Game capture and the variable frame rate abyss. Any video experts here?

[SuperDeadite]

I simply feed the RGB directly into my SC-512N1-L/DVI and record as I previously stated.  If you already have an XRGB you can use that for an even better HD result.  The SC-512N1-L/DVI is NOT cheap, but the results are quite satisfying.  This was my first attempt, and I'm quite pleased with the results.  The original raw 60fps capture is astounding.

[mackdanger]

I simply feed the RGB directly into my SC-512N1-L/DVI and record as I previously stated.  If you already have an XRGB you can use that for an even better HD result.  The SC-512N1-L/DVI is NOT cheap, but the results are quite satisfying.  This was my first attempt, and I'm quite pleased with the results.  The original raw 60fps capture is astounding.

Micomsoft really likes the 40k yen price point don't they? Just curious, where did you buy your card at? I actually managed to pick my XRGB-Mini up at Yodobashi. I thought I would have to order it. I am going to check Micomsoft's site and read up on it. I may ask you some more questions about it.

[esteban]

I agree with the Professor. You're trying to mail a package to China via the moon. The problems that you are having are a direct result of diddling with the video way way too much.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Dude! Where have you been?

[SuperDeadite]

I simply feed the RGB directly into my SC-512N1-L/DVI and record as I previously stated.  If you already have an XRGB you can use that for an even better HD result.  The SC-512N1-L/DVI is NOT cheap, but the results are quite satisfying.  This was my first attempt, and I'm quite pleased with the results.  The original raw 60fps capture is astounding.

Micomsoft really likes the 40k yen price point don't they? Just curious, where did you buy your card at? I actually managed to pick my XRGB-Mini up at Yodobashi. I thought I would have to order it. I am going to check Micomsoft's site and read up on it. I may ask you some more questions about it.

I bought mine from Micomsoft direct.  As I wanted the XSync-1 as well, and they were having a special holiday sale on the bundle set at the time.  I live in Japan, so no proxies for me.  If you plan to use the XRGB, you really don't need the XSync though.

[ProfessorProfessorson]

Just some tidbits I am adding concerning Vegas and VirtualDub, and some things I had to set to get rid of the smoothing blurred crap Vegas was doing on my videos during its deinterlacing process.

Results before adjustments:


Results after adjustments:



VirtualDub:
1. Make sure to install the Lagarith codec prior to running.

2. Set compression to Lagarith, with multithreading enabled in configure on Lagarith.

3. On "capture pin" set output size to 640x480 and color space to UYVY.

4. On audio don't check "Enable Audio Playback", because it eats up more cpu resources during capping, but do enable "Audio Capture" and "Volume Meter". Volume meter will confirm you have audio fed in correctly.

5. On "Video", go to "Filter Chain" and "Filter List", then add "Deinterlace". Once added klik on it and set to "Blend fields" and on the field order set "Keep Top Field" After that go back to "Filter Chain and check "Enable".

6. Then go to file and choose "set capture file". This is where you will name your video clip you will be capping. After that you can go to "Capture" and klik "Capture Video" when you are ready to start, and when you are done klik "Stop Capture".

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sony Vegas:
To help prevent the interpolation blur mess from happening in your gameplay video you can go to "File", select "Properties", set "Full-resolution rendering quality" to best, then set "Deinterlace method" to none (make sure you had something else do the deinterlacing to the video clips prior at capping). Choose what ever you want to render as, but what I choose is Windows Media Video V11 @ 6Mbps HD 720-30p.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------


Last video I am submitting. I could probably tinker around with some better deinterlacing methods a tad more but not worth the time given what I got is already perfectly fine for general viewing (and that some methods can add extremely long times to the rendering process, not worth it for gameplay videos). This is the end result of the above settings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvh3G8BA19g&feature=youtu.be

preview pics from the video:










Extra thanks to Eric/Quoth09, who suggested VirtualDub, etc, and for being an all-round knowledge pool concerning this stuff.

[mackdanger]

I simply feed the RGB directly into my SC-512N1-L/DVI and record as I previously stated.  If you already have an XRGB you can use that for an even better HD result.  The SC-512N1-L/DVI is NOT cheap, but the results are quite satisfying.  This was my first attempt, and I'm quite pleased with the results.  The original raw 60fps capture is astounding.

Micomsoft really likes the 40k yen price point don't they? Just curious, where did you buy your card at? I actually managed to pick my XRGB-Mini up at Yodobashi. I thought I would have to order it. I am going to check Micomsoft's site and read up on it. I may ask you some more questions about it.

I bought mine from Micomsoft direct.  As I wanted the XSync-1 as well, and they were having a special holiday sale on the bundle set at the time.  I live in Japan, so no proxies for me.  If you plan to use the XRGB, you really don't need the XSync though.

Yeah, when I said I got mine from Yodobashi, I mean I got on the train and went to Yodobashi.  O:) I am in south Tokyo. Where you at?
Also, Do you have a raw, unedited file you recorded with that card
handy? If you do, and you aren't too busy, I was wondering if you would check something. On the other page I linked a program called Media Info. If you have some spare time, would you mind running a media info scan on a raw clip you recorded with that card and paste the results here? That would tell me a lot of useful info about the kind of clips that card spits out.It's not urgent or anything. I'm just curious about the output. You can get the Media Info program here: https://mediaarea.net/en/MediaInfo

The default basic view doesn't show very much info. So after you run it on a clip, select "view" and then "text" mode to get all the info. If you could paste that text info in a post that would be cool. Again, if you don't have time, don't sweat it.

