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Need help with settings for Fast Forward Recordings

edited October 2008 in General Discussion
Hello, to all CamStudio forum members, I’m a new user and still trying to figure out CamStudio, I want to record a progress drawing on MS Paint. It will eventually be posted on youtube. I have a lot of questions, and need your advice to make this little project possible. I’ve experimented a lot but I was headed in the wrong direction from the beginning.

In total there will be about 3 hours of recording, which will have to be compressed and fast forwarded to youtube’s 10 minutes and 100mb upload limit, and a suggested 640 x 480 size, and of course I want it to play as clearly as possible, since most of what will be showed on the screen is already pixilated, every fade and glitch is even more noticeable.

Unfortunately I have to record with a fixed region of 1024 x 768, a smaller region with Autopan makes the clip really annoying and hard to follow after I fast forward it in Windows Movie Maker. There won't be alot of things moving on the screen just the cursor, so it doesn't have to smooth, just as clear as possible.

What settings should I use for Key Frames and etc. for this type of screen recording? Any suggestions would be helpful, Thanks

Comments

  • It's not too hard to calculate the required framerate for recording, at a given playback rate:

    Say, for instance, that you wan't to make a three hour session into a five minute video with a framerate of 25 fps.

    - The amount of frames in the finished video will be 5 x 60 x 25 = 7500 frames. (5 minutes, 60 seconds to the minute, 25 frames to the second)
    - Three hours is 60 x 60 x 3 = 10800 seconds.

    So you want to record 10800 seconds of "real time" to 7500 frames of video. That will require you to record a frame every 10800/7500 = 1,44 seconds = 1440 milliseconds.

    Now you have your recording settings for Camstudio (except keyframe rate, that is): Set "Capture frames every" to 1440, and the "Playback rate" to 25 fps. If you record for three hours, the video will become five minutes long.


    Of course, I don't expect you to plan the exact length of the session beforehand, just make an estimate, and leave a little room for error. Also, this was just an example, by using the same method, you can find out what settings is needed for other playback rates/recording times. As for the keyframe rate, I really don't know what is recommended.

    A couple of additional notes:

    - If you want to use Movie Makers fast forwarding, the recording can be twice as long, as WMM doubles the speed of the video. However, while I've never done a speed painting or anything similar, I'd guess that you might as well record so the video becomes shorter than 10 minutes, and not speed up the video. It adds up to the same thing, I think.

    - Codec: A lossless codec like the MSU SCLC or the Camstudio Codec should work fine for recording.

    - Compressing the video with another program than WMM, like Virtualdub, could perhaps give better quality. But if you need to add text to the video at any point, WMM will do fine.

    Vdub cannot add text, but it can resize (Video --> Filters --> Add --> resize), add music (Audio --> Wav Audio, the file needs to be a Wav file) and cut away sections (mark in and out points of the section you want to delete with the Home and End keys on your keyboard, hit delete to remove). A short description of how to compress video can be found here: http://camstudio.org/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=77&page=1#Item_3

    Whether or not it's worth it, using Virtualdub, I can't say, as I don't really know what quality you get with WMM.
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