Quality
 

I've searched for quite some time now about how to get the best possible quality. I look at some of these videos Nihilum puts out and they're absolutely incredible quality. My brother came down one day while I was watching a nihilum video (in fullscreen) and he thought it was me playing. That's how good the quality of their videos are.

How do I go about getting my vids to have this amazing quality? I've read through the link that everyone always posts (http://www.warcraftmovies.com/articleview.php?id=21) and that didn't do anything since it's mainly about encoding. When I render my videos out, which is in Vegas btw, I change up the settings quite often to try and get better quality but can't seem to get 'Nihilum-type' quality. What settings should I set everything at in my render?

They are using a really high bitrate WMV compression.
The bitrate they use is approx. 4229kb/s.
The codec is the WMV3 Codec also known as the WMP v9 (VC-1 Simple/Main) codec.

All of this information can be found out by using Gspot on any WMV or AVI file.

Hope this helps you out. :)

Helps me a little bit.. except i've never really changed the bitrate to my videos so i'm still somewhat unsure where I increase the bitrate to (what you said) 4229 kb/s. I'm at the bitrate tab when i'm choosing my rendering options but I don't know what I set them to.. or which ones I leave alone and which I change.

Just check the internet/Lan tab and change it to 4M and that will give you the same bitrate as what they are using.

Alright.. I must be doing something wrong through my process, cause the quality isn't changing (as far as I can see).

1. Select whatever i'm gonna render
2. File -> Render As
3. Save As Type: Windows Media Video V9 (*.wmv)
4. Click Custom
5. Rendering Quality -> Best
6. Click video tab and change mode to CBR (should I just do CBR or CBR-twopass?)
7. Click bit rate tab and check Internet/LAN, change it to 4 M. (should I leave ISDN checked as well? or uncheck it? it's current rate is set at 500 K)

then I hit OK and render it.

You want to uncheck the ISDN otherwise the quality will not change like you said it didn't.

For CBR it doesn't matter that much but I always try to do 2 pass as it usually gives me better quality.

The last two videos were in DivX at 4000kbps for the video and 320kbps for the audio (just the Illidan for the audio).

The actual original footage plays a huge part in giving it great quality. They filmed using full size FRAPS as opposed to half size, which, has a massive impact on the quality. :)

Hope that answers your question.

hmmmmm... it looks like the quality is changing when I don't have my ui in the video, but when the ui is taken off (alt+z u know) then the video goes to the quality I want. When my ui is there you can tell that the quality isn't what i'm looking for bc it's hard to read the text in my chat box, whereas in the nihilum vids you see everything crystal clear. :confused:

I'm using full-size fraps at 30fps.

What are your computer specs because I may be able to tell you why then.