Professor, thank you for all of the helpful detailed info about VirtualDub. I am going to archive all of that for use in my testing.

[esteban]

Extra thanks to Eric/Quoth09, who suggested VirtualDub, etc, and for being an all-round knowledge pool concerning this stuff.

Say "Hi!" To Quoth09 for me—he was very generous helping me with CD+G stuff many years ago.

[SuperDeadite]

I live in Shiga myself.  And done.  If you are wondering, the 720x240 is how the card captures raw 240p RGB.  You then have to run it through virtual dub to upscale and correct the aspect.  Though if you plan run the video through the Mini first, you dont have to do that.

General
Complete name                            : D:\Youtube\Captures\amarec(20140516-2337).avi
Format                                   : AVI
Format/Info                              : Audio Video Interleave
File size                                : 11.9 GiB
Duration                                 : 21mn 40s
Overall bit rate                         : 78.6 Mbps

Video
ID                                       : 0
Format                                   : Lagarith
Codec ID                                 : LAGS
Duration                                 : 21mn 40s
Bit rate                                 : 74.0 Mbps
Width                                    : 720 pixels
Height                                   : 240 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 3.000
Frame rate                               : 59.940 fps
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 7.144
Stream size                              : 11.2 GiB (94%)

Audio
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : PCM
Format settings, Endianness              : Little
Format settings, Sign                    : Signed
Codec ID                                 : 1
Duration                                 : 21mn 40s
Bit rate mode                            : Constant
Bit rate                                 : 1 536 Kbps
Channel(s)                               : 2 channels
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 KHz
Bit depth                                : 16 bits
Stream size                              : 238 MiB (2%)
Alignment                                : Aligned on interleaves

[mackdanger]

Oh wow, you are way down there by Kyoto huh. Thanks for running Media Info and pasting that info. For some reason your info dump didn't display all the frame rate data. I was mostly looking to see if it was constant or variable. It could be that different file types display different data. Here is a portion of the data from one of my MP4 clips:

Frame rate mode                          : Variable
Frame rate                               : 59.940 fps
Original frame rate                      : 60.000 fps
Minimum frame rate                       : 40.000 fps
Maximum frame rate                       : 60.000 fps

Anyway, that info helped a lot so thanks for posting it.

[mackdanger]

I did some more messing around with Media Info and found something interesting. I uploaded a test clip yesterday of Crossed Swords for the MVS. I then went and downloaded that same clip from YT using the download MP4 link from inside my YT account. I didn't use any external website or downloader. I then ran Media Info on the source clip, the clip I downloaded from YT, and then compared them. Now, I knew I would see some differences. For one thing, the source is about 2GB whereas the clip I downloaded from YT is only 128MB. But here is the interesting part. This is a readout of the frame rate data from the source clip:

Frame rate mode                          : Variable
Frame rate                               : 59.725 fps
Original frame rate                      : 60.000 fps
Minimum frame rate                       : 40.000 fps
Maximum frame rate                       : 60.000 fps

So the uploaded clip is a variable frame rate 60fps video. Here is the readout from the clip I downloaded from YouTube:

Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 30.000 fps

It appears that YT took my variable frame rate 60fps clip, and smashed it down into a constant rate 30fps clip. However, if you watch the clip on YT and check the resolution it says 720p/60. If you will recall from one of my earlier posts, a lot of the most popular capture software from AverMedia, X-Split, Shadow Play, and even the older ElGato stuff spits out variable frame rate clips. So unless there is something I am missing I am thinking that there are a lot of people out there uploading variable frame rate 60fps clips, YT is making them constant frame rate 30fps, but is still saying that they are 60fps. Am I off here? Is this something well known?

[SuperDeadite]

As far as I know, youtube only does 30fps....

[_joshuaTurbo]

This is a very educational thread!

Thank you to all that have submitted ideas/advice. 

[Necromancer]

As far as I know, youtube only does 30fps....

60fps is now an option, but only on Chrome so far.

[mackdanger]

As far as I know, youtube only does 30fps....

60fps is now an option, but only on Chrome so far.

I forgot to mention I am also using Chrome. I wouldn't think anything of this were it not for the fact that if I watch the video on YT it says 720p60, but it appears to be playing a 30fps clip. This could be for a number of reasons. I have another little something I want to try and I will report the results later.

[mackdanger]

Okay. I know that my (and a lot of other companies') software spits out VFR 60fps clips. So I decided to set my capture software to 30fps and see what kind of clips that would make. Here is the result:

 Frame rate mode                          : Variable
Frame rate                               : 29.970 fps
Original frame rate                      : 30.000 fps
Minimum frame rate                       : 20.000 fps
Maximum frame rate                       : 30.000 fps

At this point, I was very curious to see what YT would do with it. How much would it lower the overall frame rate to make it constant. I uploaded the clip to YT and downloaded it from the video manager and:

Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 30.000 fps

I am going to be honest. This is not what I expected to see. With the variable frame rate 60fps clips, the frame rate fluctuated between 59.94 and 40.00. So YT needed to squash it down to 30fps to make it constant. I get that. So for the VFR 30fps clip that fluctuated between 20 and 30 fps, I expected YT to squash it down even further to be able to make it constant. Instead, it appears to have added frames to bring the lower fps parts up to 30. Is that even possible? I mean, what would you add in the place of missing frames? Anybody got any ideas?