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New Capture Card--Good Quality?? (Destiny)

by Morpheus @, High Charity, Wednesday, February 24, 2016, 21:15 (2997 days ago)

I forgot to do this! A few weeks ago, I had to get a new capture card, after I accidentally ripped it from the outlet, smashed it into pieces, set it on fire, peed on the flames and threw it in the trash.

And then accidentally ran it over.

Anyway, I promised to upload a clip for testing/viewing purposes to show my raid group, see if it's any good or not.

Here's a clip of me discovering for the first time that the lift room has a Shrieker.

(File size is huge, too.)

So! Is it good quality? Is there an effective way to decrease the file size safely? Party Chat Recording? etc.

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New Capture Card--Good Quality??

by peaksutah, Wednesday, February 24, 2016, 22:26 (2997 days ago) @ Morpheus

Man, that looks great! At home I need to sit closer to the TV, or get glasses... I've been missing out on a lot of detail.

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Anyone Else?

by Morpheus @, High Charity, Sunday, February 28, 2016, 21:28 (2993 days ago) @ Morpheus

- No text -

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Yeah, but not yet!

by Beorn @, <End of Failed Timeline>, Monday, February 29, 2016, 05:55 (2993 days ago) @ Morpheus

I downloaded the clip and have some thoughts for you, but I haven’t had a chance to actually write them down yet. :) Hopefully in the next couple days!

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Okay, here are my thoughts!

by Beorn @, <End of Failed Timeline>, Tuesday, March 01, 2016, 05:17 (2992 days ago) @ Morpheus

Hokay! I wanted to actually give this some time so that I could write a proper response!

First, the good stuff: the quality of your capture is great. Most importantly, it looks like the blacks are at the right level; not too dark (which could cause large portions of the image to “pool” together in dark areas like this) and not too light (which would leave things grayish). I find that I usually have to play with the gamma settings on my card to get this right, but your video looks good!

Now, the improvements… Here’s a screenshot from MediaInfo, an app that shows all sorts of good information about video files:

[image]

First and foremost, you’re recording at 60 frames per second. For some games with true 60 Hz output (like Halo 5) you might find some benefit in recording at 60 fps, but Destiny is locked at 30 fps which means that you really just have duplicates of every single frame. For Destiny this is overkill, so I’d recommend changing your card to use 30 fps. That will help with the file size quite a bit and it’ll make editing the files much simpler later on should you choose to do so.

Second, your video bitrate is 40 Megabits per second! For comparison, most Blu-ray movies float around the 20-35 Mbps range, depending on the amount of grain and fine detail in the original (animated content uses less, film tends to use more). Destiny has a little bit of fine grain thats worth preserving, but for the most part you’d actually be pretty well-off scaling that down to 20 Mbps during capture. For final export, you’re going to be fine with 8-10 Mbps.

As a test, I re-encoded your video at 8.6 Mbps and 30 fps (click this link, and then click the Download button at the top left of the window to download the actual MP4 file instead of viewing it scaled in the browser).

As you can see, you certainly lose some of the finer detail (it’s inevitable), but the video still looks pretty good and the important parts of the frame are still very sharp. And the file size is a fifth of the original (~170 MB)! For the most part, I think this quality would be very acceptable for sharing (and if you decide to upload files to YouTube, they will crush it even more than this, unfortunately).

Direct comparison of the videos is tricky, but I pulled one of the more difficult frames (one with lots of grain noise, dark colors, fine texture, and whole-frame movement) from both videos so that you can compare the original to the 8 Mbps version in a “worst-case” scenario: Frame Comparison (PNG, 2.5 MB) (Be sure to view that at full-size, not scaled!).

As for your last question, recording party chat is kind of a pain in the rear and I don’t have any good advice for that yet. I just ordered a funky chat cable that should help with this, but it won’t arrive for another day or two so I don’t know how well it works yet. I’ll report in again once I get some hands-on time with it.

Final takeaway:
If you have the hard drive space to spare, I’d recommend recording at 30 fps and the best bitrate you can, but then you should edit down and compress the files before sharing online. If drive space is an issue, you can scale the recording quality back to 15-20 Mbps and it should still look pretty darn good.

