A Belgian country drive - rFactor 2 WIP video

It´s alive!!

Drying line feature seems to work nicely.

I cant wait to see some real wet weather footage with actual clouds,
getting a bit tired of that blue sky.
 
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Tim Wheatley said:
I see puddles on the video, those are where the main reflections are. It's a drying surface.

Anyway, anybody with video rendering knowledge want to help me sharpen things, do I really need to do two passes? :)
Click to expand...

I saw a few of the wetter spots under signs and such. Maybe there just isn't enough to reflect and show the wet spots compared to the dry.

As far as rendering it really won't matter when your uploading to YouTube. Your best bet is to Render it at 1280x720 (no resize) crank the H.264 bitrate to 5K and throw it up on mediafire for direct download. That is the only way to preserve finite detail. Some HR screens probably wouldn't hurt either.
 
Probably right. The output file does look a hell of a lot better than Youtube makes it look. I've begun to wonder if Youtube has issues converting from particular codecs.

I have rendered out to (MP4) H264 at 20k before and it just hasn't looked as good after upload. But that was output at 1920x1080 so perhaps I am spreading that 20k pretty thin...
 
What program are you using to render Tim? If it's Vegas Pro i use WMV and a bitrate of 6000 i think. Can't confirm though as i have literally just reformatted and don't have it installed. Think it's WMV 1080P something or another
 
Vegas Studio Platinum HD 10. I have Divx, Xvid, WMV, Sony AVC (H264), and I do have Quicktime Pro but only ever used that to render for TV before using the settings they told me. ;)

I'm kinda confused actually, I never had as many issues getting quality as I am at the moment. I think the main difference can only be that I keep trying to render to 1080 rather than 720. I'll definately try WMV right now as you're the second person to say that. :)
 
you should always render to the size you want to publish. I see no issue with outputting to WMV. I always run a few tests with multiple output sizes and bitrates of a 15 second clip before deciding on anything.

The Sony H264 probably isn't the best of the encoders options wise. I use Virtualdub for all my finish work and this H264 encoder. http://sourceforge.net/projects/x264vfw/files/
 
No don't use wmv, use mp4. the hd version on youtube gets converted to mp4 in the end anyway, why send it a bad quality wmv so it can create a bad quality mp4? may aswell send it a good quality mp4 to start with :)
 
WMV didn't seem to look any better on the output file, the fine detail seemed worse. Outputting to 1280x720 H264 now, we'll see if 1920x1080 was the issue all along...
 
I'm going to upload another test video, plus upload the original to a file sharing site so you can see the finer detail which Youtube might remove. Let me know what you think and I'll work on making a proper time lapse video if it's good. :)

I don't mind giving a little sneak peak to you guys for helping me. :)
 
This is quite annoying! So I re-rendered and in the original video you can clearly see the dry line and things look good, but Youtube turns it down a notch and makes it hard to see the dry line. Massive, massive difference. I think what I'm going to do is build a proper preview and make it downloadable, it's probably the only way to preserve the details Youtube doesn't.

The current software version I have shouldn't have many rain issues specifically, so I'll hope to put it out on Monday. Out of interest does anybody know about any other video sharing site we could try apart from Youtube? I know Vimeo doesn't (or isn;t supposed to) accept gaming video anymore.

Thanks for your help guys...
 
I know YouTube helps feed the masses but a drop in quality kind of offsets that. I'd be "down" for a download Tim.
 
I guess you already tried the "Upload to YouTube"-function in Vegas 10.0?
I rendered this movie with that function, but I have to admit it's not perfect. I also searched a while for another proper YouTube-render option but that was the best I came up with.

It's a real pity that such sophisticated movie editing software is let down by its poor render options. This clip I made has a better quality for example, but it's made with Cyberlink's PowerDirector.
 
Mee said:
I guess you already tried the "Upload to YouTube"-function in Vegas 10.0?
I rendered this movie with that function, but I have to admit it's not perfect. I also searched a while for another proper YouTube-render option but that was the best I came up with.

It's a real pity that such sophisticated movie editing software is let down by its poor render options. This clip I made has a much better quality for example, but it's made with Cyberlink's PowerDirector.
Click to expand...

Yeah it's also related to how much there is trackside I think. The more the frame changes the more KB you're going to use and I think so much gets used up that it's tough to get the texture quality on video. That video you uploaded looks great in the slow motion sections but the fast movement the track/trackside textures become a blurry mess. Spa might be a bad choice for video because of the trackside, a modern circuit has much less going on frame to frame and you should get more for your bitrate. I'm really not sure I can blame Sony Vegas. Each file I have output it's possible to really pick out the detail but you upload it to youtube and it all kind of merges together...
 
The issue is easily fixed, but your mind is pre-occupied elsewhere...

Thanks for posting up the wip, can't wait to get into it :)
 
The encoding pre-sets included with all compositing software are never as good as dedicated encoders. Even so, Vegas is probably the best AAA editing program that actually caters for suitable digital distribution first time. Rather than having to output a lossless video all the time.

From my short experience with youtube, I believe the best way to try reserve quality during the processing their end, is to try pack your video full of keyframes, or I-frames.

This is only really possible with the divx codec when you pack your video as an avi but personally I find myself using mp4 all the time now because avi doesn't provide the audio quality I need. and AAC > MP3.

So either you'll want to use MainConcept AVC/AAC (I think uses codecs found on your computer to encode)
Or Sony AVC (uses in-built encoder)

Both encoders use similar setup.

Set 1280x720 (Don't bother with 1080, it's really not worth it)
Allow source to adjust frame rate: Only to be used if source has a variable frame rate (e.g. a DVD)
Profile: High (Allows Vegas to use additional advanced settings that are invisible to the user, such as 8x8 Transform)
Entropy coding: CABAC (Better compression at fixed bitrate)
Frame rate: Depends on source (If you used fraps to capture at 30fps, then type in 30.000000 - don't allow the encoder to change the frame rate unnecessarily)
Progressive Scan
Square pixels (These two will always stay the same for PC playback)
Bitrate: You should be using around 5,000,000 if you're putting this on a site for download (otherwise give it 20,000,000 for Youtube)
Video rendering quality: Good/Best - adds a "telecine-like effect" to your video to smooth fast motion, the next frame is overlapped with the current frame. "Good" analyses the frame rate and blends a maximum of 1 extra frame, "Best" allows 2 extra frames to be blended together and analyses current frame with the previous and next frames.
Preview - Turns off this "telecine effect" and will reserve the full frames as they were originally captured. This will retain sharp details and texture under fast motion.

Again from experience, I found Sony AVC a better encoder overall with less blocking.

Best to use MPC-HC to preview your videos - there's no reason not to have this media player available on every computer imo.
 
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