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Why does no-one record straight to mp4?

Mario · 7 · 1700

Mario

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For my last video, I recorded straight to h264 / mp4 by changing one of the lawena configs and didn't see any noticeable difference in quality (maybe some people did? - keep in mind I didn't know about disabling resampling).

This meant I didn't have to waste time stitching together files in vdub and I didn't have to encode the video at the end (although you could if you wanted to). This probably saved me hours.

Also I didn't have to use like half a TB to store the TGAs and avis. Instead the whole project (10 min video, 1080p60fps) used maybe 2-3GB (including the final render and individual clips combined).

I don't really know anything about video editing so maybe I'm missing something? If not I can show people how to change lawena to do this (very easy).

If you want to see the quality I got the video is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tv_E8hGTVk

D/l without yt butchering quality (1.3GB):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/foa1ceok0hsmpdz/jumpmapcompilation.mp4?dl=0

Encoding the video drops the file size to 0.5GB and keeps similar quality:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0sr9xvn6wz44wvd/encodetest.mp4?dl=0


nolem

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Personally, hard drive space isn't an issue, so I generally am not concerned with how much space my recordings are taking up, but I can understand how this could be an issue for some.

I think it mostly comes down to trying to encode as few times as possible. While the quality doesn't go down a crazy amount when re-encoding it is still noticeable and generally something editors try to avoid, especially considering that youtube does its own encoding. Editors for RJWeekly generally don't encode until the very end simply because it's how to make videos look good without uploading raw AVIs.

Also, some people (all RJWeekly editors) use some form of frameblending where you're either left dealing with raw TGAs, PNGs, or an AVI, so you wouldn't even be able to encode at that stage even if you wanted to. There's been a tool released (https://github.com/AronParker/AviRecorder) that could theoretically encode straight to mp4, but if you're going through all this effort anyway there's not really good reason to sacrifice quality for file size.

Basically just comes down to whether you're willing to be dealing with massive files in order to get a better (albeit only slightly) result.


Dr. Heinz

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Also saw the avi recorder. Haven't had the chance to try its out yet. Seems promising.



Mario

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it mostly comes down to trying to encode as few times as possible
Both ways encode once though? My way encodes the clips individually at the start before editing them (I only included the 2nd encode link as an example - I didn't upload that to yt) whereas the traditional way encodes after rendering. Does the order matter?

Thanks for answering though :)

I might explain how to do this for people with less serious edits then - not sure why lawena doesn't offer this option in the first place.
« Last Edit: March 10, 2017, 02:02:22 PM by Mario »


?oss

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if you are going to edit your clips somehow it already implies encoding
you cant bypass encoding unless you render as lossless which will create a video of hundreds of GBs no matter how small ur source files were
also idk if it lets you to set up your bitrate manually because if it doesnt its not very good because depending on what textures a map has they can destroy your quality


nick

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what nolem said but also specifically what toss quoted nolem as saying