Okay, as much as I have read about the Cinepak codec and VMS (Vegas Movie Studio), this too can also provide a good FPS rate (definitely 60.0) if encoded right. If not, I hope 59.97 is good enough because I checked and that's the only thing VMS can provide when push come to shove.
And then if the TAS encoding tools don't work where it couldn't place the subtitles on your video, you should be able to freely put the subtitles into the video using Vegas Movie Studio. Therefore, you still need to pull test0.sub off the emulator movie file (FCM at the least) to make sure the layout (subject, player, time, and rerecord count + "tool-assisted recording" and "TASvideos.org") is exactly correct.
I been keeping this codec, VMS, and ffdshow (just in case) all in handy just in case I need to use them as an ultimate resort if recommended encoding methods do not work. I post more about this later. But yeah, give Cinepak a try and give this a good run under VLC media player. =)
Okay, as much as I have read about the Cinepak codec
Proprietary.
Ergo, bad.
Also, the FPS is no question whatsoever. We don't encode these movies in real time. Even if the game runs at 0.014 fps when we encode it, the resulting AVI will be watched at the normal FPS and will look very fluent. The encoding just takes longer time. The same number of frames will be encoded, in any case.
The actual question is 1) quality / size, 2) codec availability (proprietary codecs are no-go because of that), 3) stability, 4) widespreadness.
Okay, I been testing the use of Vegas Movie Studio 8. I been using the X264 codec to encode a raw AVI off an emulator movie file and now I been using this for editing. As I been getting familiar with this one program (it's not free, but it can be evaluated), ironically, this pretty much covers every step in the "how-to encode XXX to AVI" instructions at the main TASVideos site. It's that the actions are expressed differently.
VMS does freely allow producers to throw in their subtitles easily, they still need to follow the guideline on getting subtitles off a movie file, though.
VMS allows producers to throw in a "video track" before the beginning of an emulator movie to further present the speedrun as a whole. Taking "logo.avi" and adding that to the beginning of a movie is an example.
Finally, VMS can maintain the sound of the video, but keeping the audio/video flow sync'ed is the key.
If TASvideos.org accepts complete speedruns that uses the ffdshow codec, then that codec should be great to use for VMS.
I'll post a tutorial and demonstration of how VMS can be used to present speedrun clips soon. And this will involve the ffdshow codec after I read this:
Encoding video using the FFDShow codec
To be written some day...
It's been easy for me to use lately. But I'll try to prepare a tutorial about this tonight. Until then, this is the home page of the Vegas suite including VMS. This does support AVIzlib and FFDShow codecs btw.
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/products/vegasfamily.asp
Okay, so far, it is compatible with ffdshow, but I can't get crap out of H264. There's already Google results out there that explain about the errors spitted out when trying to render (encoding) video projects into AVI. I do end up with a big file size (170~320 MB) on a 12 minute movie.
Most videos here are encoded with H264 video and mpga audio codecs. For some reason, they don't work well with VMS. It's starting to suck, however, I will find ways of working around it! There has to be a way.
