Recording Videos of Games - How do I get better quality?

[Boyiee]

Currently I'm running retail fraps and when I upload to youtube the video looks meh, I want to make it better.

I game at 2560x1600 and have been using 29.97fps half-size capture in fraps. This seems to get me decent quality videos as well as size. The videos are 1280x800 and are very nice and clean, roughly 1min per gb which is fine.

I've messed around with lower resolutions, fps settings, and fullsize/halfsize and gaming at full resolution with halfsize/29.97fps seems to be a pretty happy setup, at least when rewatching the video on VLC.

However once it goes to youtube, the max quality it would play in was 480p, however today it now is available at 720p. 720p is perfectly fine with me, and the quality looks great, however I know nothing about youtube and want to keep that 720p setting.

I guess I'm making this post looking for any further suggestions. The quality is fine TODAY, but when I first uploaded it was crappy. 1min/gb is DECENT but if there are other programs or ways to edit that could make that a little better, that would be great too. I'd imagine I'd run fraps for an entire game, so it could be 10+ minutes. I have the HDD space, but like I said, suggestions would be great.

I have yet to get any editing software, so suggestions on that would be fantastic too.

Here was my first test: Gaming@2560x1600 recording @half-size 29.97fps - Youtube originally gave me 480p but later upgraded it to 720p (which is what I want).



edit: also, randomly fraps crashes (seems to be related to WoW)

[Kenshiin]

I'm not an expert on the subject but I did notice that YouTube always takes some time to process the videos you upload before you can watch them in the correct setting. Even after they tell you the video is done processing when you do the initial upload.

[Gryffes]

Ok.

The highest res you can get via youtube ( excluding a very specific thing you'll never ever run into ) is 1080p - a 16:9 format.
You are recording in a 16:10 format - which is why you are getting black bars at the side.


tldr with the yesterday/today thing, youtube encodes for multiple resolutions - hence 240/360/480/720 etc, it can take a little while ( 1-2hrs for a big file ) for all resolutions to be useable.

Also when talking about quality/time, please use mbps, as it's the universal standard. eg there will be a setting/slider when you encode that uses this figure - on a modern codec around 4-7mbps will get you a really good quality video.

[Kiarax]

The processing time for HD probably doesn't help that you're uploading the uncompressed video. You can get that filesize down in a massive way without any noticable loss of quality when you encode it and YouTube should have the 720p version available a bit faster. Also might be placebo on my end, but encoding it in to mp4 format (what YouTube uses and converts it to anyway) seems to make it process faster. May just be my imagination or it could vary wildly on how "busy" YouTube is at the time, but food for thought. YouTube used to process stuff as it uploaded before (not sure if it does now with the new uploader) and my slow upload speed may have warped my perspective, but I've had an 8 minute long 720p video be processed within minutes before.

[Callisto]

The processing time for HD probably doesn't help that you're uploading the uncompressed video. You can get that filesize down in a massive way without any noticable loss of quality when you encode it and YouTube should have the 720p version available a bit faster. Also might be placebo on my end, but encoding it in to mp4 format (what YouTube uses and converts it to anyway) seems to make it process faster. May just be my imagination or it could vary wildly on how "busy" YouTube is at the time, but food for thought. YouTube used to process stuff as it uploaded before (not sure if it does now with the new uploader) and my slow upload speed may have warped my perspective, but I've had an 8 minute long 720p video be processed within minutes before.

I was under the impression that yt converts to flv, not mp4

[Niya]

flv and mp4 are only containers flv contains some flash-specific codec, and mp4 uses h264 AFAIK.
boyiee, do you upload the raw fraps files to YT? oO must be a really good connection you have there... it's probably that YT can't handle the fraps codec that well and that's why the videos don't look fancy.

fastest way should be that you just re-encode the videos with handbrake to h264/mp4. that could even speed up the encoding process at YT. oh, and you might wanna try to record in 25fps instead of 29,something.

I have yet to get any editing software, so suggestions on that would be fantastic too.

depends on what features you need. pretty much everyone uses sony vegas or adobe premiere, but they'r expensive as hell when you buy them...
a free (open source) and pretty powerful editor is lightworks. complicated at first because it has its own way of working, but once you get that it's quite ok. only problem is that it's really picky on video formats you can import, dunno if it can handle fraps raws.

[Boyiee]

Ok.

The highest res you can get via youtube ( excluding a very specific thing you'll never ever run into ) is 1080p - a 16:9 format.
You are recording in a 16:10 format - which is why you are getting black bars at the side.


tldr with the yesterday/today thing, youtube encodes for multiple resolutions - hence 240/360/480/720 etc, it can take a little while ( 1-2hrs for a big file ) for all resolutions to be useable.

Also when talking about quality/time, please use mbps, as it's the universal standard. eg there will be a setting/slider when you encode that uses this figure - on a modern codec around 4-7mbps will get you a really good quality video.

