Posted: 2/1/2015 9:32 AM
Post subject: Steps required to become an encoder?
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TheCoreyBurton
He/Him
Joined: 10/14/2013
Posts: 335
Location: Australia
I'm a long time lurker, and although I haven't made too many posts this far I'm looking to become an encoder. You can skip this paragraph if you don't care about little details: I love watching videos here however my internet connection is poor at best. It's not bad when I'm uploading or downloading a few gb here and there, but if I'm going to be streaming hundreds of videos a month at 1080p or higher it gets to be a problem, so I've always had to download the input files and dump and encode them myself to watch them on my TV. I've had great success with many of the emulators here (the easier ones like Bizhawk, Snes9x, Fceux and the more frustrating ones like Mupen and Dolphin too). Given my situation, I'm thinking it'd be better for me to just attempt the more difficult encodes if I were able to, for instance I had the recent NSMB Wii run encoded in 1080p within two days of it being on the submissions list. I have little bits of trouble here and there with certain runs, particularly older ones, but it's still something. What I'm asking is, what does it take to become an encoder and how do I do so? I'd love to contribute here but I don't have the patience to make a TAS myself. If you want or need a sample of my work you're welcome to request it.
I'm not as active as I once was, but I can be reached here if I should be needed.
Posted: 2/1/2015 9:53 AM
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feos
Site Admin, Skilled player (1237)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11275
Location: RU
NES TAS of 2011
Hi. It all depends on what your connection allows you to do. The point of encoders is to send their encodes to Archive.org and YouTube, and while standard definition downloadables may be not too huge (100MB average?), youtube streams are around 1GB among most of the platforms, but may be quite a bit bigger, up to dozens of GBs. http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14327 If you can afford this, there are 2 kinds of roles you might take. There usually are submissions with no encode in the workbench, so the easiest job is to encode them and put somewhere on youtube, or mediafire, or mega. http://tasvideos.org/Guidelines.html#Feedback And finally, if you can do more, there is a job to make official encodes for publications, that is descried by the thread link I gave above.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Posted: 2/1/2015 10:32 AM
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TheCoreyBurton
He/Him
Joined: 10/14/2013
Posts: 335
Location: Australia
I just read over them now. Sounds to me like I'd probably be best off doing workbench encodes or HD streaming of the more difficult ones occasionally. I'm prepared to deal with large file sizes provided that it's infrequent, I know my Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door encode is around 20gb but I don't mind too much given that it's 5 or so hours of 1440x1080@60fps. I feel like it's worth it. Is the site accepting 60fps for the HD streams yet? I know it was on debate a little while ago but now that Youtube supports it, what's the stance? Thank you, by the way!
I'm not as active as I once was, but I can be reached here if I should be needed.
Posted: 2/1/2015 10:37 AM
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feos
Site Admin, Skilled player (1237)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11275
Location: RU
NES TAS of 2011
Sounds cool! How did you encode it? For workbench runs, it doesn't matter whether you use 60fps or not, since you host those encodes on your own channel. But I'm going to make an official announcement about moving to 60fps for publication encodes as well.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Posted: 2/1/2015 10:37 AM
(Edited: 2/1/2015 10:58 AM)
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AntyMew
It/Its
Encoder, Player (35)
Joined: 10/22/2014
Posts: 425
thecoreyburton wrote:
1440x1080@60fps
TTYD runs at 486000000/8112960 fps (PAL60) EDIT: Or not. For some reason I've always thought Japan uses PAL instead of NTSC. 486000000/8115128
Just a Mew! 〜 It/She ΘΔ 〜 ███████
Posted: 2/1/2015 10:40 AM
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Nach
Emulator Coder
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
feos wrote:
But I'm going to make an official announcement about moving to 60fps for publication encodes as well.
Please have a discussion with me before doing so. I want to ensure we account for certain issues.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Posted: 2/1/2015 11:46 AM
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TheCoreyBurton
He/Him
Joined: 10/14/2013
Posts: 335
Location: Australia
Anty-Lemon, I do believe you're right. 60fps was more of an estimate to illustrate my example, than a precise figure. Here is a quick section I just re-encoded to upload, just to verify that it all looks alright. It's only twelve seconds long and I saved it at Q18 to make it upload faster. I dumped it losslessly with Dolphin over a few hours and then I dumped it at the lowest bitrate I possibly could with an AV Sync of the same revision. Converted vfr to cfr using calculations I'd verified and a plugin I'd found in another forum post here, removed the duplicate frames and then encoded with x264 at Q16 I think (I usually use the highest Q value that looks best. It ends up between Q12 and Q18 depending, usually). That was for my own personal viewing however, I'm aware I'd have to add the subtitles/text and a verified logo if I was to put it online!
I'm not as active as I once was, but I can be reached here if I should be needed.
Posted: 2/1/2015 1:00 PM
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feos
Site Admin, Skilled player (1237)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11275
Location: RU
NES TAS of 2011
That looks quite amazing! The general workflow for Dolphin is as follows:
  • Get an avsync build that syncs and has all the features needed for the submission, unless it's done on a revision where it's all already included.
  • Dump with a lossless codec, at highest anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering settings possible, at highest internal resolution your monitor allows.
  • natt's vfr to cfr converter is then applied to video, Ilari's GapFix is applied to audio, and target framerate is calculated depending on the game.
  • For downloadable SDs, downscale it to 640x480 (if the source is 4:3) or 640x360 (for 16:9) using LanczosResize. It has been noted that when dumping at 2x or 4x, downscaling looks better when Bilinear is used (someone should confirm this). Also, SD may look better when dumping it at native res at all, like it would not have redundant blur in it.
  • For youtuber, you either upscale by 2, or don't upscale at all, if the dump's resolution is already high enough (like 1440p and higher). Method is not known for sure, it might be either PointResize, or LanczosResize. Someone should clarify this.
  • Once you've done configuring the above with your avisynth script, you encode it using commands from my TASEncodingPackage, or even using the package itself, since it has quite some important tweaks. The commands in it are the most up-to-date and proper, unless your case is exceptional.
  • Then you upload to TVC and Archive if it's a publication, or wherever else you wish otherwise.
For anything you don't know already, request links and I'll post them. Looking at your skills, I think you could very well encode for publications.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
Posted: 2/2/2015 1:41 AM
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TheCoreyBurton
He/Him
Joined: 10/14/2013
Posts: 335
Location: Australia
No problems! I'll do a few test encodes using the package over the next week or so and make sure everything goes smoothly and I'll let you know if I have any issues.
I'm not as active as I once was, but I can be reached here if I should be needed.
Posted: 2/2/2015 2:26 PM
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feos
Site Admin, Skilled player (1237)
Joined: 4/17/2010
Posts: 11275
Location: RU
NES TAS of 2011
http://tasvideos.org/EncodingGuide/PublicationManual.html
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.