27 réponses à ce sujet

[kstarler]

Are you adjusting your desktop gamma to make everything in your OS look brighter? If so, this pops into mind as a potential reason for the difference in brightness, though I admit to having no idea if this would actually be a reason for the difference or not. Which program are you using to compress your video?

Modifié par kstarler, 20 mai 2011 - 03:51 .

[goofyomnivore]

I used FRAPS to record it and Staxrip to compress/encode it. I think I figured it out though there are some settings in Staxrip I need to enable.

Thanks for the replies though

Modifié par strive, 20 mai 2011 - 09:15 .

[Sailears]

strive wrote...

Don't want to necro a thread, but lots of good info here and I thought I could ask my question here rather than creating a new thread.

I'm a noobie at using video recording. I did my first attempt this past night.
(my video)

Anyways my question is -- the video is darker than how I play. Is that a side effect of FRAPS/compression? If so is there any way to remedy it? I used Fraps and Staxrip.

Looks quite ok to me, but worth checking what the others said.
Could be something to do with the change in colour space when fraps encodes the videos, and this not being decoded properly in staxrip? Someone please correct me if I'm out of line - don't want to be giving false information.



Oh, I'll take this opportunity to share the method I've settled on, after many weeks/months of trying different things, and help from people on here (Bozorgmehr, Kronner, Leeroi to mention a few)!

Essentially what I wanted was:
1. Record to separate drive/partition - many huge avi sections.
2. Join/convert (batch convert) the raw footage to shrink it for archiving, and editing. Delete originals.
3. Use archived material to create video (using whatever software you prefer).

Yes I could just use the original stuff in part 3, and reduce the amount of transcoding, but unfortunately powerdirector (which I already own) butchers the original files when encoding, and produces a significantly better result when the source footage is already encoded in h.264.

General concencus is to encode to h.264, using the x264 encoder in whatever way is the most comfortable.
Following from this I read it is recommended to use mp4/mkv container for this.

So there are a silly number of ways to do part 1, free or paid for. For those comfortable with CLI, there is always that option, and I was toying with the idea at one stage, but in the end I wanted a simple (thus definitive) method and because I'm still not clear on a lot of the x264 options and what settings are appropriate, decided not to do it via cli.

Then there was megui, which although very powerful felt a bit too messy to install/use, and I don't have the desire nor time to put into fiddling around with a GUI like that.

And the slew of other options/combinations - super, avisynth, staxrip, mediacoder, avidemux, any video converter, freemake... I'm not going to list everything or what combinations...
Of course, already having one of cyberlinks products I had a play around with the trial of their mediaespresso tool, but found this to be very  limited, with the quality also being quite poor, and generally not worth the asking price.
Then the rest of the paid for stuff, by xilisoft, avs... whatever.
Sods law, every single tool did one lot of things well, but all had at least one very irritating flaw <_<. But unless you want me to write a ridiculously long post giving my irritations with every tool that I've tried, I'll just leave it at that.

If you're already using one of the many tools out there with success, or are savvy enough to do things manually then I will be happy to read what your thoughts are.

I don't want to say more than that, other than testing all these methods has taken a lot (a lot! ) of my free time and a lot of reading and learning. But I like to understand things as thoroughly as I can, so once I started reading I needed to bring it to a conclusion.

And now what I have decided on.
One of the many tools I tested was Handbrake, which I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with. Ok, pretty nice, did a decent job of it, but not quite comfortable with the interface. But then I came across an alternative interface for it called vidcoder, which I think is fantastic, with the only downside being it can be a little slow.

But main thing is it is one self contained tool (no ancilliary stuff needed), with a simple interface.

As it can't batch and merge (only batch convert), there is the need to use something to join any adjacent avis before converting them - I used virtualdub for this. Huge file sizes yes, but to find something free that can batch convert and merge simultaneously is not as easy as it seems. And the paid for stuff that can do it have their own shortcomings.

Anyway - gathered all together as a batch (adjacent files merged into one, single clips left alone) and specified a conversion profile (I chose the high profile as the base settings).

Just a few changes - on the first window of the settings, set anamorphic to none, cropping to custom (and zeroes, because otherwise it will crop all the black bars in ME2 dialogue), and resizing to 1152x720 (my monitor is 16:10) or 1280x720 for 16:9 - I wanted to standardise the archived footage, so upscaling anything recorded at half-size, downscaling anything from full-size.
Second tab, turned off all video filters.
Third, framerate same as source, constant quality of 18.
Audio as AAC (faac), with bitrate of 320 (gives room for transcoding), and the rest auto.
And left the advanced tab alone - no need to change the default options, the important ones are selected, and in any case the result is quite fine.

And that was that, just takes a bit longer than some things (but things that use cuda tend to mess up the quality anyway). All 16:10 footage archived at 1152x720, and 60fps (I record 60fps, because it is more fun to play, and also like to store stuff in as high a quality as possible) as h.264 with aac audio, in an mp4.

One thing, this might not be viable for people who like to hit record and do this for more than 20 mins at a time, because the merged avi (before converting) will be silly huge, so best to use another method. This is better for many smaller recorded segments for say a montage, rather than a whole playthrough in chunks.

Right, then with all of these shrunk and archived files can be shuffled around and messed with in editing tool of choice, then encoded to lower bitrate/quality h.264 and aac, in container of choice.

------
Just thought I'd share that; apologies if it is a little incoherent in places - I can't think very clearly at the moment for typing all of this up, but hope it is useful enough.

Modifié par Curunen, 20 mai 2011 - 10:10 .