trying to make game videos

alidan

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most of it is still test render,
seeing the difference between uncompressed lossless video and a pass through handbreak

and i am haveing a problem

im useing sony vegas 11 as my editing program, i know it can use the gpu, but i have no idea how much that effects it.

see i have 6 minutes of 1080p video
it takes almost 24 minutes to render out (discounting the errors which forced me to render it 5 times trying to fix)
if i move that 6 minutes to 720p (still 1080, but rendered out to 720)
it takes 10-14 minutes

if i just go with the cpu only it takes about 18 minutes.

i have to ask, is it really useing my gpu (5770 1gb)
would a better gpu render things out faster?
is there any kind of calculator i can use to try and balance cost benefit?

on steam i was told to try vdub... my problems are these, and almost a direct copy from the steam thread

"does it use a gpu to make rendering faster
will it use all my cores
is there a way to make the user interface better? what i really like about vegas is that i drag my files to it, i cant see all of the videos i drag there, and editing them is just as easy, while vdub... i have no idea if i can even composit 3 videos together and mix several audio tracks, i record in in a compressed lossless format, and i record dual audio tracks, one of me on a mic, and one with game audio only, and if i have to i cut my audio and replace it with something i record later on

from what i can tell, it only uses the cpu, but that said, i am able to use the h.264xfw codec for output and even rendering 1080p, it outputs it at almost as fast as it can play... i may have to really look into vdub, but like i said, i need more out of it than it is currently showing me it can do."

the videos i am editing are either dual audio through handbrake, or dual audio from dxtory using the Lagarith Lossless Video Codec

any help is appreciated.
 

thor220

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FYI you can find out how much of your GPU is being used by opening the Catalyst control center. (Double click on the icon in your system tray, looks like an atom)

Go to Performance > AMD Overdrive

Sony Vegas is able to use your gpu to increase rendering speed. It's even better that you have an amd card as Vegas can utilize OpenCL. Just make sure you have hardware acceleration enabled in the program options.

Sony vegas should use all your CPU cores, it's heavily multi-threaded. You could stand to decrease rendering time by getting a more powerful graphics card but your CPU has to be able to feed your gpu will performing tasks for the rendering.

EDIT **

Your video card has a different impact on speed depending on which codec you are using.

Here is an article on the software's GPU Acceleration:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/GPU_power_in_Vegas_Pro_11
 

alidan

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ok, an update of sorts,

i am asking this on gametrailers and on steam, over on steam, i got this response.

"Try Virtual Dub. It's an amazing piece of software for video editing, and regularly updated."

beyond that they said nothing more but rtfm and no response sense. so curious, i went over to vdum and screwed around a bit with it...
untill now i only really used it as a gif viewer... so i could look at the specific frames of gifs...

so im useing it, with a 1080p video, 1 minute of me playing the first level of brutal doom.
and for fun, i have a fan on in the background so i can also use audacity.
see i was racing if i could do what i need to in vdub faster than i can in vegas.

here is a bit of a dump of what i did.

*****************************
ok here is a test

vegas, just the audio levels are dealt with because there is no in program noise filter that works decently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnGD9jI8mvc

vdub, after 7 renders of me trying to get the audio to sync and finally figuring out the problem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLakxJ3ZBLw

ok lets go from start

vegas is a ♥♥♥♥ ton faster and easier to use, hands down, gives better visual feedback of whats going on without forcing me to render to see it.
on the render side, it took 3 minutes for 1 minute of video
horrifically ghosted the video
and to top it off, decided "i know how you have the video settings, but here me out, look, darker, you like it?" which would require me to go into the filter setting and un do the moronic crap it does.

vdub on the other hand
gives no visual feedback, so it is a pain to use, forces to render to see decisions i make, i dont know how to resize it to 720p to make the rendering faster yet,

but it is easy to strip the audio, move it to audacity, mix it in audacity, add a noise filter to get a fan i have on high out, completely, then output that as a wav and input it to the video, and after i fixed the problem with syncing, started rendering at 24fps... than it went to 18, slowly down to 8, and ended around 7... so rendering will take longer with it...

the only real problem i have with vdub is that its not a video editor... at least not the same way that vegas is...

there any video editors like vegas that use vdub as its backbone?

