Thread: Creating Movies
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Old 04-18-2003, 11:15 AM
tobin tobin is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Posts: 251
I just tried FRAPs (www.fraps.com) and after running a few tests, I must say it seems like an excellent tool for building movies of worlds. I did find that it didn't record well at 640x480 and that only after reducing Vizard's window size to 320x240 did it capture at a reliable and acceptable frame rate. Keep in mind 320x240 is about VHS/NTSC quality, so it's not much different than what you can achieve with low-cost video capture kits for a PC.

I recommend the following:

1) Use viz.go(viz.NICE) to automatically open a render window at 320x240 (4:3 aspect ratio).

2) Configure FRAPS to record at 25 Hz (or 30, but most AVI codecs looks fine at 25 so why not give the CPU a little extra breathing room).

3) Use F9 to toggle recoding on and off. Be sure to have lots of hard disk space because you'll use 115 Megs per minute of video. It's extremely easy to later recompress the AVI files using a fantastic free tool called VirtualDub (www.virtualdub.org).

4) Be sure to quit FRAPS when verifying your AVIs look right otherwise you might think the frame rate counter that shows up in Windows Media Player is part of your recoding (FRAPS displays a frame rate counter even in Window's Media Playe so it can be confusing, or at least it confused me at first).


Note about codecs & VirtualDub:
When recompressing your video, you should decide what codec you're going to use (codec is the compression algorithm used to shrink video files). The trick is finding one that's both good quality and compatible with computers you'll later use to play it on. My old favorite is Intel Indeo 5.1 but it unfortunately no longer comes free on XP (after service pack 1, that is), so it means you can't trust that folks with new machines can play such videos. As such, I mostly use MPEG1 now because every PC and Mac supports it. There's a good free AVI to MPEG1 or 2 converter called TMPGEnc (www.tmpgenc.net). For some reason, it doesn't seem to work with the output directly from FRAPS so one workaround is to re-save the AVI using VirtualDub (save as AVI without turning on any compression so that it's goes fast and doesn't lose any quality). Alternatively, I looked and found you can purchase a MPEG1 codec from Pegasus, Inc. for $30 (www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htm). Seems like there must be a freeware MPEG1 codec out there but I didn't find it yet.

Instead of going MPEG, a very good alternative within the AVI world is the DIVX codec. You can go to www.divx.com and get a freeware version of their codec that is superb. With it, you can use VirtualDub in one step to shrink your AVIs. The downside here is you need the codec to both compress and to play back later, which means if you intend for users/PCs to view this AVI they too will need to download the free version of DIVX.
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