Lets racing time

Mountain. I could do 7 PST easy.

I can do Wednesday evenings, but probably not this Wednesday, because I really need to get Contra going.

Torgo, did you my PM and what you need from me for the SMB2 race?

After Michelle is done with this class of hers I could probably do some later weeknight races, but right now Sunday afternoon will probably be my only free time.

I did! Sorry, I thought I sent you a reply. Yep, you're good. In fact, I can safely say I'm mostly done putting it together. I'm waiting on tweaked footage from Destil and I gotta put together the soundtrack, but aside from that for all intents and purposes the video is done. Incidentally, fun fact: Not accidentally deleting all your scripts is a pretty huge boon to production time. Who'd have thought!

fake edit: What's your progress on your desync, Destil? I've tried fiddling with the framerate and trimming it, but the best I've managed is getting it to sync up at the end, resulting in a desync at the beginning. In its current state, your video is about three seconds ahead of your audio by the end.

I tried last night and while it looked like it was working in the preview it ended up just removing all the video. I'm going to get up early and set it up again tomorrow morning, take a look at lunch and if it's done/good start the upload then (I should compress it while I'm in there, shouldn't I? First upload took hours).

New idea for a race: Mega Man X4: Zero run.

Okay, I just tried again with the same result as Torgo: moving the audio desync to the start of the video.

Halp!

What races are in the making? I'd like to get in on some racing action!

Look for Contra tomorrow, and hopefully Super C by Monday. The races were short but sweet.

Works for me, although I'd be playing the gamecube X Collection. Screw trying to get a goddamn PS1 emulator up and running.

You can also expect Super Mario Bros. 3 tomorrow as well!

I'm honestly drawing a blank here. To be perfectly truthful as part of the finished product it isn't terrible. By the end its desynced by about 3.3 seconds, so for most of the race it's actually less. It helps that otherwise everyone's audio cut together beautifully. Barring any solution coming to mind, I might just call it a wrap and finish it.

edit: In the long run, if you can't figure a solution, recording the audio separate might be your best bet. What you're going through is exactly the reason why I do it.
You should race with us on Sundays. Speaking of which, is anyone down for Sunday again? Anyone have any ideas or preferences?

Future race idea: Labyrinth + Final Stage Kid Icarus run. Possible optional challenge: NO MAPS. Which is to say, you can't have one pre-made ahead of time or have one in another window. You can make one as you go though. Bring your graph paper, kids.

Contra needs a little more work than I thought, but I should still have it up on the Yubbertoobs before it's no longer today. Kishi and Nich both had some desync that needed cleaning up. Fortunately the race is short and there are lots of good cues to help fix it. And I'm learning a few tricks that will help streamline the process for future races.

Kishi, your mic is in sore need of a windscreen. I'm chopping out a lot of loud breathing sounds from your audio. The sound quality is otherwise fine. (If you don't have a windscreen, swipe one of Lady's nylons and attach part of it to your mic with a rubberband. I used that trick for years.)

(Or use your own nylons if you're into that, I guess I don't know.)

Audio desync seems to be a really common problem with Hypercam 2. Has anyone here squashed the problem for good, and can throw together a detailed how-to for newcomers? Some light research last night revealed it might have something to do with the bitrate you record your audio at. Can you guys having desync problems sound off on what your audio settings look like? 44000 should be optimal.

I gave destil my exact settings for the SMB2 race, and my audio seems to be perfect and he still had issues, so IDK *shrug*

My only advice is to start a recording, take a shower, eat lunch, and then see if it syncs up after two hours. YOu really aren't going to notice if it'll be off by a few seconds unless you test record something as long as a race. It may still seem perfect in a short test.

E: FWIW, here's my settings that work for me

If that's the case I think the best solution is to pull the audio and cut 1.1 second of random silence out of it at each of the 25% marks and see how that lines up. I'll try that tonight, unless you want to (I don't have the other tracks to see how that affects the cross-mix).

I actually tested running Audacity in the background before doing that race and I think I had it working, but I also thought I had the desync fixed and wouldn't need it. I'll do so next time.
EDIT: what visual cue do you use for syncing video to audio?

I did the race at 44000 stereo, then after I found the desync I did a test recording of Mega Man V at 11000 mono and both had desync.

Is this as much a problem in Hypercam 3? I may just pony up for it if not.

I fixed the desync issues I had in the Pentathlon after watching this short video. I see McClain has those checkboxes fixed on his screenshots, but that is not the default setting.

I've done a lot of test recordings with these new settings, including the entire Pentathlon all over(did it in 30 minutes this time, but still), and an entire run of Link to the Past using zsnes, without any trouble. Seems to be working.

Yeah, I saw stuff about that bug and I've got those boxes checked.

