- Jun 10, 2018
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Do you want to turn your animations for your game into videos but don't know how? Did you download a program to do the job but don't know what all the settings mean? Don't know what the best settings for your videos are?
This thread is for you.
The purpose of this thread is to have a place where users can ask questions about video encoding and to explain a few things in general.
While I'm by no means a professional, I have learned a few things over the years, so here are some general explanations:This thread is for you.
The purpose of this thread is to have a place where users can ask questions about video encoding and to explain a few things in general.
Format and Codec:
The first choice to be made: What format should you use? In short, the format is the "container" which holds all the information of the video. There are lots of container formats. Examples of widespread and mostly used formats are .mp4, .wmv, .avi and .webm. While .avi and .wmv are old formats and usage decreases and the usage of of the newer .webm format increases.
If you want to make sure that the most of your audience can watch your videos, it's best to use a well known and supported format like .mp4, almost every device can handle it.
The codec is in simple terms the algorythm that decides how the video is encoded and decoded.
Most video editing programs give you the chance to change the codecs settings. Here are the most common and (imo) most important ones with some information:
Quality:
Is what it says. Sometimes called rate factor (RF). Lower values produce higher quality videos, but higher values reduce the filesize.
Colorspace:
Specifies how colors get organized.
Example:
If you can choose between YUV 4:2:0 and YUV 4:2:2, YUV is the color scheme and the numbers basically tell you how colors are stored.
4:2:0 means from every group of 4 horizontal and 2 vertical pixels only the 2 colors from the top row are stored and expanded for to the bottom. When using 4:2:2, the 2 colors from the bottom row are also stored and expanded to the top row.
In addition, if you have 4:4:4, every color from every pixel in the group will be stored:
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Bit depth:
Controls how many colors are available for the image. Usually you have a range from 8 to 12 and sometimes more, sometimes less.
For example an 8bit image can have 256 colors, a 10 bit image 1024 colors and a 12 bit image 4096.
This is of course just a simplification to give you the basic idea of what bit depth and color space do or mean in general. My knowledge is also limited, so if you want more information abot this, have a look through the web, or maybe someone else is willing to share more information in this thread.
Profiles:
These basically combine all of the other things mentioned into one setting
Most common profiles are:
Baseline
- used for devices with limited computing power, older mobile devices for example.
Main
- used as mainstream profile for standard applications. Nowadays more or less replaced by the high profile.
High
- mainstream profile for standard applications, used for blue-ray and HD movies for example
Useful Tools:
Gimp/Photoshop - Can save image series as movie, there are not many options available for the video though.
Handbrake - powerfull program for video de/encoding.
ShanaEncoder - even better program for video en/decoding (imo).
VirtualDub2 - (note the number) video editing program with the ability to encode image series into movies, detects image series automatically, also simple and powerfull.
Final note:
As mentioned, this thread is meant to give users a bit background knowledge and a place to ask about video encoding in general, so feel free to ask if you have a question. Also give me a note if I missed something important, or explained something wrong. Feedback welcome
And again, I'm no pro, this is basically just a bit of what I learned over the years in private.
