how to record videos

[Vivi]

I am having trouble determining how to record videos in high quality on my 1440x900 dell se198wfp monitor, graphics card: AMD Radeon 5450.

I am using the software Bandicam, I have no idea which video settings to place for Youtube HD. I'm not sure if I should enter (for the size of the video) 1440x900 or select one of the preset options. Not sure if 1440x900 is 16:9 or not.

[stj]

Re: how to record videos

use this:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ytd2/

[mariushm]

Re: how to record videos

Open Broadcaster Software ( https://obsproject.com/ ) is a quite good solution to create video from games, desktop capture, whatever you want to do.

You can configure it to capture a particular window, or region of a window, or a game and so on.
By design, the software is designed to compress to h264 (the same compression used by youtube) but it configures the compressor to compress as fast as possible with as little cpu usage as possible so the file size will be a bit larger than what's possible. This causes a compromise in quality of the video it captures.

You can however reconfigure the software to compress the video using another compressor like MagicYUV for example ( http://magicyuv.com/ ) which will compress the captured images to disk without any loss of quality but the file size will be huge (let's say 10-15 MB per second of video)
After you're done capturing the video, you can load the large video in some software (like Sony Vegas for example) and recompress it with h264 to get small size and high quality).

Youtube will recompress anything you upload to its own internal video formats, so exacty what settings you'll use won't matter much.

It's still a good idea to upload videos in expected resolutions like 1920x1080 or 1280x720 and not uncommon resolutions like 1440x900 (so don't capture the whole screen but only a 1280x720 region, or capture the whole screen and crop a 1280x720 section in post processing)
Also good idea to keep frame rate to 24, 25 or 30.

ps. stj recommends a software for downloading videos from youtube. Maybe I understood incorrectly and you want that? If that's the case I use a firefox add-on for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/fir...nload-youtube/

[Vivi]

Re: how to record videos

Open Broadcaster Software ( https://obsproject.com/ ) is a quite good solution to create video from games, desktop capture, whatever you want to do.

You can configure it to capture a particular window, or region of a window, or a game and so on.
By design, the software is designed to compress to h264 (the same compression used by youtube) but it configures the compressor to compress as fast as possible with as little cpu usage as possible so the file size will be a bit larger than what's possible. This causes a compromise in quality of the video it captures.

You can however reconfigure the software to compress the video using another compressor like MagicYUV for example ( http://magicyuv.com/ ) which will compress the captured images to disk without any loss of quality but the file size will be huge (let's say 10-15 MB per second of video)
After you're done capturing the video, you can load the large video in some software (like Sony Vegas for example) and recompress it with h264 to get small size and high quality).

Youtube will recompress anything you upload to its own internal video formats, so exacty what settings you'll use won't matter much.

It's still a good idea to upload videos in expected resolutions like 1920x1080 or 1280x720 and not uncommon resolutions like 1440x900 (so don't capture the whole screen but only a 1280x720 region, or capture the whole screen and crop a 1280x720 section in post processing)
Also good idea to keep frame rate to 24, 25 or 30.

ps. stj recommends a software for downloading videos from youtube. Maybe I understood incorrectly and you want that? If that's the case I use a firefox add-on for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/fir...nload-youtube/

So, say if I use Bandicam, in order for me to record a game (smoothly without lag) I would have to set the settings this:

[mariushm]

Re: how to record videos

Well, you should use the same resolution in the capturing software as the resolution of your game.
If they don't match, the software will have to perform an additional resizing of the images it captures, which uses more processing power.

Therefore, if your monitor native resolution is 1440x900, I would either capture the game at that resolution or configure the game to run at 1280x720 and capture at 1280x720 but then it may look uglier on your monitor.

Next, you've chosen MPEG-4 as codec which is a lossy codec, it compresses movies the same way a picture application saves a picture to JPG format.

