Need some help with videos

edited in General
So I've been trying to get a gameplay video posted for Toxic Bunny HD using Fraps. But seeing as I am totaly new to creating videos I'm having trouble getting the video down to a size that can actually be uploaded. I have googled a bit and have tried some official solutions but they don't reduce the size enough. Anyone have any experiece with this that can help me out?

Thanks

Comments

  • Hey @Rigormortis, we also building one :)

    To reduce a fraps video you will need another piece of editing software. The first one we did we used movie plus. I would not recommend it though.
  • @tbulford, Cool :) yours would probably be a better showcase of all the features.

    The editing software I tried is virtual dub, which is actually recommended by Fraps. And even though it greatly reduced the file sizes, it still left me with a file of about 200MB for a 7min movie. Clearly I'm missing something.
  • Did you try dropping the resolution? It might seams obvious.

    Well we cutting parts from all 4 levels. Also take the lighting off for the video as the darkness works for game play but really makes the details hard to see on a lower res video.

    Ours will still be about a week though.

    Travis
  • Hmmm, I'll look into that. I just need to make the time to tweak and learn what everything means/does :)

    I'll just put some gameplay on in level 1, so that everyone can get a taste so long. :)

    Thanks for the help.
  • Thank you for taking some time with our title. :)
  • Out of interest, the way we (Open Window video students) were always recommended to do this was to use the h.264 codec, and have video bit rate set to some multiple of 300kb/s. You lose some of the vibrancy in the colour, but overall the quality's great for a small filesize.

    We'd use Quicktime Pro, but I don't imagine that's important.
  • See, educational institutes DO teach you things :)
  • Hmmm, I didn't know what it meant, but the tutorial I followed to it also uses the h264 codec. That is if I remember correctly, not at the correct PC now. I do now that the bit rate was set to 10k, which was wat the guy in the tutorial suggested, but again I'm not sure what that even means.

    Maybe I should post some screenshots tonight of what I'm actually trying to do.
  • I use "Any Video Converter". With the latest video I made, which is 2:10min, I got it to 160MB at a res of 1280x720, 10k bit rate and 29 FPS in .avi format. Codec was xvid and the audio was 192kbit.

    Hope that helps a little.
  • I think it does actually. I have no idea at what resolution I'm using but the size seems about the same. I should have mentioned this earlier but the actual compression isn't bad. The original file size is about 1.8GB and it goes down to 150MB, but the 150MB seemed big to me for a 7min vid. Am I expecting too much?
  • Handbrake is pretty cool. I've screen captured videos of about 10 mins running at 1280 x 720 and optimised them down to about 80MB.
  • another (easy?) way to efficiently compress a video is to upload it to youtube and then download it again using something like keepvid. Caveat of course being that you have to upload a large file... and you get youtube quality video's out (which isn't that terrible on 720/1080p).
  • 150MB for 7 minutes at full res isn't bad at all. Remember that YouTube will compress that down again for each different resolution that it serves the video at. People recommend h.264 as a codec because it means YouTube doesn't need to re-process the high res video a second time, so you won't lose more colour quality.

    Basically all you have to keep doing with video compression is fuck around with whatever settings you have to hand until you get something that works for you. Key concepts like data rate per second and stuff like that should help you figure out what you're likely to expect: 10KB * 29 frames * 60 seconds * 7 minutes = 119MB. Clearly that's not too shabby.

    Also, take a look at your audio - uncompressed audio is your next big worry in terms of filesize. This is actually where YouTube gets most of its compression from, they've managed to sync very compressed audio to video without going totally fucking mad like us normal humans do ;)
  • Cool guys, thanks for all the suggestions and help. I'll give it another go when I get home and hopefully will have something up for you to look at tonight.
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