I know this isn't a "hardware" question; but there isn't a "software" section, and I figured someone here would be an expert at this sort of thing.

I purchased Fraps a couple nights ago, downloaded VirtualDub with Xvid codec, and recorded a couple of videos which I then uploaded to Youtube (see here and here). All of that was A LOT easier than I thought it was going to be.

The question I have is why did the videos end up with a max resolution of 480p?

I play Neverwinter at 1920x1080, and that is the resolution those videos were recorded. The original videos were 4.6 GB and 6.3 GB but compressed down to 189 MB and 655 MB respectively. I know there must be an incorrect setting or something else I am doing wrong (at least for outputting HD video). I'd like to at least do 720p video up to Youtube, if possible.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Originally posted by BitterClinger

I know this isn't a "hardware" question; but there isn't a "software" section, and I figured someone here would be an expert at this sort of thing.

I purchased Fraps a couple nights ago, downloaded VirtualDub with Xvid codec, and recorded a couple of videos which I then uploaded to Youtube (see here and here). All of that was A LOT easier than I thought it was going to be.

The question I have is why did the videos end up with a max resolution of 480p?

I play Neverwinter at 1920x1080, and that is the resolution those videos were recorded. The original videos were 4.6 GB and 6.3 GB but compressed down to 189 MB and 655 MB respectively. I know there must be an incorrect setting or something else I am doing wrong (at least for outputting HD video). I'd like to at least do 720p video up to Youtube, if possible.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Check the format and resolution you saved it as with VDub.

Originally posted by Ivylena
Try Bandicam instead of Fraps. :)

yea, try answering his question instead of making advertisement.

he said he BOUGHT fraps and asked a question REGARDING FRAPS

and you tell him to install bandicam? seriously?

that's like someone asking how to use a bike, and you tell him to buy a roller. useless answer.

@topic:

fraps works fine. be sure you have the video capture settings set to full-size and with  a propper frame rate.

Originally posted by Thane

@topic:

fraps works fine. be sure you have the video capture settings set to full-size and with  a propper frame rate.

  

Wow, I thought we had the answer right there.  I checked my video capture settings in Fraps, and it was indeed set to "Half-size". I changed it to "Full-size" at 30 fps, restarted Fraps, and recorded another video. Again, the top selectable resolution on YouTube is 480p.

So, I skipped the VirtualDub compression and just uploaded the raw 1.4 GB Fraps AVI file to YouTube.  Voila! An HD video.

I'd still like to go through the VirtualDub compression process as it really does reduce the file sizes. Maybe I'll start playing around with settings there.

Ok, last update on this, in case anyone is interested.

I was able to create this HD video using Virtual Dub x64 compression. However, unlike the raw Fraps upload to YouTube, the maximum quality selection for the compressed video is 720p and the quality is noticeably degraded (at least running the video playback in full screen mode).

Most of that small file size you see is from the reduction in resolution (or quality, as you found out with the 720p recording).

HD takes a lot of everything - computing power to record, size to store, and bandwidth to upload/stream.

A resolution of 1920x1080 means 2073600 pixels.  At 32-bit color depth, that's 4 bytes per pixel, for 8294000 bytes per frame.  At 60 frames per second, that comes to 497664000 bytes per second.  That's a little under half of a GB per second, and comes to about 28 GB per minute.

There are ways to bring that down, of course.  Reducing the resolution or frame rate helps quite a bit, but even 640x480 at 30 frames per second and 16-bit color depth still comes to more than 1 GB per minute.

The other alternative is compression, but compression doesn't just magically make things take less space.  If you want a one minute video to take 1 GB, then there are only 2^(2^33) possible videos, as compared to 2^(238878720000) possible uncompressed.  That means that if you pick a random one minute video, the odds that it happens to be one of the chosen choices for a compressed 1 GB video are only 1 in 2^(230288785408), which for most people, is basically zero.

So what does compression do?  Basically, it will pick a much smaller number of possible videos, and then "rounds" yours to the nearest one.  Naturally, that degrades the image quality, and the more that you try to compress it down, the worse the image quality you get.  If you measure everyone's height to the millimeter, and then round it to the nearest foot, you can store the heights in a lot less space, at the expense of losing a lot of precision.  That's what compression can do. 

There are forms of compression that won't lose data, but those don't work with arbitrary data sets, but only data that has a lot of redundancies built into it.  Videos could easily have a lot of such redundancy, but not arbitrarily much, so if you're not using lossy compression, you're going to end up with very large file sizes.

There's also the issue of trying to compress a video as you record it.  If the raw data comes in at a rate of slightly under half of a GB per second, then you can't do anything terribly computationally intensive to compress that on the fly.  For that matter, it's hard to even record data as it comes in that fast.

Originally posted by BitterClinger

Ok, last update on this, in case anyone is interested.

I was able to create this HD video using Virtual Dub x64 compression. However, unlike the raw Fraps upload to YouTube, the maximum quality selection for the compressed video is 720p and the quality is noticeably degraded (at least running the video playback in full screen mode).

http://www.bigasoft.com/articles/convert-and-compress-fraps-video.html

http://www.terrabytecafe.com/2011/05/how-to-compress-video-files-without.html

Either of the above methods will compress yet leave you with 1080p quality with little noticable quality loss. 

When using Virtual Dub, don't save for YouTube. Save it in the resolution and size you want. Let YouTube worry about their own compression on their end.