Lets racing time

If you haven't tried HyperCam yet, Red, give it a whirl. I've had beautiful results visually.

But that brings me to the present urg: I hadn't recorded much of anything over ten minutes before this morning and I'm finding terrible sound desync. It starts out fine (or so it seems), but becomes more pronounced as the video progresses, so I think it might be the playback rate? I have recording and playback both set to 30 fps.

Looks darn pretty though.

Sounds like the problem I have when recording VBA.

Try loading it in Virtual Dub and setting it so the Audio and Video durations match?

EDIT: Hypercam seems to be a big help!

Glad to hear it might be workin' out for you!
Hm, that did the trick on the fifteen or so minutes I recorded of Super Metroid, but it managed to make Kirby Super Star even more a mess. The problem with the Kirby video is that the recording seems to be more or less in sync until the last two minutes, then the video inexplicably speeds up ahead of my voice. Matching the durations puts most of the video behind my voice. Weird. That feature looks like it'll come in handy though. Thanks!

I'll have to run a few more tests. I'm sure glad I didn't actually do any races. =/

Maybe I can make this work after all.

Aladdin is up.

Red, what FPS are you recording at?

...whoops. It was at 10 FPS.

30 would probably be a lot better, right?

I'm finding a lot more success recording at 25, myself. I just did a little Super Metroid and Touhou and everything was gravy.

When I go back to check the data, the videos I set to record at 30 fps were actually recording between 27-29, depending. The videos would then playback at thirty, resulting in a shorter video run time then I actually recorded, desynced with the audio. I guess my system is starting to show its age.

Point is though, try thirty, but if you're having sync problems you might try shaving a few fps when you record.

Okay, I've got everyone's Rockin' Kats footage! Thanks dudes.

Just out of curiosity, nameless, what were you recording with? And how much HD space did you start with? That might be helpful information for future racers to use as a benchmark.

I was using Hypercam, but I left it on the default compression, which apparently was "Full Frames" so it used up 150GB.

So, use compression people. It helps.

How long were you recording when this happened?

2 hours for 150GB.

Ideally you want to record uncompressed. That might not be possible for everyone, though.

New topic: what is the opinion in the general layout of the video? It only takes a couple minutes to whip up a backdrop, and I think it looks pretty spiffy. If people dig it I will try and put together a well-commented avisynth template for others to use.

It was one of the first things that struck me when I watched the video. I honestly thought it looked pretty rad. I noticed you got the font problem figured out! I haven't had a lot of time to look at it, but I'll confess I bit off more than I could chew trying to parse the script you posted up before. I'm starting to get what I'm looking at on a general level.

Does the script allow for the possibility of more than four players?

The font problem still isn't solved. For some reason VirtualDubMod (or avisyinth? not sure) only recognizes fonts I've installed since I installed the programs. I knew there was a neat looking Aladdin font out there (actually called "Aladdin") I wanted to use for the timer, and the software recognized that one right away. Then I re-installed Fixedsys and the software suddenly recognized that, too.

I ended up not using the same stack function as the SA script uses. Instead, I used overlays, which worked really well. The videos are laid out in a grid that would easily support up to six racers.

In fact, I'll walk you through the .avs, in case you want to tinker around with it. (Remember that lines starting with # are comments, and aren't parsed by avisynth.)

The first two lines are just a personal reference for how big the video needed to be. Standard SNES resolution is 256x224. I wanted two of those stacked on top of each other with some space in between them and around the edges; 12+ 224 + 12 + 224 + 12 = 484. A 17:9 screen at 516 pixels tall is 916 pixels wide. Both of these numbers are divisible by 4, which plays nice with XVid for compression later.

I used VirtualDubMod to crop and resize all four videos before processing them. You can use avisynth for this, too, but I didn't want to bite off too much at one time.

This defines the first five clips I needed. Clips are what avisynth processes as avi files in whatever you use to run the script. I was using VirtualDubMod.

First was the backdrop image, which has to be told which frame to end on. Here I'm defining it as "bg" for use later. If you were to give the ImageSource command instead, your avi would literally just be a 69571-frame-long avi of a static image.

Next are the four avi files, which had already been cropped and resized.

I had audio desync issues, so I tacked the ChangeFPS on at the end to make sure and force it back to 30 after each step. I don't know why it was desyncing, but forcing it back to 30 fixed the problem.

