A Video Experiment...

[petermcleland]

I've been playing today with various video formats, to assess their relative pros and cons...Here is what I'm looking at:-

First as displayed in the new YouTube Beta...You select the new beta by clicking the underlined blue text to that effect down under the YouTube screen...Then you click the other piece of blue text under the word "Views:" which says "View in High Quality...This will cause it to buffer for a short time before playing right through:-

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KkTHDEjxGgs

Secondly, the same video, but stored on my server as file three times the size and very suitable to play in Full Screen Mode on Windows Media Player...The file will buffer for several minutes before playing, but is of great clarity:-

http://www.petermcleland.com/video/Sync ... ice720.wmv

I'm minded to keep these very large files away from my server and just use them in the construction of DVDs. I will then be limited to the YouTube quality of the first one, for posting in forums etc.

I know there is not a lot of interest here in such things and nothing British in the video, but I would be interested to know other points of view on my findings

[dswanson]

Peter,

I repeatedly go through a cycle of trying to make a video - getting disappointed - giving up and hoping that next time will be better. I find the AVI output of Fraps very good quality but as soon as I edit the file with Virtual dub, the size expands 10 fold but then the compression in windows movie maker takes away most of the quality and makes it very dark unless you lighten the video within the editing. I'm recording at the highest resolution I can, something around 1100 x 800.

I keep trying to find video compression codecs that work better, but with little success. I have Win media 10 on my PC.

Do you have any tips for a better final product ?

[Techy111]

The best Codec you can use is the Huffy lossless codec........its great and free.....google it....any probs give me a shout and i can help with compression...

Vdub is a great piece of software used correctly....

Tony

[petermcleland]

Degsy,

I'm no expert in these matters and I simply drag my FRAPS clips into Ulead VideoStudio 11+ and then edit it in there...It offers a large number of final outputs and I'm not sure that I have the best ones yet but I have one output for YouTube and another for a higher definition result suitable for making a DVD. I don't really know what codecs and compression systems it uses but the big file in my intial post is the best output I use and the other file that I uploaded to YouTube was from an output called "IPOD MP4 (640x480)". Sorry I can't help with compression software but that Huffy thing above, from Tony, looks like it should be worth exploring

[Techy111]

Hi Peter...you can do so much better than what your getting now......Movie maker offers better resolutions mate.....Huffy is by far the best i found....!

Youtube beta and yours do come out nice though...on my HD monitor....

Tony

[tonymadge]

not done any FS videos but we use Ulead VideoStudio 11+ at work to edit and produce DVDs for court purposes this software handles Mpge2 video we record on the aircraft HD Camera and does it very well with excellent results which moviemaker cant touch??

[ianhind]

I thought that most of the videos on YouTube were in FLV format (Flash Video) or at least they used to be (and having just read an article, it seems that YouTube converts your file to FLV, whatever format is uploaded).

FLV was intended to provide streaming video for websites and hence had to provide reasonable quality without too much buffering. it also means that the viewer does not have to download a codec to view the video.

Yes HuffyUV is an excellent lossless codec which I often use as an intermediate when converting between formats but it still produces large files that are too big to be streamed.

@Degsy - as soon as you import your FRAPS AVI file into VirtualDub you lose the compression. VirtualDub will not create WMV files - a result of the heavy hand of Microsoft early in its development. Instead I would suggest that you save it as a DIVX/MP4/Xvid file (which compresses it again), or as HuffyUV file if size does not matter. But first you have to get the appropriate codec.
For example, Xvid is an open source version of Divx so you might want to try that first since the download and install does not leave bits scattered on your PC: http://www.xvid.org/Downloads.15.0.html
Once installed, start VirtualDub, load your AVi and then from the menus select Video and then Compression - Xvid MPEG-4 codec should be there. Select it and accept the default by clicking OK. Then choose from the menu: File, Save as AVI - give it a new name and click "Save" - hopefully your new file is small and good quality. Anyone else will need to have a suitable codec to play it.

And VideoStudio 11 may also be able to use such codecs - I don't know since it is a long time since I bought any video editing software, instead preferring virtualdub and avisynth to roll my own.

If you want to try creating FLV files ready to put on a website (needs a bit of code!), then the Riva FLV encoder works well http://www.rivavx.de/?encoder
See comments here on relative merits:
http://www.matthijskamstra.nl/blog/inde ... -software/


And if you want to play just about anything, try this:
http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html


If all this is gobbledygook, let me know if you want it simpler. ;-)

[SkippyBing]

An interesting thing I read about video compression was by Robert Cringley of 'Triumph of the Nerds' and 'How to Build a Plane in 28 Days' fame.
He used the example of the Apple ads, you know one cool laid back arty type pretends to be a Mac and an uptight 'suit' pretends to be a PC all shot against a white background.
The thing is they still looked really good on youtube or whatever streaming service you viewed it on. The article explained that the white background helped because it massively reduced the amount of c**p the compression codec had to sort through as about 50% of each frame was white, the other thing was that the original film was in ridiculously high definition, i.e. wet film and then scanned in frame by frame at HD levels (this was several years ago so HD wasn't really a format as such at the time) this gave the compression utility the best information to work with.
Basically if you start with a lowish quality format like say WMV and then convert to FLV for youtube your trying to compress an already compressed format so the tricks the first codec has used can compromise the tricks of the second one.
So if you start with the highest quality you can (realistically AVI for FRAPS stuff or DV Camcorders) at the highest reolution (i.e. native) and do all your editing at that level (feel free to dedicate a hard drive to video clips) and then once your happy do a one time conversion to the final codec, if you can keep the high resolution original and then if you want to compress to a different codec use the master again. That way you'll have the best looking videos you can.

[dswanson]

Ian,

I've played with Virtualdub for a while now and did have a WMV codec for Media player 9 that did compress ok but it ceased to work when I upgraded to MP10. I've been using Virtualdub to edit bits I don't want, including the tops & bottoms of the frame to emiminate the MS red flags, and then using movie maker to compress. It works OK, just a pain with such big files after virtualdub has done its stuff. I have the vidx codecs but virtualdub doesn't seem to like them. I've just downloaded a few codec packs to try when I get time. It's deja vu again, I try for a while then give up in disappointment..... :-(

[TSR2]

Degsy, you can modify the cfg file not to show the messages top and bottom. I can send you the details when I get home.