SrcDemo² - Render smoother Source engine movies, faster.

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by TorQueMoD

Does this actually smooth the camera movements the same way the demo smoother works inside Source Engine or does this only smooth the frames of the entire video?

Thanks!

This works with whatever frames the game spits out. It never touches the game itself, so there is no way for it to control the camera. So no, it just smoothes the frames of the video.

[TorQueMoD]

That's what I thought. I was searching for a tool to replace the Demo Smoother and this came up so I was simply hoping

[RambJoe]

Will this be ported to Linux when Steam comes out?

Thanks.

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by RambJoe

Will this be ported to Linux when Steam comes out?

Thanks.

It was ported on Linux before it was ported to OS X, because it was created on Linux and then made to run on OS X afterwards. I just haven't made it easy to run yet because I haven't released a package for it.

[Fake Flavor #32]

I hate giving vague complaints, but I simply cannot get SrcDemo to pick up the frames I'm dumping. My directories and render settings are fine, and I'm precisely following your instructions. I don't know what's wrong.

So I activate SrcDemo, load a demo, set host_framerate to the correct value and startmovie in the right directory.

While the demo is running, I check SrcDemo and my output folder: nothing. Meanwhile, in the folder Source Recorder is using, it's spitting out thousands of TGA frames. Dokan and the JDK are installed.

If it helps, I'm running Windows 7 x64 with integrated graphics.

Also, what is Gaussian blending, and how does it affect the image?

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by Fake Flavor #32

I hate giving vague complaints, but I simply cannot get SrcDemo to pick up the frames I'm dumping. My directories and render settings are fine, and I'm precisely following your instructions. I don't know what's wrong.

So I activate SrcDemo, load a demo, set host_framerate to the correct value and startmovie in the right directory.

While the demo is running, I check SrcDemo and my output folder: nothing. Meanwhile, in the folder Source Recorder is using, it's spitting out thousands of TGA frames. Dokan and the JDK are installed.

If it helps, I'm running Windows 7 x64 with integrated graphics.

Also, what is Gaussian blending, and how does it affect the image?

Can you start it in debug mode and give me a log file? That'd be a lot less vague to start with. Also, if the game is outputting TGA files, where is it outputting them? Usually one of the 3 following things happens:

• Everything is fine, game makes frame, SrcDemo catches them (not the case here it seems)
• Game makes frames, SrcDemo doesn't catch them, but they are being made elsewhere (double check the paths and everything, search your hard drive for stray tga files)
• Game tries to make frames in correct folder but SrcDemo fails to catch them. This usually blocks the game from writing the frame, which causes it to freeze for a while (~30 seconds) until it gives up trying to write the frame and then does endmovie by itself, at which point it is not writing frames anymore. You can check if it did that by looking at the console output of the game.

Try to identify which of the above is your situation, or if it's something else entirely, and please provide a log file~

[Fake Flavor #32]

Some more information about the situation.

SrcDemo is set to watch this dir. Source Recorder is dumping frames here:
D:\Steam\steamapps\me\team fortress 2\tf\srcdemo

The final, processed PNG frames should be exported to:
D:\Videos\MvM

Looking in the log file, it seems that mounting to Recorder's folder failed. I can't imagine why, but I'll check security and permissions settings to make sure.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zsm7g1pgb7...-09-geg6e_.log

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by Fake Flavor #32

Some more information about the situation.

SrcDemo is set to watch this dir. Source Recorder is dumping frames here:
D:\Steam\steamapps\me\team fortress 2\tf\srcdemo

The final, processed PNG frames should be exported to:
D:\Videos\MvM

Looking in the log file, it seems that mounting to Recorder's folder failed. I can't imagine why, but I'll check security and permissions settings to make sure.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zsm7g1pgb7...-09-geg6e_.log

Alright, so one of those nondescript Dokan errors. Dokan really doesn't give much info when it fails. Can you go through the same troubleshooting steps as described here? (Restarting, launching with --srcdemo-debug-fs, checking if Dokan by itself works using the sample mirroring filesystem). Also, try running SrcDemo2 as admin to see if that makes any difference.

[mreeuwij]

nice job WindPower. Nice tool anyways.

[Fake Flavor #32]

Restarted. Didn't work.
Flagged with --srcdemo-debug-fs. The logs didn't change.
Tried the sample FS. The terminal window opened, but closed immediately.

I also retried all of these as admin, but none worked. Gah. Troubleshooting be hard.

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by Fake Flavor #32

Restarted. Didn't work.
Flagged with --srcdemo-debug-fs. The logs didn't change.
Tried the sample FS. The terminal window opened, but closed immediately.

I also retried all of these as admin, but none worked. Gah. Troubleshooting be hard.

