Tech Support Fort - Questions, Comments and Codecs (READ THE OP!)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Tech Support Fort - Questions, Comments and Codecs (READ THE OP!)

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

Okay, I use Xsplit (I know it says not to, sue me, I did it before I read anything and I'm used to it) and have been currently using this method:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLFXr4ub55I

To seperate out the sound from my partner on Discord and my recording. This is good enough, but it means my own voice is tied in with the game audio. What's the best method to set things up such that the game audio is recorded with the video be seperately from my own voice?

# ¿ Apr 12, 2017 23:40

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 07:48

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

More weird tech stuff (I managed to isolate my own audio, so yay).

I've been trying to encode an episode of my LP using premiere pro, frameserver and MEGUI. It's been absolutely fine and has worked for two sequences on the current project I have up. For the third sequence, I start up frameserver, point MEGUI at it and things are fine until it hits around 67% at which point it just stops encoding. MEGUI appears to still be running fine as I can abort if I want to, but it stops encoding extra frames and will just stay at that point forever.

I'm at a loss as to what's wrong. It's not a huge deal as I can probably just export the sequence to a new project and encode again, or at worst just remake the sequence, but I'd like to at least try to understand what's going on.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2017 10:38

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

So I just updated my setup for my new computer.

I use the Premiere Pro/Frameserver method with MeGUI to encode my videos.

All's well until I load up MeGUI and try to load the Avisynth Script I wrote up:

code:

DirectShowSource("Sequence1.avi")
ConvertToYV12()

At which point MeGUI gives me the error:

code:

Script Error: There is no function named "DirectShowSource". (D:....../Avisnyth Script.avs, line 1)

As far as I can tell my setup is exactly the same as it was on my old computer so the error message is mystifying.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2018 17:36

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

Admiral H. Curtiss posted:

Unless you have a particular reason for it, just use AviSource instead of DirectShowSource. DirectShowSource is kinda terrible.

Only reason is because the guide on the OP told me to! Thanks for the help.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2018 23:17

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

The whole pre-editing part of that is some bizarre mystery to me since as far as I can tell I just do all of those changes in Premiere. What's the difference and why would you bother doing this outside of your usual editor?

I suppose the only time it would have been relevant is my SotN LP where I just scaled the thing by 1.17 after recording in Retroarch.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2019 00:58

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

Hey, so I'm trying to get Sonic Generations recording with OBS, when I do I get this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM_qlPbFayE

As you can see the image quality is goddamn horrible and I'm nowhere near smart enough to know why.

These are my video recording settings for reference.

I've enough power on this computer to do basically whatever, so any advice on what to change would be helpful.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2019 22:45

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

zfleeman posted:

Your resolution is really high at a really low bitrate for recording. Keep your encoder at 'veryfast' and up the bitrate to... 20000? 15000? I'm not sure what will look good at that resolution, but I do 20000 bitrate at 1080p for x264. Consider rescaling to 1080p.

25000 bitrate and rescaling to 1080p works like a dream. Thanks.

I have literally no concept of what bitrate does or anything so I just used the default for ages.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2019 23:08

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

Nidoking posted:

Quick and dirty explainer time!

A "bit" is a binary digit, a 0 or a 1. It's handy for storing information in an electronic medium because you can represent the values with "on" and "off" in a circuit, but a single bit can only store one of two values. To store complex stuff like meaningful numbers, documents, pictures, or videos, you need to combine multiple bits into a single value. Two bits can represent four values: 00, 01, 10, and 11. The number of values increases exponentially with the number of bits used - 8 bits can store 256 distinct values, 32 bits gets you into the billions, and 64 bits cover more than the expected number of seconds in the lifespan of the universe.

Of course, the bits alone are pretty meaningless until you assign some significance to them. Obviously, each pattern of bits is a binary representation of a number (and you can encode negative numbers in a variety of ways), but then you have encodings like ASCII or Unicode that assign each numerical value a character or symbol, so that you can turn text into bits. Graphical data, for the most part, is split into pixels, and each pixel will be represented by a number to indicate its color. There are lots of ways to do that, but I'm going to stick with RGB24, which assigns 24 bits to each pixel - 8 bits for the amount of red, 8 bits for the green, and 8 bits for the blue. A graphic file will also have a header to describe features of the image such as its dimensions, so that the graphics driver can assemble the pixels correctly into the image.

Video data, setting aside the audio portion, is a series of images, plus information like frame rate, dimensions, which color scheme it's encoded in, and so on. The video portion of the file is a gigantic string of bits that are split up into frames, each of which is a string of pixels, each of which is a string of bits. You really get to appreciate the power of graphics processors when you consider how rapidly they can read such a file and convert it into the video you see on your screen. But just how many bits are there in a video? Let's say it's a 1920x1080 video with RGB24 pixels and 30 frames per second. Without compression, that's 1920x1080x24x30 bits per second, or 1,492,992,000 bits per second.

Fortunately, video encoders do things like store only part of some frames, or combine two pixels into fewer bits, to cut down on the size needed to store the video. But there's only so much you can decrease the size of a file before you start to lose some of the data. The fewer bits you have available, the fewer distinct files you can possibly store. Try to reduce the size too much, and the encoder can't possibly keep all of the detail in each frame. However, encoders have algorithms that try to determine, based on the content of the frames, which data will be least harmful to lose in representing the video. Pixels that don't change for a long time, or change to values that are very close to the previous values, won't affect the final product as much if they're skipped over for a frame or two, while if the whole image is changing rapidly, it's going to take a lot of bits to keep up. So going a bit below the minimum for lossless encoding might not be noticeable, but the fewer bits you make available, the worse the video will look. That's what the bit rate is - how many bits you make available per unit of video, usually seconds - and why it's important to how your videos look, as well as why different values are appropriate for different videos. But, as has been said, the more bits, the better it will look, until you hit the bit rate for uncompressed video.

Is the rate that you choose to use largely experimental then? What's to stop me setting the rate to the maximum possible and just not caring apart from filesize?

# ¿ Jun 13, 2019 00:26

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

Voicemeeter Banana and Virtual Audio cables will do the job on the software end super easy.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2021 12:11

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

Just a general question about using Adobe Premiere.

My process is OBS->Adobe Premiere for Editing->Frameserver->MegUi for encoding. I've done this for about five years or so.

Is this still considered best practice if you're using premiere?

For more context about why I'm questioning this:

I send from the Frameserver to MegUi using:

AviSource("Episode 03.avi")
ConvertToYV12()

Inside a .avs file which I manually edit before I encode. I can't imagine it is the most efficient way of getting things done.

Natural 20 fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Sep 27, 2023

# ¿ Sep 27, 2023 10:42

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 07:48

Natural 20: Sep 17, 2007; Wearer of Compasses. Slayer of Gods. Champion of the Colosseum. Heart of the Void.
Saviour of Hallownest.

IGgy IGsen posted:

There was a time when I still used premiere, when I did just that until I realized it's not really worth it for quality or filesize. And just directly encoded thevideo. So yeah, I'll just agree with the others.

In goon LP there's a lot of strange and outdated practices still making the rounds as best practices. And hey, if it works for you, then do whatever. But in this case, you can simply skip an unnecessary step. No real reason to do it

No, no, I'm happy to change. I just followed ye olde guides back in the day and never updated my process because what I had worked and if it worked for Nat five years ago then it works for Nat now goddamnit!

# ¿ Sep 27, 2023 15:37

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Tech Support Fort - Questions, Comments and Codecs (READ THE OP!)