Comments on: Ed Wood

By: Ed Wood – Take Two (Nefarian Video) « Falling Leaves and Wings

Ed Wood – Take Two (Nefarian Video) « Falling Leaves and Wings — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 16:35:02 +0000

[...] been reading over the past week or so, you know that I’ve been playing around with FRAPS and video capture. Actually, it’s been more than that really. Over the past week I think it’s safe [...]

By: Triz

Triz — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 23:03:51 +0000

That’s MUCH better. Everything is readable even on 720p.
Stick with Vegas over Premiere

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 16:46:22 +0000

So – here is the result of the edit via Sony Vegas (note that it views best at either 720 or 1080):

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 16:25:35 +0000

After reading Xav’s thread, I went ahead and picked up Sony Vegas – but not the “Pro” version (which retails for about $600, and I just don’t see myself using it enough to make that kind of investment), the one that’s similar to “premiere elements” – and I’m playing around with it some now. I was able to tweak the program in all of the ways Xav recommended, and I found it on Amazon for $70! (It seems average retail is $130). I’m also going to add a second hard drive and a bit more RAM (I’m running at 6g currently – but my machine can support 24, so I might go up to 10 or 12).

I might try to FRAPS a boss fight with my warrior for her power auras that I’m going to put up this weekend-ish.

I’ll let you all know how it turns out

By: Triz

Triz — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:03:59 +0000

Beru, the problem with compressing the file in QTPro first is that every compression/encoding you do on any video file makes you lose some of the quality, except for when you use a lossless codec, and in that case you don’t lose file size anyway.
I don’t know how good the QT codec is for actually encoding stuff, but you basically always should do edits on your raw files and encode after that.
For adding audio afterwards, you can mux that in whenever you want, it doesn’t really matter that much.

By: FeralTree

FeralTree — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:29:12 +0000

There’s a great thread on Premo’s site with a guide on optimizing your video to get good picture/quality, esp for uploading to places like youtube.
http://premoguild.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6048

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:15:22 +0000

Yar – Triz is spot on here. The fuzziness is a Premiere issue, not a fraps issue. Because if I play the fraps avi file back using something like divx it’s crystal clear. But the file is massive. You are also correct in that I play at 1920 x 1080

I read from others using premiere that if they compressed the .avi file in QTPro first and then loaded it into Premiere this solved the blurriness issue. I just really haven’t had enough time to explore this option yet. And I wanted to get some feedback on if this really works – since QTPro is a paid program (not that it’s an issue, I just wanted to make sure that it works before shelling out cash on it!).

By: Triz

Triz — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:15:30 +0000

John, the problem with going for 720p videos would be that Beru would have to record at that resolution. From seeing that there’s a 1080p choice, I think she’s playing on 1920*1080, and in that case recording at 1080p is better.
The video being fuzzy at the high def settings is caused by Premiere’s encoding settings and encoder, not by Fraps compressing the data, as Fraps doesn’t compress the data

By: John

John — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 07:43:07 +0000

I noticed that your High Def goes all the way up to 1080p. Which is nice, but seems unnecessary. 720p seems to give more than enough resolution to be able to follow what is going on accurately.

I noticed that at 720p I can’t quite make out all of the text (like the numbers for your health bar). However, I still can’t make them out at 1080p. So something else is getting in the way of being legible. As such, a clearer 720p cut would be better than a fuzzy 1080p.

I wonder if Fraps is causing the problem in trying to compress the data during the record phase. In which case, letting Fraps do less compression, and doing better post-filtering in Premier.

For example, if you look here:

That Tankspot video doesn’t go about 720p. However, I can read the text without problem. I guess the chat text is hard to read, so maybe it is a font issue. Because I can read the much smaller Threat numbers. And even the tiny time-of-day on the bottom right.

I think your video is pretty good, but I do think there are still some settings that can be tweaked if you want.

By: Beruthiel

Beruthiel — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:59:29 +0000

Thanks for the tips!

I’m not tied to Premiere in any way, really, the progam comes with the Photoshop bundle that I buy – and I’m not opposed to using something different. It’s just what I’m familiar with. What are some other recommended editing programs?

I will definitely take a look at that thread when I get home!

As for hard drive – right now I’m just running with one Hard Drive – but it is fairly large (800GB, I beleive). Given that my PC is a few years old now, I probably wouldn’t put another Hard Drive in at this time as I’m starting to consider a new PC, but that is definitely something to keep in mind for a new machine!