Need advice from experienced movie makers..

[vintervargen]

Ok, using Fraps to gather footage atm, recording in 60 fps, 1024*768 full-mode.

Due to not much HD space i have to compress them as much as i can before starting to actually make the movie in an editing program, so using the 3ivx D4 4.04 codec with max quality setting to do that.

Now, which editing-program is best suited to produce a movie with high quality? that is, the effects doesnt have to be advanced, but i want the quality of the movie itself to be as good as possible.

(im only used to Sony Vegas 4.0, and i just cant get it to compile the clips with 1024*768 resolution, which results in loss of quality..)

 

[VidX]

Personally, there's no need to record at 60fps, unless you are doing alot of slow motion footage, so recording at 30fps, or even a native 25fps is perfectly fine.

I prefer to use the raw FRAPS footage for working with, but I have a hefty machine with 2gig of RAM and over 1tb of HDD space to play around with, so that's no problem for me, you might want to just stick with the lowest compression on a decent codec, one that doesn't require alot of CPU usage to decode, 3ivx should be ok.

Adobe Premier is what I use to stick the final footage together with the sound, and Virtuadub to do the final compression, with xvid as my prefered codec.

Regarding resolution, capturing and working with the files in 1024x768 is fine, but you want to maybe halve the resolution for the final work.

 

[enkor]

this is a pretty good site on how to get good quality files, even if you don't use the wierd programs it recommends.

 

[vintervargen]

thanks both, and about the 60fps, i dont notice any difference in lag between 20 and 60 fps in fraps Oo..

 

[Kcinimodus]

Hmm just wondering, what version of fraps do you have? I'm running it at 15fps, half resolution (got an ingame resolution of 1280x960). And still ingame I got something like 14 fps... how the hell do you manage running it smoothly on 60fps oO. My computer is pretty fast, Athlon XP3200+, 1 gig ram, 2x160gig HD in raid 0, only my videocard (Geforce TI4400) is slightly outdated. Setting a lower resolution doesn't really help. Any suggestions?

 

[Tiques]

Hmm just wondering, what version of fraps do you have? I'm running it at 15fps, half resolution (got an ingame resolution of 1280x960). And still ingame I got something like 14 fps... how the hell do you manage running it smoothly on 60fps oO. My computer is pretty fast, Athlon XP3200+, 1 gig ram, 2x160gig HD in raid 0, only my videocard (Geforce TI4400) is slightly outdated. Setting a lower resolution doesn't really help. Any suggestions?

I dont know your GFX card, but you say yourself it is slighty outdated and as Fraps basicly runs completly on power on the GFX card, I suggest upgrading

And you might want to check the speed of your HDD, as that can have effect, if the HDDs cant write the info down quick enough for Fraps
EDIT: You got raid 0, so nvm

I have same CPU, 1gig ram, smaller HD than you but I used Radion 9800 Excalibur, and I just record it perfectly smooth

 

[VidX]

latest version of FRAPS is 2.5.4, which fixed an issue with SLI graphics cards, registered users would be recommended to upgrade to it, you should have received the download details via e-mail.

I would also recommend not using FRAPS in windows XP, as there is still some issues with the recording quality, all of it is down to the codec compatibility with XP, where the recording can be blurry if recorded at a res. higher than 800x600.

Yes, you'll not really notice any difference between the 30fps and 60fps settings, but you can only really record at 60fps if your game is capable of running at that speed while recording.

At least a 7200 rpm drive is what I'd recommend using to record to, I use a 10k LVD160 SCSI stripe, and the difference between recording to it and recording to even a 7200rpm SATA150 drive is amazing, and even if you are running RAID 0, you'd need to make sure that it can handle the sustained write speed

And yes Kcin, the bottleneck in your system is the GPU, I'd suggest upgrading, you can grab a 5700 for something like £60 nowadays, you'd notice a vast improvement in recording FPS.

 

[Kcinimodus]

Thanks for the replies.

I just noticed I'm using a very old version (free I think) of fraps, 2.0.0. I tried out fraps version 2.5.4 (shareware), and it's an HUGE improvement. I can also record at 30fps now without noticing anything. So it was downto having an old version, not duo to my graphics card which still seems to beable to run this game smoothly (for example when facing zergs I got little lag).

 

[Aoln]

windows movie maker 4tw \o/