Hope that helped! :)

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Okay, here are my thoughts!

by Morpheus @, High Charity, Wednesday, March 02, 2016, 04:55 (2991 days ago) @ Beorn

Yeah, while I was shopping for a new one, I decided to spring a few extra bucks for the 60 model, then while it was shipping I realized--the only games I have in 60 frames are Halos 1-5. At least I think so--I haven't even tried my other games or systems yet.

I downloaded your resample, and visually I can see no difference. I probably should've sent in something that wasn't almost all black. Then again, I'm really terrible with discerning stuff like that. I can barely tell the difference between 30 and 60 fps. But either way--170 Megabytes is a lot better than 790. I'd much rather take that for what looks like the same quality! :-)

Something like that is definitely what I need!

Let me give you the layout of a typical recording--the software I currently use records files in a .ts format. Only one program I have can use that, and it's just for viewing. Thankfully, the software automatically converts and saves an .mp4 copy as well. I have 1 or two programs that can use .mp4's to edit. I used to have a codec for my primary editing program that allowed me to edit .mp4's, but I lost it when my computer died, and unfortunately I can't find it on the internet anymore. So 90% of the time, if I want to use a clip in an editor, I have to convert it to .wmv or .avi or some other compatible format. That's three converts of the exact same recording, and all of them are heavy in filesize. You've just explained to me why, but whatever you did seems to really help!

I also looked at your photo comparison, and I didn't notice it at first, but after a few more late night glances, I definitely saw the lack of grain on the 8. It actually looks cleaner that way, more "hi-def", not just "compensating for hi-def".

Hard drive space isn't too much of a problem, but I went ahead and set my capture card to 30 fps, and dropped it down to about 19 MBPS.

Thanks, I really appreciate all your help on this! You obviously know your A/V stuff, and if you're okay with it, I'd like to talk with you more about it--maybe discuss encoding methods, I can send over some more tests, stuff like that!

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OBS

by narcogen ⌂ @, Andover, Massachusetts, Wednesday, March 02, 2016, 06:18 (2991 days ago) @ Morpheus

I'm not sure what your card is or what software you're recording with, but look at OBS:

http://obsproject.com

If it can see your capture device, it should let you pick a container, codec and bitrate of your choosing so you don't need to hang on to big files and don't need to transcode before editing.

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Okay, here are my thoughts!

by Funkmon @, Wednesday, March 02, 2016, 07:26 (2990 days ago) @ Morpheus

I'm extremely basic in video recording, I don't know a lot of stuff. But, I always put my crap to 30fps, 10 megabit, in h.264 video then edit it in Windows Movie Maker (which does all the junk I need), output at 8mbps, since it's going to go on YouTube anyway and be destroyed by compression.

I also think it can handle transport streams. They're just MPEG. If not, you can use handbrake to convert to MPEG 4.

Party chat audio looks like it will be fixed by the update to output to speakers if you select it.

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Okay, here are my thoughts!

by narcogen ⌂ @, Andover, Massachusetts, Wednesday, March 02, 2016, 07:30 (2990 days ago) @ Funkmon

I'm extremely basic in video recording, I don't know a lot of stuff. But, I always put my crap to 30fps, 10 megabit, in h.264 video then edit it in Windows Movie Maker (which does all the junk I need), output at 8mbps, since it's going to go on YouTube anyway and be destroyed by compression.

I also think it can handle transport streams. They're just MPEG. If not, you can use handbrake to convert to MPEG 4.

http://handbrake.fr

Windows Movie Maker does not support .ts files (and many others).

http://filmora.wondershare.com/video-editor/edit-videos-in-windows-live-movie-maker.html

Party chat audio looks like it will be fixed by the update to output to speakers if you select it.

That would be pretty awesome. I won't have to buy one of those fiddly cables.

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Of course!

by Beorn @, <End of Failed Timeline>, Wednesday, March 02, 2016, 18:29 (2990 days ago) @ Morpheus

Thanks, I really appreciate all your help on this! You obviously know your A/V stuff, and if you're okay with it, I'd like to talk with you more about it--maybe discuss encoding methods, I can send over some more tests, stuff like that!

Absolutely! Let's do some Patrol sometime and chat video stuff. :)

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