Capturing tutorial

[SethNaket]

Now we just need avisynth+nero/x264 tutorial so we can move the community away from that crappy xvid stuff

 

[Vodkafairy]

what is the difference?

 

[Thornea]

Very good guide well done m8 Ive got all the same equipment so will prolly start working on my own movie soon. have a rep point

 

[Kaun_IA]

very nice Vf.... BUT ill just keep recording whit Fraps... thats too much hassel for me.

i play ranger 90% of time in rvr so not much big fights. can record 25fps whit 1280x1152 whit np.

Specc:
2,4 gig P4
768 crappy ddr.
Ati radeon x800pro

i just record onto second hard drive to minimize eny lagging effect. so far havent let me down

 

[Raven]

should be a sticky tbh

 

[SethNaket]

what is the difference?

Well there's the size for one. Take your movie as an example: 296MB for 21m30s iirc, that comes out to about 1850 kbps right? 192kbps of that is mp3 sound so that leaves ~1650 kbps xvid.

If you used AAC sound instead of mp3, you could easily drop audio to 100kbps and keep the same quality. Using AVC video (aka h264) you could drop the video to 1000kbps for same image quality, or most likely better image quality due to the compression being quite different. So just going by size you could release "the same" movie with 1100kbit total, for 176MB total filesize.

Apart from strictly size-reason - you forgot to deinterlace and you have a really strange aspect ratio on the clip (do you play widescreen?). The upside of scripting is that you perform the same operations every time just by one click, so you never forget anything. You can also experiment very easily with avisynth filters to improve image quality and compressability, for instance removing grains and noise can help compress more without losing quality on "important" parts. It may sound like a lot of work but once you've written the script its a simple drag-n-drop to encode the next clip and the next clip and the next clip and...

The downside is that encoding takes about 30% longer with AVC, but it's worth it.


Btw, I'm not saying your vid is bad, it's a lot better than the first ones I captured (ground circuit loops suck!).

2nd Btw, you can script the same way with fraps clips and get even better quality. Think Dooms RR video quality at 250mb instead of 1gb.

 

[Castus]

Im looking for the RVR forum.Anyone seen it?

 

[Niko]

nice nice:worthy: your movies rox ze box

 

[Vodkafairy]

If you used AAC sound instead of mp3, you could easily drop audio to 100kbps and keep the same quality. Using AVC video (aka h264) you could drop the video to 1000kbps for same image quality, or most likely better image quality due to the compression being quite different. So just going by size you could release "the same" movie with 1100kbit total, for 176MB total filesize.

well that definitely sounds worth trying excuse me for being a total noob but this requires the use of a different codec i guess, is this one also free/easy to get like xvid?

Apart from strictly size-reason - you forgot to deinterlace and you have a really strange aspect ratio on the clip (do you play widescreen?).

i didnt interlace on purpose, i actually kinda like the effect . as for the aspect ratio, its set to 704x512 because i crop off the edges. i didnt know i could change the signal with my gfx drivers so i compensated with vdub, and now im kinda too lazy to change it

it sounds like complicated though, but think ill google some tomorrow to see if i can figure it out. would be great to have small filesize for high quality vids, makes the hosts happy too

 

[illu]

very nice Vf.... BUT ill just keep recording whit Fraps... thats too much hassel for me.

i play ranger 90% of time in rvr so not much big fights. can record 25fps whit 1280x1152 whit np.

Specc:
2,4 gig P4
768 crappy ddr.
Ati radeon x800pro

i just record onto second hard drive to minimize eny lagging effect. so far havent let me down

I'm sure fraps at that resolution records at half-screen size.

Well there's the size for one. Take your movie as an example: 296MB for 21m30s iirc, that comes out to about 1850 kbps right? 192kbps of that is mp3 sound so that leaves ~1650 kbps xvid.

If you used AAC sound instead of mp3, you could easily drop audio to 100kbps and keep the same quality. Using AVC video (aka h264) you could drop the video to 1000kbps for same image quality, or most likely better image quality due to the compression being quite different. So just going by size you could release "the same" movie with 1100kbit total, for 176MB total filesize.

