Video Compression

T

The Giant Napkin

Well-known member
So, here's the problem: I occasionally record stuff with Fraps, but as you know Fraps outputs really large .avi files. After roughly half an hour of recording, I'm stuck with over 100 gigs of footage, but I still want to record much longer before using it in a video project. Since I'm terribly old-fashioned and only have a 500 GB HDD for storage, I need to compress this footage. However, because I'll be rendering it out again later (in a video project), I want as little quality loss as possible. (Because if I compress it now, then use the compressed footage in a video project and render that out, it will be effectively compressed twice and therefore there is some 'unnecessary' quality loss, right?)

Now, I'm a complete noob on this: I read some of Ross' and your forum posts on the new format for his videos, but unfortunately both that and internet sources such as Wikipedia do little more than confuzzle me. So I was hoping some of you might have some advice for me: which codec I should be using, which format and which video compressing software. Of course, since I'm Dutch, I don't really want to spend money on this : P. Any advice?

 
If you want to retain the best quality for further edits/processing then I would suggest to use HuffYUV 2.1.1 http://www.videohelp.com/tools/HuffYUV

If will reduce the data size to about 50% of the uncompressed RGB footage if you set it to "Convert RGB to YUY2". If will be practically lossless (only have the colourspace conversion errors, which you will probably end up with anyway subsequently downstream in your editing process). The good thing about HuffYUV is it is very quick in both encoding and decoding, so editing will be easy on your computer resources.

If you use other codecs - such as MJPEG, high profile high level MPEG2 or MPEG4 (h263, h264, AVC etc) the compression will be increasingly lossy and processing-intensive, especially h264/AVC but will reduce your data rates significantly. If your computer and editing package can handle such compression/decompression in (near)real time you can go that way, otherwise I would recommend HuffYUV.

Note that if you use high-compression codec at high bitrates (depends on the resolution of your video captures) for your source material then you need not worry too much about quality loss during re-encoding of your final output video.

Regards

 
If you want to retain the best quality for further edits/processing then I would suggest to use HuffYUV 2.1.1 http://www.videohelp.com/tools/HuffYUV
If will reduce the data size to about 50% of the uncompressed RGB footage if you set it to "Convert RGB to YUY2". If will be practically lossless (only have the colourspace conversion errors, which you will probably end up with anyway subsequently downstream in your editing process). The good thing about HuffYUV is it is very quick in both encoding and decoding, so editing will be easy on your computer resources.

If you use other codecs - such as MJPEG, high profile high level MPEG2 or MPEG4 (h263, h264, AVC etc) the compression will be increasingly lossy and processing-intensive, especially h264/AVC but will reduce your data rates significantly. If your computer and editing package can handle such compression/decompression in (near)real time you can go that way, otherwise I would recommend HuffYUV.

Note that if you use high-compression codec at high bitrates (depends on the resolution of your video captures) for your source material then you need not worry too much about quality loss during re-encoding of your final output video.

Regards
Click to expand...
This sounds interesting, but I seem to have some problems getting it to work. First of all, 1:35 (2.18GB) of Fraps footage is 'compressed' into 5-8GB, regardless of using RGB->YUY2, fastest or best YUY2 compression. Is this normal? The footage was recorded full-size at 1920x1080 and 50FPS. I'm using the 64-bit versions of both VirtualDub and HuffYUV because I couldn't get the 32-bit version of HuffYUV to work with the 32-bit version of vdub.

Secondly, I can't play the compressed footage with Windows Media Player; when I try to do so I get only audio. Whereas I absolutely don't mind finally switching to a good freeware media player, I could use some advice on that as well. Or is HuffYUV compressed footage meant to be decompressed before being used again?

Thanks a lot for your help : ). I used to compress my videos at a high bit rate using the free Windows Live Movie maker, but when I noticed the damn program couldn't even use the footage it compressed itself (it tells me - honestly - that it can't read .wmv videos it compressed itself minutes ago. Incidentally, it doesn't allow you to render videos in another format). So I'm kind of pissed enough with Microsoft to want to switch to something else...

 
First of all, 1:35 (2.18GB) of Fraps footage is 'compressed' into 5-8GB
Click to expand...
That means your Frapps capture is already compressed using another codec. What type of file is produced? AVI?

Open it with GSpot - it should give you detailed information about the parameters of the video and audio and compression used.

Regards

 
First of all, 1:35 (2.18GB) of Fraps footage is 'compressed' into 5-8GB
Click to expand...
That means your Frapps capture is already compressed using another codec. What type of file is produced? AVI?
Click to expand...
Fraps saves videos using its own codec, FPS1 according to GSpot. It saves files in an .avi format.

Does this mean the current filesize is as good as it gets without using 'normal' compressin (rendering them out at a high bit rate)? In that case, can you suggest a good codec to use (and the format that's best used with it)? I have tried DivX, but the free codec doesn't let me render at bitrates higher than 20k, which is still a bit too low for my liking.

 
if you want to record in Source Engine games, use demos and Source Recorder. it's easier and doesn't increase FPS lag at all.

 
The Lagarith codec compresses better than HuffyUV, although I've find it will occasionally crash Premiere on me. It all depends on your content, but that might get you to 30-60% of your space you're using uncompressed.

Uncompressed, HuffyUV, or Lagarith are really your only options if you're going to be doing video editing. Highly efficient compression codecs like x264 or xvid rely on keyframes, which mean each frame doesn't store all the data you need, which makes seeking in the clip hell and a bad choice for editing.

Really you might want to think about getting an additional hard drive, but if you want to play Tower of Hanoi, another trick you can do is make copies of all your videos at a low resolution and use THAT for editing except for your final render. In the meantime, compress your original clips down in 7z or something to get a little bit more space. It still means you'll have problems for your final render, but that buys you time. In the meantime though, use Lagarith with RGB encoding (it should handle fraps' BGR fine I believe), that's your easiest option.

 
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