Your videos look very impressive! And right now, you're still faster -- and I like the style of your intros.
as far as i know, Youtube transcodes everthing if the resolution is LESS THAN OR EQUAL to 1080p. If you encode with 1100p (for example by adding some black borders...), youtube should offer an "original" option.
(or you may take your current encode and double the solution, which would be 2160p... no current computer would be able to playback this, but youtube might create a better 1080p video)
YouTube shouldn't cause the flicker since the resolution sent is the same as the output, but I have heard about the reduce resolution problem YouTube does. I guess the only solution is your suggestion of original mode.
Edit: When I get some time, I'll check some things...
Okay, I gave the 2160p a shot with some pretty decent results... still not perfect like I'm seeing locally though. I also have an un-scaled version... which, if you have a 1080p monitor, means the video is shrunk by half (for some reason YouTube rendered this one horribly).
EDIT: Here's a comparison screenshot:
YouTube 1080p vs. YouTube 2160p vs. Local Playback
http://i.imgur.com/3ProW.png (Link now as the pic stretched the forum)
Joined: 6/25/2007
Posts: 732
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
It's quite a coincidence that I saw this thread for the first time today since I uploaded a lossless 1920×1080 H264 video to YouTube today and was appalled by how it handled it. The double-resolution method is a good idea for a workaround, but YouTube somehow manages to botch that slightly too. It's so close, though! If you made torrents of these, I'd totally download them all and help seed them. I'd really like to see the non-YouTube-ruined versions.
It's quite a coincidence that I saw this thread for the first time today since I uploaded a lossless 1920×1080 H264 video to YouTube today and was appalled by how it handled it. The double-resolution method is a good idea for a workaround, but YouTube somehow manages to botch that slightly too. It's so close, though! If you made torrents of these, I'd totally download them all and help seed them. I'd really like to see the non-YouTube-ruined versions.
I actually had a torrent going for one of them, but took it down due to lack of traffic. For now I'm focusing on getting YouTube playback optimized, but I'll host one of the originals after work so you can download and compare the quality. Which one you want to see?
And the 2160p method IS very close and I think my problem lies elsewhere now. I'm exporting these from After Effects CS3 and unfortunately scaling the video to 2160p uses some sort of interpolation so that's why it's looking "fuzzy" now. What I want to try next is to get a plug-in which uses no interpolation during scaling... but I haven't found one or really looked just yet.
That and I just know I'm using the wrong encoding for these... sometimes try to use H264 MP4s, but it crashes if the video gets too large. If that doesn't work I just encode to Xvid AVI which introduces compression artifacts (I'm assuming) but honestly I'm really just winging it here. I just pretend to know what I'm doing ;)
Any plans on doing a story book atlas video (perhaps Deja Vu) in the near future? I personally think it would look cool.
I'd love to do Deja Vu actually... I'm just unsure of how to logically arrange the different locations. Do you know of a map which shows the different paths between screens?
Joined: 4/20/2005
Posts: 2161
Location: Norrköping, Sweden
AndyDick wrote:
Randil wrote:
Any plans on doing a story book atlas video (perhaps Deja Vu) in the near future? I personally think it would look cool.
I'd love to do Deja Vu actually... I'm just unsure of how to logically arrange the different locations. Do you know of a map which shows the different paths between screens?
Unfortunately I don't... But one way to do it could be to arrange them in the order they are visited in the TAS, starting from the top left corner. That way the cursor would basically be moving from top left to bottom right corner, except when backtracking. Though that might in a way ruin the "atlas" purpose of the video. Hmm...
It's been pretty much a year, but have you ever felt like making more of these again? I started thinking about how I'd love to see one made for Snake Rattle n Roll.
It's been pretty much a year, but have you ever felt like making more of these again? I started thinking about how I'd love to see one made for Snake Rattle n Roll.
Yes! I've just been having PC troubles for the past few months. It started with my hard drive dying which took a few atlas projects along with it:
Deja Vu
Snake Rattle N' Roll
Excitebike (all tracks concurrent like my Lolo video)
Desert Strike (Genesis)
Metal Storm (with Parallax BG)
Most of those were close to completion as well *sniff*. I have made various backups of my projects, but I still do not know if any of those above were saved.
So now I'm trying to get my PC running again. I'm on my 2nd replacement hard drive and just learned today the issue is likely elsewhere. I suspect the power supply or motherboard since trying to install Win7 fails while trying to copy OS files to hard disk (I brought the HD to work today and it appears fine). The 1st replacement HD worked for 2 weeks, then my PC failed to boot to OS. It's been pretty frustrating to say the least.
Any troubleshooting ideas are welcome!
Thanks!
And my PC troubles are now over as I've just finished building a new one.
I've also found a complete backup of my work-in-progress files as well!