I can live with the black bars, not going to play in 16:9. I haven't encoded before just uploaded directly to youtube after it was fraps'd.

The processing time for HD probably doesn't help that you're uploading the uncompressed video. You can get that filesize down in a massive way without any noticable loss of quality when you encode it and YouTube should have the 720p version available a bit faster. Also might be placebo on my end, but encoding it in to mp4 format (what YouTube uses and converts it to anyway) seems to make it process faster. May just be my imagination or it could vary wildly on how "busy" YouTube is at the time, but food for thought. YouTube used to process stuff as it uploaded before (not sure if it does now with the new uploader) and my slow upload speed may have warped my perspective, but I've had an 8 minute long 720p video be processed within minutes before.

What should I use to encode/compress or whatever to make uploading to youtube faster while still retaining the nice 720p quality I want? It took like 20minutes for that 40second video to go directly from fraps to youtube.

[Boyiee]

flv and mp4 are only containers flv contains some flash-specific codec, and mp4 uses h264 AFAIK.
boyiee, do you upload the raw fraps files to YT? oO must be a really good connection you have there... it's probably that YT can't handle the fraps codec that well and that's why the videos don't look fancy.

fastest way should be that you just re-encode the videos with handbrake to h264/mp4. that could even speed up the encoding process at YT. oh, and you might wanna try to record in 25fps instead of 29,something.


depends on what features you need. pretty much everyone uses sony vegas or adobe premiere, but they'r expensive as hell when you buy them...
a free (open source) and pretty powerful editor is lightworks. complicated at first because it has its own way of working, but once you get that it's quite ok. only problem is that it's really picky on video formats you can import, dunno if it can handle fraps raws.

Fraps default options were 60/50/30/29.97fps so thats what I went with, I will try 25fps. I won't be purchasing anything, I'll torrent if the free stuff isn't that great.

edit: getting handbrake now

[Boyiee]

handbrake is really shitting on the quality, what settings do you recommend?

edit: 4000-5000kbps seems to be happy right now for 1280x800. Should I be web-optimizing?

[Boyiee]

Ok off to a good start with using handbrake now. These 3 uploaded pretty fast, now I just need some minor tweaking. There seems to be no difference in filesize quality or anything with webopimization.





Although with webopt youtube was telling me there may be audio/syncing issues.


EDIT: I tried lowering my resolution to the next 16:9 available on BF3, which was all the way down to 1920x1080... the game looks terrible to play but recording fraps at fullsize gave me 1080p access on youtube and it does look good... Really not sure what fraps settings or settings in general to be happiest with.

Spoiler: show

[hey]

I'd recommend recording and uploading at the full resolution. Youtube supports up to 4096x2304.

[Boyiee]

The problem with that is the file size as its being written. Half-size capturing is roughly 1gb/minute, full size at 2650x1600 is much much more.

edit: 3gb per minute lol

[Callisto]

Time for a bigger HDD, lol.

[Boyiee]

Well running fraps at 2560x1600 is pretty taxing, as if gaming at that resolution wasn't already. So I have no problems doing halfsize videos as they may have borders because of 16:10 but they still stay high quality while allowing me to play with no issues. The 1920x1080 video I did actually looks fantastic, but it's so hard to play at such a shitty, archaic resolution lol.

I got vegas running, decided to try a 10 minute run just to see how it went. Looks like fraps is picking up my mic though as I can hear some keyboard presses... pretty lame cause I would love to keep vent in the videos. This 10min video is taking forever to upload, its roughly 1gb mp4 though so I can understand. What I don't like is at 4minute intervals fraps starts a new video, so around there is a slight chop in vegas that I don't know if I can do anything about.

[Boyiee]

And here is the long one from vegas. Just noticed its mp4 instead of m4v.



Not really sure what the best method is or what will get me the best videos. The one that I dropped my resolution to 1920x1080 and ran full-capture looks awesome, but the 2560x1600 half-captures, which are all of the others, still look ok. Still not sure why fraps is conflicting with WoW.

Thanks for the help so far and the software suggestions. Any other suggestions are always welcome, such as formats softwares etc.

edit: the m4v's straight from handbrake are all 720p after half-capture, but the mp4 I used vegas for is 1080p even though it was also done half-capture.

[Zeb]

As for youtube processing the video, I remember hearing one commentator saying that depending on the file type, youtube will process it during the u/l instead of after the u/l is finished. Don't remember what type though.

[Adajer]

The 1920x1080 video I did actually looks fantastic, but it's so hard to play at such a shitty, archaic resolution lol.

Thanks for making me feel bad about myself.

[hey]

Thanks for making me feel bad about myself.

What, you don't have $1200 to spend on a monitor?

[Boyiee]

Yeah bro whats wrong with you get a job buy monitors profit

[Boyiee]

or learn to play poker