Resizing in-game movies captured with FRAPS
August 6th, 2016
I am using FRAPS to capture 1 to 2 minutes of in-game footage at full widescreen resolution (1600 x 1050) and the results look (and sound) fantastic. Unfortunately, as you can guess, the file sizes are huge, between 1 and 2 GBytes.
I have tried using VirtualDub to resize and compress these videos but I am having no success. The resulting .avi’s are still large (400 to 800MBytes) and the quality is very poor. The video image loses all its crispness and looks washed out, darker, and markedly fuzzy (impossible to read in-game text that was so clear in the original).
Most of the compression filters/codecs I have tried won’t work with widescreen format (including my DivX 6.x codecs) and those that do produce very poor results. I’d like to get the movies down to decent downloading size (25 to 50MBytes) so that I can share them with my gaming friends.
Has anyone got any recommendations on what software and size/compression methods I should use? because I am struggling!
There has to be a way to do this as I see in-game movies on gaming sites all the time that are in .avi or .mov format and manage to maintain a lot of the clarity and detail while managing to keep the file sizes as low as 15MBytes.
Any advice appreciated.
I don’t know much about video editing but I would try this program as I have used it before for any and everything I needed to edit videos. http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/products/product.asp?pid=457
As far as file size have you looked into converting the movie to flash format?
maybe if you record at lower resolution. (half-size)
1366�768
1280�800
1440�900
what other codec have you tried? xvid?
Why is the AVI movie generated by Fraps so big? How can I reduce the size?
The filesize is big because there isn�t enough time to encode the movie while the game is running. The movie frames are slightly compressed, but still require a large amount of disk space due to the high resolutions. Once you have finished capturing you should convert the saved AVI into one of the popular compressed movie formats such as mpeg or divx. Recommended programs for doing this are tmpgenc (Tsunami Mpeg Encoder), and VirtualDub.
Using VirtualDub is quite easy. To create a compressed version of the AVI follow these steps:
* Start VirtualDub
* Select File->Open and choose the AVI in the Fraps directory you wish to compress.
* Select Video->Compression and choose the codec you wish to compress with (usually divx)
* Select File->Save As AVI and specify a filename for the new AVI.
If you have Windows XP you can also use Windows Movie Maker to compress the video files. If you use Windows Movie Maker it's recommended that you keep your Fraps video files at 800x600 or under.
What format does FRAPS capture in? Is it uncompressed?
If you resize it, it will loose detail. There is no way around that.
There is no limit to the resolution of XDiv, but the CPU usage climbs dramatically as the resolution increases.
Something must be going wrong if the files size is getting that big. Are you sure you are compressing it? An Mpeg4 ASP file would get bigger due to the very high resolution if you use the resolution you stated, but a very short video should not get to the size you state. But the bitrate would have to be fairly high to maintain quality at that resolution. You might not of set that to a suitable level.
With regard to videos sharpness, it could be down to what you are using to resize the video with that looses quality, there are a number of different resizers and each has it’s strengths, Lanczos4Resize or LanczosResize (these are both different, the former sharpens most, but they are for Avisynth, the closest in VirtualDub is Lanczos3) tends to sharpen the video slightly when resizing.
I don’t have any videos of that size to try. But I have just resized one up to that resolution using a bitrate of 1000 and a 20 second video came out at 6.25MB. The bitrate is far too low though at that resolution and would need to be considerably higher (about 8x but you might get away with less)
You could do a two pass encode and that will allow you to set the resulting file size, or use one pass and set a bitrate of suitable size. (try 7000)
Profile@level>
Select quantization type: MPEG
Adaptive quantization ticked
B-VOPS ticked
max consecutive to 2
Zone Options>
Begin with keyframe ticked
chroma optimizer ticked
More Quality Preset–>More>
6-Ultra High
VHQ mode 1-Mode decision
use VHQ for bframes too ticked
use chroma motion ticked
Set maximum I-frame interval to frame rate*10
Set the resizer if necessary to what I suggested, if not using filters then select fast recompress
everything else should be okay
Try that, you can set a select start and end if you want to try a small section. That is a faster way to test.
Open the result with GSpot to see the quality (Qf). It should be at least 0.2, the smaller it is the lower the quality.
I am having this exact same problem. I am trying VitrualDub right now. Testing
Try recording halfscreen, and then render it with Vegas after you have edited?
Brings a world of warcraft 8gb movie of mine back into around 300mb, Stage6 quality.