Apart from strictly size-reason - you forgot to deinterlace and you have a really strange aspect ratio on the clip (do you play widescreen?). The upside of scripting is that you perform the same operations every time just by one click, so you never forget anything. You can also experiment very easily with avisynth filters to improve image quality and compressability, for instance removing grains and noise can help compress more without losing quality on "important" parts. It may sound like a lot of work but once you've written the script its a simple drag-n-drop to encode the next clip and the next clip and the next clip and...

The downside is that encoding takes about 30% longer with AVC, but it's worth it.


Btw, I'm not saying your vid is bad, it's a lot better than the first ones I captured (ground circuit loops suck!).

2nd Btw, you can script the same way with fraps clips and get even better quality. Think Dooms RR video quality at 250mb instead of 1gb.

I think you should also write a guide. I'm sure I'm not the only one - but all this vid capturing business is fiddly and then the compression without losing quality side of things is a real headache.
This guide by VF is a great start. There should be guides by the people that know how to show how to convert fraps footage (raw avi) to the best quality small clips.

All these kinds of posts are very useful.

Oli - Illu

 

[Vodkafairy]

There's a quick and easy way to cut out bits that you don't want. For example the moment I jump off the bledmeer boat I turn on recording and I stop it after something worth saving has happened, so I don't have to look very long to find the clips I want. But all the roaming before that, is totally pointless to look at.

With vdub theres a quick and easy way to cut out bits and pieces you dont want and save it without having to recompress (so no loss of quality), it makes the files a bit smaller.

Once you have selected the piece of footage you want to save, just go to file and Save as AVI.

Now to illu's question, you can also (re)compress the footage with different settings or a different codec alltogether. To do this you have to select 'full processing mode' in the Video menu, and select a codec in the Video > Compression menu.

Now, I'm not an expert in how codecs work at all. I can just tell you the codecs I used so far, which are picvideo and xvid.

First of all this is the way xvid codec settings look. Before I sent the clips to Rure for the editing of his xmas gift (with WI's leftover fights) I compressed them all in 5000 kbps (click on target quantizer to change the slider to show kbps). This gave very high quality yet much lower filesizes then the ones produced by picvideo. Remember, if you want to use premiere to edit then do not compress the clips with an mpeg4 codec like xvid, because it wont work. Vegas will be able to work with these clips though.

I guess you could use picvideo to reduce the fraps filesizes too. This way you can use premiere and still get fairly small filesizes, for little to no loss to quality. For example: for the recording of my last shadevid I had ~260 clips recorded in picvideo with setting 19, and alltogether they are about 40-50 gb in size. From what I remember, fraps gives much bigger files.

I'm not sure what the best way for fraps users is to make their files a bit smaller, but for a start you can always cut off the pieces you dont need. Personally I'd just recompress the clips with picvideo to make them a bit smaller. It saves a ton of space, but takes some time and I'm not sure if this is the optimal way to deal with the problem.

 

[rure]

You died to a rr3 scout VF? :<

 

[Vodkafairy]

You died to a rr3 scout VF? :<

No

Anei just cried at me after I died to getting added on and I think it was cute Allthough, I did die to her and her scout duo (Kyra iirc), after a very long and funny fight Unfortunately I forgot to record.. joys of playing in fullscreen mode, I log msn, irc, bb on second pc aswell as recording so often I hit f6 to start recording while I have irc open ;D

qq!

edit- this is what happened before-

Spoiler

note the 'anei cheers at you!' , and the bloody theurg was at low hp but he fled into the tower. ;<

 

[Carter]

photoshoped

 

[SethNaket]

well that definitely sounds worth trying excuse me for being a total noob but this requires the use of a different codec i guess, is this one also free/easy to get like xvid?

Nero recode does both of them so it's pretty easy once you have that program. You can download a trial version of nero premium at www.nero.com or if you're "resourceful" I'm sure you can find another version easily.
If not, there's the free x264 codec at www.x264.nl

i didnt interlace on purpose, i actually kinda like the effect . as for the aspect ratio, its set to 704x512 because i crop off the edges.

Hehe ok, didn't think of that. I'm kind of obsessed with finding the best deinterlacer so whenever I see combing I just think someone forgot.
Another good thing with scripts though is that if you feel like not deinterlacing you just comment out a line in the script and then do the "usual" routine on it.

I think you should also write a guide. I'm sure I'm not the only one - but all this vid capturing business is fiddly and then the compression without losing quality side of things is a real headache.

