Nexuiz Movie creation

[GreEn`mArine]

Well, since there have been some debates about the quality of movies, this is what I can provide as information.

I captured the first 20 seconds of the "demo1.dem" which is shipped with Nexuiz v2.0. As you might know, this scene provides really heaviest fast non-stop action!

I set the cl_capturevideo_fps value to "90", set the resolution to 1600x1200 and set 2xFSAA (at such a high resolution 2xAA should be really enough).

My final movie has these specifications: 800x800, 30 FPS.
So what I did was to import the 20 second clip (which consists of 1880 TGA files, about 20 GB in size) to my editing app, downscaled the scene to 50% (to get the 800x600 resolution) and set the clips speed to 300% and activated the blending of frames to make fast motion smoother. I speed it up to 300% because I had a 90 FPS clip, which means that it would have played at only 1/3 speed if put into a 30 FPS movie comp. however, when speeding it up to 300% it has 1:1 game speed again.

Beside this I did some gamma correction and color boosting. Then I exported the tga sequence to a 30 FPS 800x600 Huffyuv coded avi clip (lossless).

Then I compressed it with 3000 kbps first, but the result didn't look too good, so I decided to take 4000kbps which looks okay imo.

I compressed it with both x264 and Xvid. I optimized the codecs settings to be as good as I was able to set them up. I used Media Encoder to compress the clip with x264 (3-pass, and 128 kbps audio, stereo, encoder: lameMP3). As I was unable to compress it as Xvid using Media Encoder I did it the oldskool way with VirtualDub, 2-pass, anyway, I just had a 56 kbps mono 21khz mp3 codec there, so the xvid file is smaller in size.

You can download the two files and compare them. IMO the x264 version looks okay. However, what I wanted to proof is that 4000kbps is really the maximum you will need for superior video quality, beside this I consider 800x600 and 30 FPS "enough" for fluent play, too. Please note that this clip is extremely fast in motion and stresses the codecs a lot, which means that it is well possible that 3000-3500 kbps will suffice for a production movie as such movies don't have full speed all the time anyway.

Beside this I think that speeding the clip up by 300% is too much, since I think it makes it too blurry. I will only capture it with 2x of the target movie framerate instead of 3x to have it less blurry, but still fluent. I also think (but I can't prove that of course) that such a very blurry clip makes it even harder for the compressors to gain good and effective results, as you don't have any sharpness in the image anymore which is the advantage of these compressors. Anyway I consider x264 still suitable, even for such blurred clips

Enough said, here are the clips:
x264 version
xvid version

[C.Brutail]

Wow, you made my day. Seeing nexuiz in it's all pride FLUENTLY!

Still, motion blur is too much imho. But a very good way to show nexuiz.

I think this could get on the main site too! N1!

[GreEn`mArine]

I will re-record it with another FPS setting and also try another tool that merges the frames to see whether it makes any difference. The guys who encoded all the great Q3 movies such as Get Quaked 3 etc. used Vegas for frameblending, and I'll have to try that one too, already got Vegas 6 Demo

[Tei]

amazing. I will try to mirror the file and maybe pimp it

[GreEn`mArine]

actually you won't need to mirror it . It is gonna stay online for quite a long time ;D

Btw, I already recorded the same scene with 120 FPS. The reason is to simulate a real movie editors situation, when they want a clip in their editing app that is already slomo (0.5x speed) but already contains blended frames, too.
So what I did was to double the speed of the 120 FPS clip and let the frames blend using After Effects. When this clip was exported I had a 60 FPS clip which is already blended. I imported this clip again into my editing app and set it's speed to 200% again to get a real 1:1 game speed, however, I didn't apply frame blending anymore.

I am still figuring out the correct compression and the tools to use for that. Until now I tried it with Mencoder (mentioned above), and at the moment I am using and testing MeGUI (required M$ .NET Framework v2). I used and read all of the Shaolin Productions Tutorials which you should, too, if you're interested in this. They describe both the usage of MeGUI to compress a movie in very good quality using the x264 codec and the general way of getting the best quality and maintaining it before it comes to compression.

About this I found out that the result of making a clip 3x faster and activate frame-blending (which means that all the time 3 frames are blended together) looks very varying when using different tools for that. Using After Effects for it makes the clip very blurry, using Vegas lets the movie appear less blurry. And as far as I understood it (I am totally newb to Sony Vegas) you can even configure the kind of blending mode in Vegas, and it actually seems to be the suprioir application for that job. Note that the two clips I uploaded are done using After Effects and,as jus said, speeding the clip up to 3x speed.

The reason why I looked into the Shaolin Production Tutorials was that they manage it to release real good quality movies that only have about 2700 kpbs using x264 and MeGUI, However, my first compression test with it wasn't convincing (I was using 3000 kbps though). However, there are many factors why such movies, e.g. Get Quaked 3, are quite small: smaller dimension (720x576 instead of 800x600), less framerate (25 FPS instead of 30), probably better audio compression, and the fact that the movie doesn't contain the fastest motion all the time which my test clip does.

What is really interesting to read is the "On Quality" article on the Shaolin Productions page, as it clearly says what methods there are to increase movie-quality (before compressing it). Capturing with a high FPS and then blending the frames together has the disadvantage that it takes quite a lot of time to capture and also a lot of time for blending the frames together (doing that in After effects actually takes longer than capturing the scene itself!). The advantage is that you can provide a movie that plays fluently even at a low framerate (25, 30 FPS) which means that you get smaller filesize, but the disadvantage is that the image is always blurry in order to appear and play fluently. The only way to get a sharp image quality is to release (and capture) the FINAL movie with a higher FPS, such as 40 or 50 so that it plays fluently again. However, ths will increasefilesize a lot. Note that 25 FPS movies that are also captured at 25 FPS often play and appear to be choppy since the images' borders are always sharp, and if they move too fast due to fast movement in the game it doesn't appear smooth anymore.

[Tei]

actually you won't need to mirror it . It is gonna stay online quite a bit of time ;D

Well... I really need something like your video. Because I am tryiing to enhance the moddb profile for Nexuiz, thas has not much good stuff.

So.. I have uploaded your video there:
http://files.moddb.com/3178/download-in-game-video/

Is that OK?

[GreEn`mArine]

I don't have a problem with that