trouble getting true-colour capture

jez

Hi, camstudio seems very nice to use but I'm having one problem with the output.

One prominent element of my movie contains a black->grey gradient, which looks fine in 32-bit colour mode but looks very bad when the number of colours is reduced. So my screen is in 32-bit mode while capturing, and I want the captured content to be too. I'm happy to sacrifice bandwidth for perfect quality. In "Video settings" I've tried every available codec and have slid the quality slider up to max for all of them, but the avi always comes out with that particular image posterized down to a small number of grey-levels.

Am i missing something? I can see there's an explicit choice between colour modes for "video annotations" and also for avi->swf conversion, but I don't see anywhere I should tell it explicitly to preserve the video depth information in the captured avi itself. Even after downloading and selecting the camstudio "lossless" codec, I still get this apparently lossy result. Has anybody out there had similar problems, or can see what I'm doing wrong?

Many thanks, --jez

PS I'm using camstudio 2.00 on XP SP3 on a lenovo thinkpad x200s

jez

OK, I think I've got the solution/workaround. I had been recording in "Record to SWF" mode with "Delete the intermediate AVI file on completion" unchecked. My mistake was to assume that the AVI I obtained this way would respect all my codec settings---but apparently, for whatever reason, it doesn't: instead it seems to be using the Microsoft codec all the time. Instead, if I "Record to AVI" and then *separately* launch the SWF producer afterwards, I get a nice clean true-colour AVI using my chosen codec, and then a faithful SWF conversion of it (about 1/3 the size) which is what I wanted in the end. I guess it might not be a bug as such, but the different behaviour on these two paths certainly violates the principle of least surprise.