Help wanted for testing motion blur for future FM episodes

[BTGBullseye]

Yeah, remarkably low RAM usage here too...

 

Hey Ross, what program do you use to convert the PNG files to video?

[VeryShyPerson]

I think in the FAQ he mentioned VirtualDub. Thats what i use too.

[BTGBullseye]

Ah... I'll give that a try then.

 

I'm also gonna try doing the video at 60FPS output... I always liked higher framerate video.

Edited March 20, 2014 by Guest (see edit history)

[VeryShyPerson]

Just make sure to a) change the framerate to 30 and b) use compression if you don't have a lot of disk space. Though i assume the latter isnt much a problem.*

 

Another SrcDemo2 thing: The audio tends to go out of sync at higher framerates. What i did to solve that was just to use the startmovie wav command and re-record the audio separately and use that.

 

*A year or two ago i did some test of lossless video codecs and i found Lagarith to have the best compression. Though i'll stick with h264.

[Otto]

I think in the FAQ he mentioned VirtualDub. Thats what i use too.

I used to record initially with the .TGA extension, then do a batch conversion of them all to .JPG in something like IrfanView, and then load up

the jpgs in VirtualDub to compile the video. Of course I would set the compression down so much that you couldn't tell it apart from the source,

but the file size was decreased dramatically (don't know if that matters if the video is compressed anyway).

Is there any reason to use .PNG over any other extension? Does the format really make a difference in the end, apart from using it for storage?

[VeryShyPerson]

JPEG is lossy while PNG is lossless. I think TGA is uncompressed but I don't remember.

The problem with JPEG is even if you save it at high quality, it still loses a tiny bit every time you re-save or re-code it and it can get pretty ugly.

I never bothered with conversion -- after I got the video compiled and such I just delete all of the frames.

I wonder if it affects the time when encoding it to h264.

[BTGBullseye]

I wonder if it affects the time when encoding it to h264.

It makes it take about twice as long to encode on my machine...

[VeryShyPerson]

I'm not surprised really. I think its a general rule of thumb that compressed shit is slower than uncompressed shit.

 

That reminds me of the time I had a bunch of bitmap scans. I first compressed them to 7z, and then because I wanted to see what would happen I converted them to PNG and then compressed the PNG files to 7z.

The original files not only compressed faster but the resulting 7z file was smaller.

 

(I think the settings were Ultra, LZMA2, and Solid Block. Solid Block is good for compression but bad for speed.)

[BTGBullseye]

That's because PNG is already compressed... BMP files are not compressed, so they can be compressed more with the right algorithms.

[VeryShyPerson]

Yeah compressed files don't re-compress too good. Sometimes they can get bigger.

[BTGBullseye]

Especially if you make them self-extracting...

[VeryShyPerson]

Speaking of compression, I found NTFS compression pretty good, especially on lots of small text/html files. Those sorts of files can take up more space than they need to because of the....I forgot the name. The 4KB block thing.

[BTGBullseye]

Yeah, oh well...

 

Ok, so my settings for a 60FPS vid were 60 output frames, and 30 blur frames... Came out quite good for a 12GB video.

[blacktronics]

Well I just tested it myself, it came to 8 minutes 15 seconds on my system. I may try the others later.

 

The short one took 29 minutes.

I don't get it, that's much longer than my time, but your CPU should be a little faster than mine. Vsync was off and srcdemo2 was operating?

What irritates me even more is the fact that there is barely any difference between 1080 and 720p

and that my CPU is barely used during the process.

 

I'll try moving the game to my SSD so it can save the frames to that, let's see how that turns out.

[BTGBullseye]

I can't record above 1600x900, unless someone wants to get me an external monitor that supports that resolution...

[Bugthing]

How can anything using Java be a good thing for CPU usage..

[BTGBullseye]

If it doesn't do multithreading, any Intel processor with HyperThreading will stay below 50% core usage on ANY application, Java or not.

[kreedzfreak]

The process took about 5 minutes for the short demo on 720p and double the time on 1080p with maxed out settings.

 

My specs are Core i5-3570k @ 3.4GHz, 16 GB RAM @ 1600 MHz and the graphics card is a GIGABYTE NVidia GTX 670 OC.

The files were saved on my HDD, WD Blue 1TB.

[nightfly]

I was just wondering what software do you use for editing, because you could try the Reel Smart Motion Blur plugin and speed up your entire process. It's pretty darn fast and takes advantage of multicore cpu and gpu acceleration, best thing is you wouldn't have to record at 180fps anymore

 

You can see a demo of what it does for game footage in the clip below (you can skip to 2:00).

wouJ19dSes8

 

Hope this didn't sound too much like product whoring since it is my only post here, but it's a good plugin (I use the version for After Effects) and it saves me a ton of time since I have to re-render footage multiple times according to very valuable client input

 

LE: here's a link to their compatibility page

http://revisionfx.com/products/rsmb/compatibility/

[BTGBullseye]

I don't think Ross has any of the programs on that compatibility list, but I have After Effects so I might use it...