So any hope for the second (third?) Pentathalon, Brickroad? Or did the video issues kill it?

It's on hold because Mike wants to run another heat. It wouldn't do to upload the video and ruin the surprise for the second batch of racers, would it?

Mario 3, the Race. Youtube, the Upload. Shaka, when the Walls Fell.

Ok cool. For some reason I thought he already ran a second one, but I guess I got confused with the second FIRST one.

THERE. ARE. FOUR! RACERS.

Kadir beneath Mo Moteh.

I might be interested in doing a pentathlon, but my race times are pretty narrow right now. Basically it would need to be daytime Thursday, Friday or Sunday because of my work schedule and Michelle's school stuff at night. I might be able to do a race a night, but it would have to be because Michelle went to bed early.

This should only be a problem until the end of the month. After that I should be up for more late-night stuff after she is done with school. You might even get to hear her mocking my gameplay!

What I do is set a personal sync point as soon as I get both video and audio going, such as opening the emulator's file menu on a countdown.

As for my own recording settings, I record with Lagarith lossless codec at 25 fps.* My audio sample rate (which I haven't touched since I stopped using it) is 44100. It might also be worth noting that I always resample the audio to 48000 with avisynth, but near as I can tell this doesn't cause nor solve any desync issues. I haven't tried that trick Dadaph linked

*I record at 25fps and force it to 30 with avisynth because trying to record at 30 has always ended in tears. Speedy, desynced tears.

Yeah, my audio desync entirely started when I switched up to recording at 30FPS from 10, perhaps I should try 25. Do you move it up to 30 when you combine videos or move everything else down?

The process for my own footage is to take a second pass on it after recording to cut in the audio, bring it up to 30fps, and bring the resolution back down to its native one. I use avisynth and virtualdubmod. I'll make a similar pass as needed for everyone's videos. The final video is always 30fps though.

Fun story: I recorded Bionic Commando at 30fps, and the result was a video the literally zipped ahead of the audio, like the game was running at a slight fast-forward. What I ended up doing was encoding it two more times: Once at 25fps to fix the speed, and again at 30 to bring it back to standard (since avisynth requires all videos run at the same framerate). Don't ask me why it worked, it just did. I had hoped to do something similar with your footage, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Cutting in bits of silence won't work I think: It will only mangle the commentary as a whole, and if I tried to cut in silence for everyone, it would only desync their footage.

What I can try to do is cut in some "lol desync" frames at a few points to allow the audio to catch up (see: Dadaph's footage in pentathalon #1).

Go for it.

Yes, this is the best idea.

Bonus points if you just make every 60th frame a percy. It can be like the porn in Fight Club.

And appropriate to my performance.

Hmm. While we are at it. Anyone know how FCEUX really handles PAL games?

For those who don't know. Europe's PAL system used 50hz, which compared to NTSC's 60hz and 30fps, ran at 25fps. That meant non-optimised videogames of old ran slower on PAL systems. Some games, like Mega Man 3 and Sonic 2 were optimised and ran fine, others, like Mega Man 2 and the first Sonic, weren't, and felt slow as crap compared to other games in the same series(one of the reasons I always prefered Sonic 2 and MM3, even as a kid).

Now, as I live in Europe, I grew up with slow mode, and my entire pre-PS1 retro collection is PAL.
When I wanted to play Battletoads again, recently, I downloaded the PAL ROM, so I could train on my emulator(savestating to learn all the stages) and then use the real NES to show off on my mad skillz. With a PAL ROM, I thought I could avoid that entire mess...
Now, I can actually get past the Turbo Tunnel consistently while playing the game on my NES, but I can't when I'm emulating, as I proved in the first Pentathlon video.
I had no idea why, until:

A few days ago, at the Contra race, I considered actually playing the European version, Probotector, for shits and giggles. I mean, it would be cool if one of the windows showed robots running around instead of the usual muscle guys. I ended up not doing it, because I thought the slower speed would give me a serious disadvantage in the race.
But after I beat Contra, I started up Probotector, and was shocked to not be able to notice any differences in the speed at all. Does FCEUX somehow speed up or skip frames of PAL games, and does that explain why the timing on the PAL Turbo Tunnel feels way off?

Yeah, I know it's kinda unrelated, but I'm very curious to find out.
And does it mean I could have raced Probotector along with everyone else racing Contra, and actually display the game at the same speed? Weird things.

At least I have figured out playing both NTSC and PAL games in the same Hypercam recording doesn't mess up anything. Even on my messed up pentathlon recording, Battletoads seemed pretty synced to the few things I remember saying.

Okay, Contra is done. Is SMB3 uploading right now? I don't want to accidentally ruin something by logging into the LRT account and trying to upload another video while the first one is still going.