Spring RTS Engine

Hi!

Can you recommend a Codec that has good real-time performance even in higher resolutions and doesn't produce extremely big files (like 20 MB/sec) and especially has serious "cutting capacities". The reason behind this is recording videos in Spring. I used DIVX for this until now at high bitrates. This was ok as it produced pretty small files with high quality but cutting this is just horrible as things like "rewinding" and so on is just a pain in the ass...

So what codec could you recommend?

Xvid

I record spring stuff as raw uncompressed AVI, do all the editing etc then encode with Xvid

Thanks but I was looking for a codec to record in the first place. Doing uncompressed stuff might get a bit big as I tend to record at 1280x1024. That leaves the option to do some high-res stuff if you want and also makes the cursor way smaller when downcaling (Or is there a way to hide the cursor?). DIVX was pretty good on that job and I preferred it over XVID as I could only go up to 10.000 kbits/s while DIVX gives you more. But just as XVID it's just a pain when you go ahead and cut stuff because skipping between different positions (especially backwards) takes ages and really was annoying when doing the first EXTA trailer...

That's what I want to prevent for the 2nd one...

I normally use a constant bitrate of 1800 kbps and usually crop my video. Cropping has the advantage that it doesn't reduce the quality at all, unless you really need all of it which I never do. Video quality is pretty decent while the filesize stays rather low.

You could try using mplayer's mencoder and encode it as x264 though. Quality is superb, but I don't have any experience with it yet nor do I know how well it compresses or what the bitrate is (guess it's pretty high).

For all who are interested in this:
MJPEG is a good solution though I'm still playing a bit with the On2 VP7 and ffdshow settings in order to look if you can force a nice keyframe rate that makes editing a charm with those codecs too...

The general consensus is, xvid is the best for medium quality, medium resolution, h.264 is the best for high quality, high resolution. H264 takes longer to encode and I think it takes more resources to run as well, but it is capable of excellent quality at surprisingly low filesize.

Maybe once again:
This is not about which codec gives you the best quality / filesize but which codec produces files you can edit without huge disadvantages. This is where MJPEG for example is wonderful as each frame is more or less just a JPEG picture and so each frame is a keyframe which makes skipping through different video positions just wonderful in contrast to all those MPEG4 & Co videos where this task takes up hell of a time as those formats are made primarily for playback and not editing...

You of course get bigger files when you want to have the same quality for your MJPEG videos in comparison to those other codecs...

You could of course edit the raw video file and then encode it if diskspace allows for it.

rattle wrote:You could of course edit the raw video file and then encode it if diskspace allows for it.

You have any idea how much space a 1280x1024 @ 30fps raw video consumes?

With that editing would probably slow down because of the hard drive dying down...

[Krogoth86] wrote:

rattle wrote:You could of course edit the raw video file and then encode it if diskspace allows for it.

You have any idea how much space a 1280x1024 @ 30fps raw video consumes?

With that editing would probably slow down because of the hard drive dying down...

Its what i do..