***********************************

so vdub is slower, and i can't use it for everything i want to do, but in all honesty i'm thinking of recording for 30 minutes to an hour at a time, and in the summer, i will have a fan on in the window trying to cool my room down, so i will have to strip audio almost no matter what. at least for the first pass when doing the editing, vdub is a better choice to split files. the problem comes in a bit later on when i want to go through an hour and instead of cutting it into 10-15 minute chunks, i want to take that whole hour and condense it down to the best of the best for that hour, or after i finish a game and have 4-80 hours of video, cutting that for a review.

now. on a side note. i dont use the mainconcept avc as that refuses to use the gpu and render
however, i now use the sony avc, and well... i found out it also is not using the gpu to render, it just doesn't refuse to even render it like mainconcept does.
so apparently something is broke and im not sure how to fix it...
 

alidan

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ok, small update, i was about to call myself a complete moron because i relized i may not have opencl installed or something, so i got a opencl benchmark... at least to my understanding

luxmark

im using a 5770 1gb
i get a whole 425 points on it... and with my cpu and gpu, i get a whole 426 on it, i guessing its pathetic.
not sure what i should expect if i get my gpu to work with vegas
 

thor220

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That's a pretty low OpenCL score. . .

On your question about vdub:

as far a I know, there are no other editing progrmas that use it as a backbone BUT it does have plugins. Maybe if you look around you can find a plugin that will fit your needs. Hope this helped!
 

alidan

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ok, after a bit more screwing around in vegas, i managed to get the gpu to work with it... granted only at 30%... yea...
that 30% however put the render time for the 1080p file from 3 minutes to 1 minute... which is more than acceptable... granted rendering it at 720p is also 1 minute which is annoying... i can't get it to render faster than 1080p but whatever...

my next problem i have to tackle is darkness.

this here is the vdub version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLakxJ3ZBLw

this is the vegas version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8wKno_izbQ

and this problem i have no idea what to do... i dont want to have to go into vfx if i don't have to.

and yea, that luxmark score sounds really really bad, though i have no idea on what scale, because the only thing comparable is that they have an i7 picture and a gpu that is better than mine to show off, and they get 10000 or something like that...
 

alidan

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did a bit more looking after i looked at the tutorial

apparently vegas uses a lower internal gamma setting
after a test video, i determined that its about 1.35 on the gamma to make it about normal.
 

alidan

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i have learned over the years, my on and off trials with doing something with video, that nothing is as easy as it should be.

want to record videogame footage, well... you better have a spate 1.5gb a minute (even worse with fraps)
you want it smaller, good luck getting any program to accept it (h264vfw, it can take 1280x720 at 30fps and make it about 30mb per minute, but no editing program will accept that format)
so you finaly got that to work... well
now lets throw a mic not always working (mic is 100% fine, it just stops working every now and than, a software problem, not hardware) and to top that off, if you record when its not working, it will not tell you it failed, and just for a final kick to the teeth, the moment it stops, it crashes whatever program you use.

these final problems with vegas were the end of a very long line of annoyances i came across...

untill i want to pull footage from consoles, i'm hoping that i am done with worrying about this stuff.
 

alidan

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oh no its not that hd video eats space, its that any codec that compresses it well is not useable in video editors, and i have tried everyone i could get my hands on. not one of them would accept h264vfw, a codec that uses a fair amount of cpu but outputs a really small file size, i could have recorded an entire 80+ hour game and never had to worry about space.

as it stands with vegas, im useing a codec that gets me 1080p 30fps at about 1.5gb a minute give or take.
the good thing is, i can run that video through handbreak and get that 1.5gb file down to little over 100mb, im hoping to get a 2tb drive dedicated to capture, if not a 4tb drive, and because its only for the raw capture, and not storage, i can get the crappier cheap drives.

with that said, anyone know if i can automate the process of making videos?
i want to capture lets say 8 hours of video, i want to split said video into 10-15 minute chunks, is there a way i can flag an area of the video to render it out to that point, than make a new video and do the same... it would be nice to be able to do this while i sleep, seeing as i don't have a render/work computer and this is all happening on a personal use computer.