Post subject: Codec poison
Editor
Joined: 3/10/2010
Posts: 899
Location: Sweden
We had a discussion on IRC about things that really doesn't work well with the normal codecs. One thing we discussed is fake pseudo transparency. That is, pseudo transparency archived by dirting with binary transparency.
Publisher
Joined: 4/23/2009
Posts: 1283
Another would be multilayer backgrounds.
Patashu
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Joined: 10/2/2005
Posts: 4043
I don't think foreground layers (like snow falling in one level of yoshi's island) are handled well.
My Chiptune music, made in Famitracker: http://soundcloud.com/patashu My twitch. I stream mostly shmups & rhythm games http://twitch.tv/patashu My youtube, again shmups and rhythm games and misc stuff: http://youtube.com/user/patashu
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
Patashu wrote:
I don't think foreground layers (like snow falling in one level of yoshi's island) are handled well.
You're absolutely right. Back in the days when we still used bitrates, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had a castle level that had rain that would become invisible if it had low bitrates and actually pushed back the rest of the runs bitrate due to the 4:1 ratio that was in place, just to make the rain work. In hindsight, that run is probably worth reencoding with modern encoding scripts, particularly if an improvement is made. Another sort of effect I've noticed that'll cause problems with higher crf values is plasma effects, though, luckily, this is mostly just limited to the demoscene anyway. Either way, basically anything with fast motion will ruin videos.
Editor
Joined: 3/10/2010
Posts: 899
Location: Sweden
I decided to make an animation designed to be a major challenge to encode. [URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/705/47173071.png/][/URL] Get the animation here. It's an AIR application so it should run on the main three operating systems. Here is a list of the features:
  • Three spinning and resizing checkerboard grids that each has one RGB channel.
  • Bouncing, color changing, size changing, balls that are Screened on top of the grids
  • 100 falling rectangles that subtracts a random color.
  • Bouncing inverto-bars.
Feel free to post your results trying to encode this mess.
Publisher
Joined: 4/23/2009
Posts: 1283
Looks interesting. Will try when I have time.
Editor
Joined: 3/10/2010
Posts: 899
Location: Sweden
Just remember that there is no need to screencap it, I used AIR so that I could automate a perfect dump of the animation. Just click the status field to start a dump.
Publisher
Joined: 4/23/2009
Posts: 1283
Thanks for the tip!
creaothceann
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Editor
Joined: 4/7/2005
Posts: 1874
Location: Germany
First of all I'd half the resolution to 400x300, for hard-to-compress videos it'd be justified unless there's important details like text. Then just adjust the h264 bitrate/rate factor to get a comfortable file size, and the preset to get a comfortable encoding time.