When you save a picture to JPG, the software analyzes the picture and figures out what details in the picture are less noticeable to human eyes and depending on the compression quality you chose, some details are removed to make the file smaller.

MPEG-4 works the same as a JPEG compressor, but works with a series of pictures (or frames in movie speak). It looks at a sequence of pictures and figures out how things move in that sequence of pictures and what's important and where your eyes focus when watching and tries to keep as much quality in the areas where your eyes are normally looking at.
If you set the quality to 100, naturally the compressor will try to keep the most quality and will work extra hard to retain as much information but that's somewhat pointless because details will still be lost no matter how much the compressor works. So if you insist on going with that route, it would make sense to go with a 80 or 90 at compression quality but I guess that depends on how fast your computer is.

As for file sizes, depending on what quality level you set, it will take more or less disk space to save each second of capture, it all depends on how much motion and complexity is there in the game. It could be 100 KB for one second, it could be 1 MB for next second, so it's hard to predict how much disk space it's going to be used.

If I were to capture a game... well, I'm more of a perfectionist. I would capture the game with a lossless codec (Magicyuv, lagarith, huffyuv, utvideo etc), which means the compressor will be very fast and retain all detail and the game capture software won't use lots of resources but the file sizes will be huge. I have about 1 TB of free disk space on this system, so I can afford to, I don't know if you have enough disk space.

After I'm done capturing, I can simply load the files into a video editor like sony movie studio or sony vegas and choose h264 compressor and select the best quality I want for youtube and let the computer recompress the video to what's suitable to upload (could take hours if i want that much quality).

A lossless codec will pretty much write to disk about 30-50% of the information it captures so you can predict how much disk space you need... for example for 1280x720 at 30 fps you'd need about 2 bytes per pixel, so in a second the software captures 1280x720x30x2 = 55,296,000 bytes or around 52 MB, so a lossless codec will reduce that to about 20-30 MB a second .. that works out to about 1-2 GB per minute and so on.

To capture with a lossless codec, you'd have to choose AVI as file type, then select external codec, then choose one of those compressors i mentioned (but you have to install them before).

[Vivi]

Re: how to record videos

I see, I've got MagicYUV lossless video codec v1.0 (32 bit)
And I don't think my computers processor is that fast: its a: AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core Processor 440+ 2.30 Ghz

And I've got the settings set to this:

[mariushm]

Re: how to record videos

If you're going to recompress the video at a later time, you may as well keep the audio uncompressed until you edit everything.

MPEG-1 L2 is lousy quality, especially at 192kbps. It's sort of the same quality as video cd (the stuff before DVDs). If you want to retain quality, select 384 kbps or select PCM which means the audio will be uncompressed and the bitrate will be about 1600 kbps (but you can later recompress it to aac or mp3 which is what Youtube expects.

Anyway, have a look at Open Broadcaster Software instead of Bandicam. It's open source and more configurable and doesn't have restrictions like unregistered bandicam, which seems to stop recording after 10 minutes or something like that.

[Vivi]

Re: how to record videos

I have no idea how to use Open Broadcaster Software, but with FPS, if the game's FPS is 30, should I record exactly at 30 FPS?

[mariushm]

Re: how to record videos

The game's fps will vary depeding on the quality settings you have in the game, on what video card you have, on how complex the game is and lots of things.
At some points the game may run at 100 fps, in other points only at 20 fps, maybe at cutscenes or intro movies the fps will be locked at a particular framerate.

Sites like Youtube can't really handle properly videos that have varying framerate, so pretty much all capture applications insist on you setting a particular framerate (fps) for the video. The standard framerates for videos are 24 and 30 for ntsc countries and 25 for pal .. and of course 50 and 60 fps.

Some screen capture software can lock a game down to a particular framerate like 30 to make it easier for that capturing software to record. This can make a game feel sluggish.

Make some effort and learn how to use that open broadcaster software, there are some tutorials on their site and you can also find tutorial videos on youtube. It's time well spent to learn it.