Getting the best quality video

[joty]

Originally Posted by Thiras

Find x264 & use that.

It's sort of tricky but I think it turns out nice with the proper settings (and I don't know what the proper settings for wow vids are since I haven't tested it a single bit)

Yeah, I installed the x264 codec just can't seem to find the right settings in Vegas to get it to render.

Will take some more testing I suppose!

[Thiras]

I'm leaving a four pass x264 encode on overnight with all settings maxed (my 3 ghz core 2 duo is kicking ass at 4 fps atm, whoo!). Then I'll make a comparison with xvid and post it here, probably in a new thread.

[zap]

Originally Posted by joty

How would I go about rendering to h.264? I read about this elsewhere and tried to render some videos the other night but kept running into a "The selected codec does not support the current render settings"


I play WoW in a 1280x1024 resolution, and it seems all my fraps videos come out as 800x600 for some reason. My PC isn't the greatest but it's fairly new (6750 duo, 8600 512mb, 2g ram).

I've just been rendering everything to the DivX codec via the tutorial, but now that I've gotten some stellar clips I'm just worried that the quality is terrible. It looks comparable to other movies up on WCM but I just imagined I could have an awesome quality movie with my new PC. I was thinking around 5-600MB for a 30-40 min movie.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions, and I'm sorry if my english is poor as it is not my first language.

Fraps can only handle a max widescreen resolution of 1280x800. Anything more and fraps will default to 'half mode'. So lower your in-game resolution.

[joty]

Originally Posted by zap

Fraps can only handle a max widescreen resolution of 1280x800. Anything more and fraps will default to 'half mode'. So lower your in-game resolution.

I thought this was changed in the later versions of fraps?

I just worked up a small part of the intro, and I'm making some great progress. I've seem to gotten the quality down, but now the file size is worrying me.

To fix the quality, I downloaded the newest fraps, changed my in game resolution to 1600x1200, and changed all my vegas templates to match as well. The quality is amazing now.

I just got done rendering a small, two minute clip, and it's about 85 megs. At that rate, my end video would be like 1200 MBs, which is way, way too much. I rendered it as a .wmv, CBR single pass, 30FPS, 1600x1200, 5MB video.

My target size/length was about 30 mins and 6-700MB. What's my next step from here? Just keep lowering the MB down from 5 until I reach a happy medium of quality/file size?

Thanks so much for the help, I'm getting there!

[Thiras]

Originally Posted by zap

Fraps can only handle a max widescreen resolution of 1280x800. Anything more and fraps will default to 'half mode'. So lower your in-game resolution.

That's the second time you're telling porky pies in one thread.

Fraps versions greater than 2.8.0 can record up to 2560x1600 on dualcore systems.

[Thiras]

Oh see your reply there.

So first of all you should be recording at 1280x1024 which is sort of enough. Most watchers dont have monitors that can display higher resolutions than that and it'd get the output size down a bit.

.wmv, CBR single pass, 30FPS, 1600x1200, 5MB video

CBR single pass is bad. You want VBR bitrate.

[zap]

Originally Posted by Thiras

That's the second time you're telling porky pies in one thread.

Fraps versions greater than 2.8.0 can record up to 2560x1600 on dualcore systems.

GAH! Absolutely! I recently upgraded from a dirty old P4 to a dc processor... and i've been using 1280x800 resolution but you sir are totally correct about the fraps resolution! (even if you're slightly biased against h.264 )

thanks for correcting me!

[joty]

So I just got done rendering a bunch of files, and hit another wall it seems while working with the DiVX codec.

So far I've been compressing everything as a .WMV; VBR Bitrate, 5MB, 1600x1200 Resolution. Since I have no where near enough free space to keep the raw footage, I figure I can compress the clips to a HQ format and then consider compressing post editing if the file size is too much. The quality is pretty good, and I'm very happy with how far I've came.

While trying to compress to DiVX to upload some samples to Stage6, I ran into a problem. Apparently the max resolution my DiVX (6.1.1 or whatever) allows it 1280x720. The only option I have in game that's close to that is 1280x1024. If I make my Vegas template 1280x720 and render to it as well, I get a black border around the video, which is very unappeling. Any fix to this?

[Thiras]

Originally Posted by joty

So I just got done rendering a bunch of files, and hit another wall it seems while working with the DiVX codec.

So far I've been compressing everything as a .WMV; VBR Bitrate, 5MB, 1600x1200 Resolution. Since I have no where near enough free space to keep the raw footage, I figure I can compress the clips to a HQ format and then consider compressing post editing if the file size is too much. The quality is pretty good, and I'm very happy with how far I've came.

While trying to compress to DiVX to upload some samples to Stage6, I ran into a problem. Apparently the max resolution my DiVX (6.1.1 or whatever) allows it 1280x720. The only option I have in game that's close to that is 1280x1024. If I make my Vegas template 1280x720 and render to it as well, I get a black border around the video, which is very unappeling. Any fix to this?

I'd recommend xvid over divx since that works for stage 6 aswell, but anyhoo, the resolution restriction should be due to a profile setting somewhere. Trying finding it and setting it to "unrestricted"

@zap: Well, you're right, x264 is better. In a matroska container and the fact that it's so slow though :/ Most people on this site wouldn't bother downloading it.