Rendering/compressing video

[Catman1975]

I was going to PM Sc1ence this, since he is our video production guru. Then I thought everyone else might have the same questions.

How does everyone handle their rendering/compression of video? Looking back I realize that most of the videos I see are in WMV format (except Lyra and his Divx file). Is this just the easiest? or does it give the greatest quality to file size?

I was working on a video last night. I just imported my files from a round, deleted the excess video at the end of the round, and put in some zooming, nothing big. Well I rendered the video as an AVI and got a 3.4 Gig file for a 15 minute video. I think everyone would enjoy that download. I did not have time to re-render it as an WMV to see how big that file would be. I was wondering what settings everyone is using to render their video.

[Lorian]

Most people use WMV because that is all Windows Movie Maker is capable of outputting.

If you have a raw AVI which you can encode manually I would recommend using MEncoder, it is a command line program, but it is very good.

My suggestion is to use H.264 for the video codec and MP3 for audio. Multi-pass encoding is highly recommended.

mencoder -ovc x264 -oac mp3lame -x264encopts pass=1:bitrate=1024 -lameopts preset=standard input.avi -o output.avi

Use 'pass=3' (not a typo, I won't go into why it is '3' not '2') for subsequent passes, I like to perform 3 passes.

[WaffleHousChef]

After watching some Vegas Tutorials, I've got some settings that I think work fairly well for rendering. If your screen size is the approximate pixel count of 640x480 per frame a good video render is CBR-Two Pass (Constant Bit Rate, Two render passes performed to augment quality) with a bitrate set to 2M bps. This is decent video quality for the download size. If you use a higher bitrate, you will get better quality at the cost of file size, and vice-versa. The most recent Pablo videos were rendered at 3M, for a comparison. The bit rate is a function of the pixel count per frame and frames per second, so a smaller frame size will use less bit rate to attain the same quality of video.

Here is a link to a video to demonstrate these settings. I recorded it to have something to mess around with in Vegas, so the gameplay on it is not on the same par of sc1ence's videos (not that mine is anyways.) But it's a decent demonstrator for the settings:

FileFront DL ~75M

Gameplay in 1920x1080
Recorded half height to 960x540
Rendered to 768x432 (331776 pix count per frame, 640x480 is 307200 pix count per frame)
Video Encoding CBR-Two Pass 2M bps bit rate
Audio default render
Clip Length 5:08
File Size ~75M

[sc1ence]

Originally Posted by Catman1975

I was going to PM Sc1ence this, since he is our video production guru.

whoa. lol. I am far from a guru. I only started doing this stuff a month or two ago after being inspired by exploding silvers vids. I am sure there are others here on TG that are more experienced and helpful than I. Much of what I know was learned from trial and error, as well what info was gleaned from these forums.

I use wmv because that is what windows movie maker puts out. I would probably use a different format If I used more professional video editing software. I am still on the fence about using vegas movie studio. I have tried the trial version, but found that I rarely wanted to use the FX or more refined video editing functions Vegas MS allows. This may change if we start fraps squads where everyone is recording or if we get battlerecorder set up. I would then want the ability to have multiple video streams open.

I do not recode the video unless the sound is out of sync with the video. if that is the case, I will recode using virtual dub before importing into windows movie maker.