Avisynth has lots of commands and functions to mix audio streams, but I couldn't get them to work properly. It kept telling me the bitrates didn't match, even though I tried using the command to change bitrates. What I ended up doing was just extracting mp3s from the videos and using Audacity to mix them together. I did the same thing with the music track later. I want to experiment more with this step because I think Avisynth will handle all the heavy lifting.

Two of the videos had a weird bright line down the right side, which means I probably wasn't careful enough cropping them the first time, so I chopped two pixels off.

This function handles the subtitles. The top half sticks the names on; the bottom half sticks in the completion times. Note the bottom four have "first_frame" defined; that tells the subtitle when to show up. If you leave that out they show up on the first frame and persist the entire video.

I left myself a note so I would remember the proper y offset, so the names would appear inside the windows and not underneath them.

The timer code was grabbed straight out of the SA template.

This is the main difference from the SA code. Instead of using StackHorizontal/StackVertical, I defined the clip as a series of overlays. Think of it like picture-in-picture. Overlay command takes four arguments: the main clip, the overlay clip, x coord, y coord.

First I define "o1" as a clip that uses the background image ("bg"), with the first video ("topleft") playing at 302x12.

Then I define "o2" as a clip that uses o1 as the main clip, with the second video ("topright_cropped") playing at 580x12.

And so on. Again, I use ChangeFPS at each step to solve any desync issues.

Overlay defaults to the audio track of the main clip. And since my main clip was a png, that meant it would be silent. So I use the AudioDub command to play the soundtrack, and define the whole shebang as a clip called "final".

I didn't read up too much on the Animate command; the first line here adds the counter clip to the final product. The last line tells VirtualDubMod to apply the "names" function to the clip "final" and play it. And that's what the finished product looks like!

So clearly I have a lot to learn, but I feel like I'm making progress. When I sit down to process Rockin' Kats this week I'm going to try and shoulder more of the work onto avisynth. If I can get it to do all my audio processing for me, that would be excellent.

Guys, I think I'm addicted to making these.

150 gigs for 2 hours of a NES game? No, something is wrong there.

Not even me recording 1080p footage from a modern game in Fraps is that large.

My rockin Kats video ended up being 70gigs recording at 60fps.

The half hour of MM1 I recorded clocked in at 5.81, but I was recording at only 25fps.

Thanks for the breakdown! Just going through it a couple times is giving me a much better understanding then straight, dry reading has been doing.

I guess I should get VirtualDubMod working. It doesn't want to start up on my system on account of some missing .dll file. I'll try to get it working after I catch some sleep.

I really liked how the Aladdin video turned out, but would it work with not square videos? I thought SNES and anything more modern would be 4:3 at least.

Were you not compressing it? What size are you recording at? I think mine was 512x512.

If there is only four players I'd almost rather have them in a 2x2 grid than spaced out so i can kind of "watch" all of them at once more easily. But that's not a huge deal since I tend to focus on one screen at a time.

... yeah, how did you get those square? If it's scaled it doesn't look bad.

Yeah, it's just a matter of doing the calculations again. NES resolution is slightly different, so the spacing on the Rockin' Kats video will be slightly different, but once I have it set the same basic layout should work for any NES game I process.

I was recording with fraps, so full screen at 1280xwhatever widescreen, I can't remember. But fraps has an option to capture the video at half size, so half of whatever that is. Posting from my phone, can't check it right now.

one of the video comments is

I guess you guys are just too salty for some folks.

I wonder if that's a Brickroad fan who's used to him keeping it PG-rated.

Well, that guy is really gonna hate the next race.

Also, fuck you guys, I've had "A Whole New World" in my head all goddamn day.

So, that Zelda video I posted upthread was done at 25 fps... did that work better for everyone?

That looks pretty good! And the audio looked to be in time. I might turn down the input on your mic a bit though or turn down your output volume on your headset. Though I imagine it kinda comes out in the wash with multiple voices and background music, there were bits of game audio getting picked up, most amusingly when you pointed out, "But you guys probably can't hear it."

While I'm processing Rockin' Kats, I've been rapping with Sovan about the next race. He suggested Rescue Rangers, which is a great game, but kind of too short to race. Then he suggested Duck Tales, which has the same problem.

So I had this idea: DISNEY AFTERNOON RACE.

Rescue Rangers, Duck Tales, The Little Mermaid, Darkwing Duck. One marathon sitting. All four of these games can be completed in about a half an hour with practice. If you've never played them before, they are all really fun and pretty easy to learn. (Darkwing Duck is kinda difficult in spots.)

Sovan's not available to run it this week so I am thinking Thursday the 14th. Anyone down?

I'm always down to lose at a game I've never played before.