The problem with that is that if VF is a rr9 at capturing, I'm rr3 at scripting/encoding. I just learned about it last week.
Here's the script I use in avisynth though (www.avisynth.org) , if someone wants to get started with it.

script.avs:

#LoadPlugin("C:\program\avisynth\plugins\DGDecode.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\program\avisynth\plugins\RemoveGrain.dll")  # <- sse cpu (athlon)
#LoadPlugin("C:\program\avisynth\plugins\RemoveGrainSSE2.dll")   # sse2 cpu
LoadPlugin("C:\program\avisynth\plugins\kerneldeint.dll")

#movie = mpeg2source("C:\video\clip.d2v")
movie = AVIsource("C:\video\clip.avi")
KernelDeInt(movie,order=1,sharp=true)
removegrain(mode=2)
crop(16,0,-20,-2)   # find your proper crop-values from vdub
LanczosResize(640,480)
Tweak(bright=10,cont=1.1)

Then I just open the script.avs instead of the movie file in nero and a cropped, resized, deinterlaced clip shows up ready to encode. If you want to do editing you'd probably want to open the script in vegas or something instead (just make sure to not do any deinterlacing, resizing or cropping inside vegas/premiere). The 3 plugins needed are easy to find just google dgdecode, removegrain and kerneldeint. If you record with fraps you can use the same script to automatically resize and filter, just comment out kerneldeint and crop.

 

[SethNaket]

Just to add, for anyone who wants to read up on both capturing and postprocessing, I suggest going to http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/capture/start.html which covers pretty much everything except how you connect the cable between two computers. It's not so much a tutorial and some parts of it are more advanced but you don't really need to understand everything unless you're planning on doing this for a living.

 

[Manisch Depressiv]

Awesome !

 

[Kinag]

Is it possible to record using the same program but using only one computer?

And would the quality be better than fraps?

 

[Vodkafairy]

you could maybe put the tvcard in your main pc and just connect it like that, but the thing is that on average on my bb pc it takes about 20% processor power to capture/compress at the same time, and then the permanent writing on the harddisk

im not sure if you'll lag less by using that method then if you use fraps for example, its worth a shot if you dont mind losing 30 euros if it fails

 

[xxManiacxx]

I just hope it will come something that lets me play in 1280*1024 while recording. Hate playing in 1024*768

 

[Vodkafairy]

well, as said, if your gfx card got two vga ports you can buy a scan converter. this downscales your 1280x1024 signal to 1024x768, but they are quite pricey i think

 

[Kyra]

No

Anei just cried at me after I died to getting added on and I think it was cute Allthough, I did die to her and her scout duo (Kyra iirc), after a very long and funny fight Unfortunately I forgot to record.. joys of playing in fullscreen mode, I log msn, irc, bb on second pc aswell as recording so often I hit f6 to start recording while I have irc open ;D

qq!

This is a great walkthru, though I leave the movie making up to the experts. One thing though, Kyra is/was a minstrel and I've never given that account to anyone else. (could be they deleted the old girl though, that makes me sad if its true)

Oh and Vodkafairy, do you happen to play WoW on the US servers??

 

[Vodkafairy]

This is a great walkthru, though I leave the movie making up to the experts. One thing though, Kyra is/was a minstrel and I've never given that account to anyone else. (could be they deleted the old girl though, that makes me sad if its true)

Oh and Vodkafairy, do you happen to play WoW on the US servers??

i wasnt sure on the name, the scout is called Kyr and not Kyra

and no i dont play wow on US servers, i tried it for a short while on an euro server (stormrage) and trying to get hold of a serial key now to upgrade the acc so i can casually play it some

 

[Forf]

Should make this thread sticky tbh as it contains valueable info for those wanting to capture out there ><

 

[Illudian]

breda de gekste ?

 

[Aerendur]

Nice stuff. Im testing a setup where I simply put the output into a vcr (yes lower resolution, but also no lag and no second pc needed). And then play back the video into the main comp when you got time for it!

 

[Tuorin]

Its what the boards should be about, informative and useful posts rather than xx pages of crap. Thanks

 

[Shike]

Excellent stuff VF

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Vodkafairy again.

 

[Stasi]

Look forward to the strafe like a bitch tutorial then.

yeah and the counter tutorial

and shown step bye step with a video ^^

 

[ceixava]

i get sad every time someone uses constant bitrates @1-pass instead of calculated vbr @2-pass