't forget to backup the file first) and open it with a text editor.

There are more picture quality and size settings here than in the in-game options menu including the power to change the system's preferred codec.

Tweak these settings at your own risk!

• PreferredCodec: Lets you choose a codec. This field is updated dynamically if your chosen codec fails to work
• OutputFramerate: The Framerate of the output AVI.
• GameFramerateForHighQuality: Sets the framerate of the game. This is used only when the quality setting is too high. If you set it to a high number, you get slow motion.
• KeyFrameEvery: Specifies that each nth frame should be a keyframe.
• Folder: Specifies the folder to which the output is written. It's relative to "My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2"
• FilenameBase: Specifies the beginning of the filename. Changing this from the default "movie" might permit better organization of video files (e.g., "llamas-take").
• NoFillFrames=1: Turns off auto-filling of empty frames. Results depend on the codec.
• AudioStereoOutput: 0 for mono, 1 for Stereo.
• AudioRateDivisor: 1 for 44100 Hz, 2 for 22050, etc. The maximum divisor is 8.
• SmallWidth=128: Width of video when size is set to small in the camera options.
• SmallHeight=128: Height of video when size is set to small in the camera options.
• MediumWidth=320: Width of video when size is set to medium in the camera option.
• MediumHeight=240: Height of video when size is set to medium in the camera options.
• LargeWidth=640: Width of video when size is set to large in the camera options.
• LargeHeight=480: Height of video when size is set to large in the camera options.

Settings such as zoom, pitch, orientation, etc. can also be changed for the various in-game cameras. If you're shooting in regular (not Cameraman) mode, these settings can change the camera movements you may do. Find these files at "My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Cameras". "LiveCamera.txt" is for the regular mode, and "FirstPersonCameras.txt" is for the Cameraman mode. Be very careful to backup the original files so that in case your experimentation makes some weird changes you can revert to the original default settings. An easy way to do this is to open the original with a text editor and save them as "____.BKP", then make your modification to the file and save your new settings as "____.txt".