Fraps recorded footage to DVD or BLURAY?

[Rioitz]

Hi there,

I have been recording cutscenes from a PC game, in what I originally thought was the highest avalible settings with my monitor/settings for the game. This resulted in some huge raw .AVI files of 3.72GB per 1 minute and 40 seconds of footage. The footage has an aspect ratio of 1920x1200 which is 16:10? I believe.

Now my problem is, I have been trying to edit all these cutscenes into a plausable video to be placed onto a DVD, or, if it requires it, Blueray, due to the sheer size (I want to lose as little quality as possible, yet still retain playback on standalone players). When re-encoded for DVD it causes the text shown in the video to become heavily blurred, and in some experiments trying to find the right settings, unreadable.

Is this down to the aspect ratio it was recorded in? If so, should I re-record the footage and start over? Or is it possible to have that kind of aspect ratio scaled down to fit a DVD or Blueray and still retain a fairly high standard.

Any help and input would be appreciated, and I apologize if this is in the wrong section.

Thanks,

Rio

[Baldrick]

You can keep the source aspect ratio if you add black borders or crop. BUT DVD is not that good for small text, 720x576 is a kinda low resolution.

Have you tried convert to blu-ray 1920x1080?

[poisondeathray]

The biggest reason for blurry text is standard DVD is limited standard definition 720x576 (in PAL land)

You will improve it slightly by recording 1920x1080, but the DVD will still be blurry

Currently the AR is 1.6 because 1920/1200 with square pixels = 1.6

For a 16:9 DVD your active image area is about 640x576 (40 pixels on each L + R side for letterboxing to preserve the 1.6 AR) . If you used 16/9 AR (1920x1080), your active image area would be 704x576 (8 pixels on each side).

For blu-ray, you lose a bit by using 1.6 AR, because the active image area will be 1728x1080 (you lose 96 pixels for letterboxing on each side to preserve AR), but if you used 1920x1080 it would be 1:1 no borders

Both formats lose some quality from colorspace conversion and chroma subsampling (Your videogame is 4:4:4 RGB - i.e. not subsampled, but blu-ray and DVD are YV12 or 4:2:0 , there is much less color data)

The blu-ray should be much sharper than the DVD version

[Rioitz]

Thanks for the swift responses, I will try encoding with 1920x1080 and see what that brings me. Ideally with fairly high quality for Blueray what kind of length of video would be plausable on a single disc?

Thanks again,

Rio

[poisondeathray]

Ideally with fairly high quality for Blueray what kind of length of video would be plausable on a single disc?

You're limited by blu-ray compatibility specs , before physical capacity of the BD25 or BD50 media

Maxrate is 40Mb/s for blu-ray video

Filesize = bitrate x running time

You can use a bitrate calculator before you author - there is overhead for transport streams, factor in audio, menus etc...

A free, easy to use program is multiavchd which will encode & author for you

[Rioitz]

Hmm, I tried re-encoding the footage to 1920x1080 and it still came out pretty fuzzy, I tryed re-recording some brief footage from the game to play with at 1920x1080, without re-encoding it to see if that made a difference, yet even with using H.264 Blueray codec the text still remained greatly blurred. Could the codecs I am using play a part in this? I have tried various formats, and I believe the best result was gained through converting to Quicktime. As you can probably tell, encoding isn't one of my strong forte in editing, unfortunatly it plays a huge part in it.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks

Rio

[poisondeathray]

How did you encode it? what software ? what settings ? what bitrate ? progressive or interlaced ?

Quicktime is probably the worst in terms of quality

Remember there is subsampling going on, so colored text borders will never look as sharp as the 4:4:4 RGB fraps footage, on top of that there is lossy compression as well - but it shouldn't be "fuzzy" . Maybe you could post a screenshot of before/after to illustrate ?

[Rioitz]

The upper picture is the raw fraps footage, beneath was encoded in Adobe Premiere H.264 Blu-ray



(settings for the lower image)

Output: NTSC, 1920x1080, 29.97 FPS Upper Dolby Digital, 192 kbps, 48 kHz VBR, 1 pass, Target 25.00, Max 30.00 Mbps

Source: Clip, Proxy Sequence 1920x1080 (1.0), 29.97 fps, Progressive

Hope this helps some

[poisondeathray]

It looks like Adobe is interpreting the footage as interlaced . Either you didn't set it up correctly, or your playback software is deinterlacing it

Try multiavchd

What FPS is your fraps footage in ? You're in the UK correct ?

[aedipuss]

1080 output for blu-ray is interlaced at 30fps. any lettering will always look crappy as they are written to the screen in pieces. if you are concerned about text, i would try 1280x720 60p for blu-ray.

[Rioitz]

The fraps was set to record in 29.97 which I know is NTSC, I wasn't sure if it would make such an impact on it, does this mean I should generally record only in UK standard? 25 FPS?

I will try out 1280x720 60p too to see if that makes a difference too, thanks again for the help guys.

[poisondeathray]

Technically there isn't a UK standard for blu-ray , the only native progressive settings are 23.976 (24000/1001) , or 24.0p . 25p strictly speaking isn't legal, neither is 30p

You can make a fake interlaced 25p or 30p blu-ray . This is 25p wrapped into a 50i stream , or 30p wrapped into a 60i stream. The problem is some players will still deinterlace the stream (because the signal appears as 50i or 60i) - depending on how they handle it, it can still deteriorate the stream compared to native progressive. The best option for progressive is always native progressive which only leaves you 24p or 23.976p

Euro spec blu-ray players handle 50i, not 60i , similarly you would make 1280x720p50 not 1280x720p60 .

Since you're in the UK, I would set fraps to record multiples of 25 for actual gameplay (so 50, 75, 100, 125 - so you can do slo-motion seqeuences if you were editing) - ideally you would record at least 50, so you could do proper 1280x720p50 (25 fps will either have blended frames or duplicate frames to fill in the extra frames)

I have been recording cutscenes from a PC

If this is only for cinematic cutscenes, record in multiples of 24, so you can use 1080p24 Native. The slower framerate might appear choppy during playback for gameplay, but for the cutscenes it should look fine

[Rioitz]

The footage recorded in 1280x720 looks alot better on the text, the only downfall is, the text box now takes up half of the screen. I don't suppose there is a happy medium where the text is big enough not to get corrupted, yet not so big that it takes out half of the action from the cutscene?

Sorry to be a pain, thanks.

[poisondeathray]

See above, I edited my message. Record at 1920x1080p24, and you can keep the full resolution and native progressive . This setting might be too choppy for intense gameplay, but for a cutscene it should be ok

On a blu-ray player, your 1280x720 footage should be upscaled to 1920x1080 display. If you're viewing it on a PC, then it will display as 1280x720