City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

A question of compression!

Catministrator

By Catministrator,
Posted on: 2010-04-22 02:28 in Multi-Media Fan Creations

 

Posted

For those of you CoX filmers out there... Are any of you folk familiar with Virtual Dub? If so, what compression settings do you generally use to get the best balance between high quality and file size? I've been tinkering around with this with the intent of uploading to Youtube, but I either get files that are far too large (1G+) or too poor quality... or both. That's tinkering with Xvid and DivX compressions.

 

Posted

Yes, I am. I actually don't use it very often because most times, file size/compression is not an issue for me. What file format and settings (and program) are you using that your files are that large?

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

 

Posted

Avi, since that's what Fraps and VDub seem to put out. I've got 14 Gigs (5 minutes' worth) of raw video that I'm trying to make a bit more wieldly. Unfortunately, any information I can actually find on the whole recording/compression process tends to be several years out of date!

 

Posted

The trick is, in addition to using FRAPS/VDub is to then put it into a video editing app such as Sony Vegas Movie Studio, Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere, etc. Then when you're done editing, save the finished product as a WMV.

For myself, I tend to skip using VirtualDub and go straight from FRAPS footage into SVMS, then render it as a WMV, and on average, even at high quality, my videos run about 50-150MB (far more manageable).

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

 

Posted

And here I'd been told that using more than one program was bad for quality; but then again, I did say it was all rather out of date.

Thanks! I'll take a look into this. On a coincidental note - it was actually your videos I was using as a measure for the kind of video quality I wanted to aim for. This latest one especially.

 

Posted

Thanks very much.

Yeah, I record on FRAPS at full-size, approx 30FPS, on my 1680x1050 screen, then import the files into Sony Vegas Movie Studio and save it as a high quality WMV (I customized my settings). This then allows me to upload to YouTube and STILL get decent resolution on there.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Dark_Respite's Farewell Video: "One Last Day"
THE COURSE OF SUPERHERO ROMANCE CONTINUES!
Book I: A Tale of Nerd Flirting! ~*~ Book II: Courtship and Crime Fighting - Chap Nine live!
MA Arcs - 3430: Hell Hath No Fury / 3515: Positron Gets Some / 6600: Dyne of the Times / 351572: For All the Wrong Reasons
378944: Too Clever by Half / 459581: Kill or Cure / 551680: Clerical Errors (NEW!)

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dark_Respite View Post
Thanks very much.

Yeah, I record on FRAPS at full-size, approx 30FPS, on my 1680x1050 screen, then import the files into Sony Vegas Movie Studio and save it as a high quality WMV (I customized my settings). This then allows me to upload to YouTube and STILL get decent resolution on there.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite
Thank you! That works far better than anything I had attempted with VDub. May I ask what rendering settings you use to fit the video onto Youtube? I think I've got the jist of it, but I havn't quite figured out how to take my 16:10 aspect ratio recording and fit it into a 16:9 HD resolution without stretching or otherwise harming the quality of the video. (Letterboxing keeps the aspect ratio, but seems to hurt the quality.) - Or at least some way to upload a 16:10 to Youtube and have it look good.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Serevus View Post
For those of you CoX filmers out there... Are any of you folk familiar with Virtual Dub? If so, what compression settings do you generally use to get the best balance between high quality and file size? I've been tinkering around with this with the intent of uploading to Youtube, but I either get files that are far too large (1G+) or too poor quality... or both. That's tinkering with Xvid and DivX compressions.
I downloaded the Xvid codec and use the "Xvid MPEG-4" compression setting in VirtualDub. I just run the raw Fraps recordings through there and they save a lot of space without significantly impacting video quality.

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