Frustrations of a Noob in Video Editing

RedLuck

Canada253 Posts

May 08 2011 21:17 GMT

Hey guys, lately I've been trying to record some of my games, a wide variety of games, just to pass on to some friends. It first started with Osu which was really easy to deal with because at max the clip will be like 4:00 mins, therefore fraps doesn't butcher the poor thing into multiple pieces.

So being the video editing noob I am i would just fraps a song, then encode it in MediaCoder using the H.264 format and changing no other settings in the program. This worked fine but gave me quite a terrible quality. Example:

So after doing a few videos like that I decided I wanted to try to bump up the quality. After many google searches later I didn't come up with much except a new program to use: H.264 Encoder. Bam, much better, this program would encode my videos in beautiful HD with just the click of a button. Example:

Perfect, so I found the easy way of doing it all with Osu songs... but once I tried to record a game of quake that I played I found out I had no idea how to deal with multiple parts of a video. Fraps cut's the video into like 10 pieces of 3:50ish a piece and my new H.264 Encoder program can encode them for me one by one but that gets me nowhere. I want to make it one video, obviously, that I can upload to youtube. I then tried to go back to MediaCoder and get that to work. No dice. Then I tried Windows Media Maker, and even Sony Vegas which WORKED, but were terrible quality with huge file sizes. Not good.

I figured I'd ask TL after much googling to help me out. I know there's lots of you out there who know what you're doing when it comes to video editing. I'm just looking for some tips: what programs do you use, and what are the optimal settings? I don't want to do some huge editing project I just want to string together the fraps pieces and upload to youtube in HD.

Any help is appreciated. <3 TL.

Go ThorZaIN!

_hate

Japan112 Posts

May 08 2011 21:40 GMT

try virtualdub

that's what most people used back then

not sure now

firexfred

United States78 Posts

May 08 2011 22:29 GMT

Virtual dub is pretty easy to use for this situation. Just open up virtual dub, drag the first part of the movie in and then go file - append AVI segment and select the next clip. And so on and so forth. You can also use virtual dub for compression

Here's a good vdub tutorial that diggity did a while back.
+ Show Spoiler +

RedLuck

Canada253 Posts

May 08 2011 22:32 GMT

On May 09 2011 07:29 firexfred wrote:
Virtual dub is pretty easy to use for this situation. Just open up virtual dub, drag the first part of the movie in and then go file - append AVI segment and select the next clip. And so on and so forth. You can also use virtual dub for compression

Here's a good vdub tutorial that diggity did a while back.
+ Show Spoiler +

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBXhgNSPUSM

sounds good, i'll check it out

thanks

neobowman

Canada3324 Posts

May 08 2011 23:02 GMT

Wow, you're good at Osu.

IskatuMesk

Canada969 Posts

May 08 2011 23:11 GMT

I find that virtualdub is just not fast enough to meet the demands of my encoding.

For maximum efficiency I cut and paste the fraps videos I want to encode into a separate directory on that recording HD. I create an AVS script using something called Avisynth Batch Scripter with the following template - +AVISource("%PATH%\%CLIP%.%EXT%") . This app is set to point to that directory the files are in.

Then I go into the text file and copy/paste it into another .AVS text file that has ConvertToYV12() at the end of it. I delete the very first + at the beginning of this text file and control-S.

Then I use megui to encode it. I leave megui open and already pointing at that second file. This saves me the time of choosing anything to open. I can choose from one of my x264 presets - Lower quality rating means higher quality and larger size. For 1920x1200 sc2 I don't need that high of a quality because sc2's graphics are not that sharp and there is not much motion. For something like Bulletstorm or Killzone 2/3 at 60fps I needed considerably higher quality settings to avoid blurring.

Megui is automatically set to use the mkv container and have "no target bitrate". All I need to do is click Autoencode, queue, and start.

Start to finish, to get an encoding started I can perform these actions in about 20 seconds or less.

Since I need to split my files into 15 minute parts for accursed youtube limits, I use mkvmerge to split or throw in edited audio as necessary.

Both megui and avisynth batch scripter can be found for free with google.

d3_crescentia

United States4053 Posts

May 08 2011 23:12 GMT

On May 09 2011 08:02 neobowman wrote:
Wow, you're good at Osu.

This was also my first thought.

I think a lot of the problems you're having with editing software is that it's being recompressed after editing. WMM certainly does it. Might have to fiddle around with the settings in Vegas to figure out what encoding settings are best.

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