Video conversion/output advice

[Myselfsama]

Hello, lately Ive been playing alot of games, and I decided to start capturing movies using Fraps. However the movies are extremely large, like 3 GBs for 5 mins. So Ive used AutoGK to make them much smaller, however I still the quality/size ratio still sucks. If I make a 5 min movie like 20-30 mgbs the quality is terrible, if I give it the default 75% quality, the quality is good, but the size is like over 100 megs. How is it that people produce long films with excellent quality and a low size/min? Anything helps, Thanks for reading.

~Myself

[scharfis_brain]

games are NOT films.

films have motion blur and no aliasing. -> codecs like that
games have aliasing and no motion blur. -> codec dislike that.

you need lots and even more of bitrate to compensate this to encode games at a decend level of quality!

[Myselfsama]

hmm, I sort of understand. But i'm not savy in the video editing field. I'm still confused lol. XD

[CWR03]

Your Fraps may be capturing at 60 fps, which will also inhibit compressability. After loading the video file, hold Ctrl and press F9 to enter the hidden options, then check the box at the top right labeled "Reduce framerate for 60/50fps HDTV progressive sources." 23.976 will probably be checked by default, and try that and see if it's still smooth. If not, try the 29.970 setting, which will only remove every other frame.

[Myselfsama]

k. Checked, its capturing at Half Size at 30 fps. Will using the 29.97 option signifcantly reduce file size? XD

[Dark Shikari]

games are NOT films.

films have motion blur and no aliasing. -> codecs like that
games have aliasing and no motion blur. -> codec dislike that.

you need lots and even more of bitrate to compensate this to encode games at a decend level of quality!I'd say this is definitely not true; games often have extremely coherent motion, so while the detail is very high, the codec will find it extremely easy to encode motion. While it all depends on the complexity of the video, it should be much easier than many real-world sources for this reason.

Your main reason is a combination of two things: you're not using x264, which I've found to be extremely effective on game footage, and most importantly, 60FPS is basically twice the bitrate.

[scharfis_brain]

with no aliasing and present motion blur one can save a lot of bitrate.

I tried it before.
captured 1000 fps of a recorded Quake game in highes rendering quality at high resolution.
I blurred the frames temporally down to 25fps and downsized them to the destination resolution.

with anti aliasing and motion blur applied I could reach a bitrate drop at a factor of about 4.

I used XVid at constant quantizer.
I haven't tried h.264 encoders for this purpose yet.

[Myselfsama]

Hmm... And how exactly do I go about using the h.264, or the other bitrate thing? Sorry i'm really noob at this. If you guys can point me in the direction of a program perhaps I can work my way from there. Because AutoGK doesnt let me select different encoders, simply 2 options of that type. Xvid or Divx (which Divx doesnt work for some odd reason). Thanks for the responses.

[Dark Shikari]

Hmm... And how exactly do I go about using the h.264, or the other bitrate thing? Sorry i'm really noob at this. If you guys can point me in the direction of a program perhaps I can work my way from there. Because AutoGK doesnt let me select different encoders, simply 2 options of that type. Xvid or Divx (which Divx doesnt work for some odd reason). Thanks for the responses.Try MeGUI, Staxrip, Ripbot264... there are loads of free x264 GUIs.

[Myselfsama]

Thanks! Will Try them out :D