4

Videos

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

I finally managed to get FRAPS working properly without crashing the computer. That's a good thing. So I'm currently testing methods for moving the video from raw capture to an upload site for sharing. Most likely I'll be using YouTube. It has the biggest file uploads available that I can find and supports "HD" quality. Not really HD, but it will suffice. The current problem isn't the uploading so much as getting the video ready for uploading. FRAPS splits up the capture into 3.9 gig files as it captures, so I end up with multiple files if I have a video longer than 1.5 minutes or so. Now I have to find a free program that will 1) not watermark my videos and 2) combine them without changing the aspect ratio and signficantly reducing the quality. Before this I have to compress the video to a manageable size. Currently experimenting with various encoding options to get a quality versus size ratio that I'm happy with. I'd rather err on the side of quality because LOTRO is such a gorgeous game.

Hopefully I'll figure out a solution soon and if anybody has suggestions, let me know.

4 Responses to "Videos"

The LotRO Follower Says:

For YouTube's HD videos I always go with these settings (any video program worth it's salt will allow you to set these when encoding).

Video
Codec: H.264
Bitrate: 4,000kbps
Resolution: 1280x720
Frame rate: same as source

Audio
Codec: Apple Lossless
Channels: Stereo
Frequency: 32 kHz

When I export there's also a "Quality" slider that goes from 0-100, I always go 100.

These settings will give you a good quality file that is still well under YouTube's 1 gigabyte limit.

Unknown Says:

Hi,
you could try Windows Movie maker both for converting and joining your video files, it's quite easy to use and it's included in Windows (or is available for free). to reduce the size of the raw video files from Fraps, you can use the option from the Fraps 'Movies' tab: Half-size. It will still create a decent video if you use 1280x1024 screen resolution or higher. In case of 1280x1024 the video resolution would be 640x512 (balf of both height and width of the original picture size)

Anonymous Says:

Maybe VirtualDub will be useful. There's a nice portable version available, which is great for testing.

http://portableapps.com/apps/music_video/virtualdub_portable

Jaxom92 Says:

Thanks, I'll have to check that out.