It's been a good week :)
Interesting! The simultaneous ExciteBike was rather confusing though, I have to say. Also, for the individual-track ExciteBike run, it'd be amusing if you could animate the guy wrapping around vertically somehow. :)
It occurred to me that Kid Chameleon would make a good candidate for this type of video, though obviously it's not an NES game. The levels are often huge and you only see a small part of them at any given time.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
I've been back at it the last few days as I'm preparing to finally put together a tutorial video as well. At the same time, I'm also trying to get the quality that YouTube re-encodes to be as high as possible which puts me in this kind of workflow:
1. Export Atlas Video from After Effects (Uncompressed, scaled to 2160p)
2. Encode export in Any Video Converter (H.264, 8,000 bitrate, AAC, 2160p)
3. Upload .MP4 to YouTube
This does appear to enhance the resolution from YouTube playback. Here's some comparisons between the original upload (DivX, 1080p) with a remastered version (H.264, 2160p).
Here's 480p:
http://i.imgur.com/QH0RN.gif
Here's a 720p comparison:
http://i.imgur.com/0jKpq.gif
And finally 1080p at fullscreen:
Pros:
Enhanced resolution
Cons:
Artifacts more present
Colorspace incorrect?
Glitchy visuals (watch this between 1:15 and 1:25 for example)
Obviously I can't control how YouTube re-encodes uploads, but I'm hoping to at least stop the glaring glitches while hopefully maintaining the sharper resolution. I've got more testing to do like doubling the bitrate or trying 60fps, but I'm not so sure about which options to use for H.264 with Any Video Converter. I'm thinking this is where I'm doing something wrong as each new "remastered" video I upload with this workflow causes YouTube to double the total runtime (it plays through once fine, then starts over with no sound). When I get out of work I will post the default H.264 options being used:
[EDIT]
level_idc=13:nocabac:no8x8dct:ref=2:me=umh:bframes=0:subq=6:trellis=0:weightp=0
I must be doing something wrong so if anybody has any suggestions and wants to give me a hand please chime in!
Whoa! I had no idea that Snake Rattle & Roll makes so neat a global map. I want to see the whole thing :-)
Definitely the perfect game for an atlas video ;)
---
Okay, I think I finally have a preferable solution to handling YouTube's sub-par encoding issues. I came across CamStudio's lossless codec while preparing to create a time-lapse of processing an atlas video and the results were quite nice. The only downside is a much larger filesize, but I can live with this as long as it looks nice in the end.
So here's two examples of encoding a 2160p video using camstudio's lossless codec:
NES Atlas: Making of (Time-Lapse)
Runtime: 4 min 45 secs
Filesize: 2.33 GB
Link to video
NES Atlas: Fester's Quest (Demo)
Runtime: 2 min 58 secs
Filesize: 1.5 GB
Link to video
Good thing I have access to a fast internet connection at work. These took around 5 hours combined to upload.
Okay, I think I finally have a preferable solution to handling YouTube's sub-par encoding issues. I came across CamStudio's lossless codec while preparing to create a time-lapse of processing an atlas video and the results were quite nice.
Are you claiming that by uploading videos compressed using Camstudio Lossless Codec, you got better quality from Youtube than with lossless h.264 (x264) of the same resolution?
Okay, I think I finally have a preferable solution to handling YouTube's sub-par encoding issues. I came across CamStudio's lossless codec while preparing to create a time-lapse of processing an atlas video and the results were quite nice.
Are you claiming that by uploading videos compressed using Camstudio Lossless Codec, you got better quality from Youtube than with lossless h.264 (x264) of the same resolution?
Well first of all I don't understand the intricacies of codecs and how to use them properly so don't take my word for it, but yes I did see better results of using CamStudio's lossless codec compared with inefficiently using x264. I say inefficiently as I'm almost certain I was using it in a sloppy manner by taking raw exported footage from After Effects and putting it through Any Video Converter with x264 on default settings. The end result was glitchy, flickering footage on YouTube as well as YouTube doubling the complete runtime. I also think the colorspace was wrong, but perhaps I had it incorrect before then to begin with.
Either way, I'm a codec n00b and the camstudio solution was push-button easy with acceptable results.
Pros:
Enhanced resolution
Cons:
Artifacts more present
Colorspace incorrect?
Glitchy visuals (watch this between 1:15 and 1:25 for example)
Obviously I can't control how YouTube re-encodes uploads, but I'm hoping to at least stop the glaring glitches while hopefully maintaining the sharper resolution. I've got more testing to do like doubling the bitrate or trying 60fps, but I'm not so sure about which options to use for H.264 with Any Video Converter. I'm thinking this is where I'm doing something wrong as each new "remastered" video I upload with this workflow causes YouTube to double the total runtime (it plays through once fine, then starts over with no sound). When I get out of work I will post the default H.264 options being used:
[EDIT]
level_idc=13:nocabac:no8x8dct:ref=2:me=umh:bframes=0:subq=6:trellis=0:weightp=0
I must be doing something wrong so if anybody has any suggestions and wants to give me a hand please chime in!
