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Video Update

Thursday, April 9, 2009

I have good news and bad. The good news is that I've created a video called Road to Rivendell, which follows Frodo's journey from Bag End to the Last Homely House. Unfortunately, the filing system with windows limits video capture to 4 gigs. 3.9 gigs to be specific. That means it doesn't matter which program I use, the videos will always be split up into multiple files. Now, I have a compression program that works great for reducing the video size to something more manageable. 150 gigs worth of video is crazy. The sizes after compression are still relatively large, but they're at 1680 x 1050 and really good quality. That was my goal, however, so I'll accept relatively large video size for the quality I'm getting. One of the goals for Road to Rivendell is to showcase LOTRO's beautiful landscape. The higher quality video the more able I am to carry out that goal.

Now here's the bad news. I cannot find a free/relatively cheap program to combine the videos. I've tried Corel VisualStudio 12, Windows Movie Maker, and VirtualDub. VisualStudio will combine the uncompressed raw capture but my compression program crashes with the larger files this produces (read about 25 gigs). If I compress the files before combining them, VisualStudio crashes when I try and import them. I'm at an impasse here. Movie Maker cannot create the videos at the quality I want. VirtualDub, even getting past the fact that it's not user friendly, is also bad on the quality side. The sound is also screwed up because apparently (according to the FAQ) my processor isn't fast enough to encode the audio properly. I highly doubt that with a Quad Core 9550.

So, here I am sitting with 40 seperate video files for Road to Rivendell. I didn't really want to upload a 40 part video with each part between 1.5 and 2 minutes long, but at the moment, that's the only thing I can do. So, I'll be linking to the YouTube videos as soon as they're uploaded (will take a couple of days at 40 total to uplaod). If anybody has additional ideas, that'll be great. Oh, and I'm not spending 700 bucks on Adobe Premiere Pro. That's way overpriced for amature/hobbiest video editing.

4 Responses to "Video Update"

Tommy Says:

File size limits:
FAT32 limit is 4GB
NTFS limit is ~16TiB

Might consider doing a /convert on the data drive so you can store them as larger files.

No need to post this, just helpful info for you.

Jaxom92 Says:

That's strange... The drive I'm using I set up as NTFS. I wonder if FRAPS assumes use of a FAT32 drive. There's no settings in the program to indicate such or to be able to change it. Perhaps I need to look into a different video capture software.

Blue Kae Says:

VirtualDub will likely do what you want, the trick is getting the configuration setup correctly. If you are trying to either recompress the video to get a smaller files or resize the video resolution, then you don't need to do anything to the audio and you can bypass any audio encoding by setting "Direct stream copy" under the Audio menu.

Jaxom92 Says:

I found a tutorial for stitching my videos together with VirtualDub. I now have a solution to my video problem.