That's because it's a command-line program. Running it without arguments causes the help to appear and then the program exits. Run it through the command-line.

[Sublime2k]

What does this error mean?

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "SrcDemo2.py", line 2, in <module>
File "SrcDemo2Launcher.pyo", line 283, in launch
File "SrcDemo2Launcher.pyo", line 147, in unmount_registered_mountpoint
File "SrcDemo2Launcher.pyo", line 125, in attempt_unmount
File "SrcDemo2Launcher.pyo", line 112, in subprocess_call
File "subprocess.pyo", line 493, in call
File "subprocess.pyo", line 679, in __init__
File "subprocess.pyo", line 893, in _execute_child
WindowsError: [Error 740] The requested operation requires elevation

First time it happened nothing was written into .wav file (buffered) and second time it happened there was no .wav at all (straight to disk).

I ended the demo with endmovie and stopdemo.

Edit: Previous 2 attempts were using blend rate 1 and shutter angle 360°. This time I tried with blend rate 32 and shutter angle 180° and there were no errors, but .wav file is still empty and there's no sound. Wat do?

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by Sublime2k

What does this error mean?



First time it happened nothing was written into .wav file (buffered) and second time it happened there was no .wav at all (straight to disk).

I ended the demo with endmovie and stopdemo.

Edit: Previous 2 attempts were using blend rate 1 and shutter angle 360°. This time I tried with blend rate 32 and shutter angle 180° and there were no errors, but .wav file is still empty and there's no sound. Wat do?

That error means it's trying to do something that should require elevated privileges (admin rights). Run it as admin and you should not receive those errors.

This shouldn't be connected to the audio stuff though. Make sure you render with sound ("startmovie stuff/stuff tga" only renders pictures, no sound, you have to use "startmovie stuff/stuff" or "startmovie stuff/stuff wav" to get sound). In the worst case, you can always just play back the demo normally in TF2 (without rendering it), and record the audio with Audacity or Fraps or whatever.

[Sublime2k]

Thanks for reply, I'll try running it with admin rights then.

As for sound, I'm using command "startmovie srcdemo/filename" followed by "playdemo filename" and when it's done I use command "endmovie", that should record sound as well as frames.

I do all of this in console while I'm in the main menu, I don't use "demoui". That way as soon as I play the demo, it starts making movie (i.e. frames) from the beginning until it's finished.

The .wav file is there, but it's 0 bytes and doesn't contain anything.

What the main difference between buffered and straight to disk .wav? I tried both to no avail.

Also, is it normal for high end PC (i5 2500K, 8GB DDR3) to take several hours for few minutes of video? Probably yes because we're talking about 960 frames per second, but I'm just checking.

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by Sublime2k

Thanks for reply, I'll try running it with admin rights then.

As for sound, I'm using command "startmovie srcdemo/filename" followed by "playdemo filename" and when it's done I use command "endmovie", that should record sound as well as frames.

I do all of this in console while I'm in the main menu, I don't use "demoui". That way as soon as I play the demo, it starts making movie (i.e. frames) from the beginning until it's finished.

The .wav file is there, but it's 0 bytes and doesn't contain anything.

What the main difference between buffered and straight to disk .wav? I tried both to no avail.

Also, is it normal for high end PC (i5 2500K, 8GB DDR3) to take several hours for few minutes of video? Probably yes because we're talking about 960 frames per second, but I'm just checking.

Can you provide an SrcDemo2 log then? Look particularly at the lines with [A] in front of them, those are the stuff related to audio processing.

The difference between buffered and straight to disk is that in buffered mode, SrcDemo2 keeps a certain amount of bytes in memory (which you can configure in the audio tab) before writing that to the disk. That way it does the write calls in bunches, not at every single frame. The Source engine renderer does write calls every frame, which is a lot of calls, and each of them is for a really tiny amount of data, which is very wasteful. The "straight-to-disk" mode is just what it sounds like: whenever the source renderer tries to write something to disk, then write it to the disk. Don't queue it up.

In buffered mode, you can see the state of the buffer when it's rendering. It's the little vertical meter thing on the right of the "Rendering" tab. It fills up as the buffer gets full, and whenever it fills up (or whenever you press Flush) it writes out its contents to disk. In straight-to-disk mode, there is no buffer so the meter does nothing. If you're in buffered mode and you don't see the meter filling up, then SrcDemo2 is not receiving audio data.

The other two modes (FLAC and Vorbis) use an internal buffer and an audio converter together in order to convert the audio data as the Source renderer tries to write it.

Those framerates look alright. If you think that's bad, try doing a 960fps render with the Source renderer and see how much time and disk space that takes.