SrcDemo² - Render smoother Source engine movies, faster.

[WindPower]

Released a new build today. You can download it from http://code.google.com/p/srcdemo2/downloads/list as usual.
Changes include:

• Fixed audio format always being FLAC despite selecting "WAV (buffered)" or "Ogg vorbis"
• Added pretty icon to command-line executable.

The source code is available here.

[dubel_07]

WindPower, first of all, this is genius. I am astonished at how easy the program is.
I am mid recording a series of Left 4 Dead demos (I felt like major overkill for some idiotic reason) and I was wondering the approximate size requirements for a given setting of, say, a 60 second clip at various settings. For example, I recorded via the source recorder a 15 minute sequence of tga screenies at 60 fps at 1080p and it came out around 230 gb (+/- a few). How does this compare?

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by dubel_07

WindPower, first of all, this is genius. I am astonished at how easy the program is.
I am mid recording a series of Left 4 Dead demos (I felt like major overkill for some idiotic reason) and I was wondering the approximate size requirements for a given setting of, say, a 60 second clip at various settings. For example, I recorded via the source recorder a 15 minute sequence of tga screenies at 60 fps at 1080p and it came out around 230 gb (+/- a few). How does this compare?

Well, if you want to keep losslessness, you would use PNGs and they weigh about 2.4 MB per frame, so at 60 fps you would need 2.4*60*15*60/1024 = 126 GB. If you want less, you could use JPGs which still look pretty good at ~1 MB per frame, which would give you 52.75 GB for 15 minutes at 60 fps.

But if you're going to use SrcDemo2, you might as well record at much higher framerates like 600 or 1200 or 1800 or something (and still keep the same required size on disk as 60fps).

[dubel_07]

Now the other problem I had is that in order to export a .tga sequence from the Source recorder it took about 90 minutes at 60 fps in 1080p. I just finished recording the same clip with SrcDemo2 and it took I kid you not 9 hours. Did I do something wrong? I don't think it's supposed to take that long.

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by dubel_07

Now the other problem I had is that in order to export a .tga sequence from the Source recorder it took about 90 minutes at 60 fps in 1080p. I just finished recording the same clip with SrcDemo2 and it took I kid you not 9 hours. Did I do something wrong? I don't think it's supposed to take that long.

If you're using the OS X version then I do hear it has performance problems, but if you're not then no, it should be much faster. Did you really use the same framerate for SrcDemo2 as you did for Source Recorder (which would be 60 frames per second and blendrate 1 since you're not using any blending)? I suspect you did use blending in order to get such a time difference. If you did use blending (for example, the default of 32 frames per frame), then the effective rendering framerate would be 60*32 = 1920 frames per second.
Now if you say you can render 15 minutes of 60 frames per second in 90 minutes, then it would take 32 times as much time to render what SrcDemo2 had to render, which means it would have taken Source Recorder 48 hours, as opposed to SrcDemo2's 9 hours.
(Again this only holds if you did use a blendrate of 32)

[dubel_07]

Here's what I used for settings:


On top of the time commitment, the sprites and models were sliding around for the duration of the demo and warping horribly.

[dubel_07]

And now I can't seem to delete the screenshot sequence :O

EDIT: Deleted them. Still takes forever to record.

[WindPower]

Then nope, don't know what would cause such slow performance. The models sliding and warpin around sound like a demo playback bug though, not an SrcDemo2 one.

Also, the recording settings you have there are exactly equivalent to recording at 30 frames per second due to the shutter angle.

[dubel_07]

Originally Posted by WindPower

Then nope, don't know what would cause such slow performance. The models sliding and warpin around sound like a demo playback bug though, not an SrcDemo2 one.

Also, the recording settings you have there are exactly equivalent to recording at 30 frames per second due to the shutter angle.

I checked with my demo and there are no corruptions. I'm going to try recording at a stupid-high FPS at a different resolution to see if it makes a difference. I'll keep you posted; I appreciate all the help.

[dubel_07]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37314573/testvideos.mp4
Tests of A. Fraps, B. Source Recorder, C. SrcDemo2

I want this to work really badly but I can't seem to get it to play correctly.

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by dubel_07

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/37314573/testvideos.mp4
Tests of A. Fraps, B. Source Recorder, C. SrcDemo2

I want this to work really badly but I can't seem to get it to play correctly.

Yes, that looks like Left 4 Dead's demo playback bug indeed. You can see that bug in action here; the higher the framerate, the more intense the jitter is. There are some suggested workarounds in the Facepunch thread but I haven't tried them myself, so you should ask the people there~

[dubel_07]

Originally Posted by WindPower

Yes, that looks like Left 4 Dead's demo playback bug indeed. You can see that bug in action here; the higher the framerate, the more intense the jitter is. There are some suggested workarounds in the Facepunch thread but I haven't tried them myself, so you should ask the people there~

Aww, that's too bad. I guess I'll try it once more with a different recording FPS. Hypothetically, what is the optimum FPS to record a long shot using SrcDemo2 in L4D in your opinion? (aka, make it work for me :P)

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by dubel_07

Aww, that's too bad. I guess I'll try it once more with a different recording FPS. Hypothetically, what is the optimum FPS to record a long shot using SrcDemo2 in L4D in your opinion? (aka, make it work for me :P)

I don't know, I've never used it for Left 4 Dead or Left 4 Dead 2. The video I linked to shows the extent of the bug at different framerates, so you should take whatever value you find appropriate in that video.

[dubel_07]

Originally Posted by WindPower

I don't know, I've never used it for Left 4 Dead or Left 4 Dead 2. The video I linked to shows the extent of the bug at different framerates, so you should take whatever value you find appropriate in that video.

Ok, I appreciate the help. I'll let you know what I figure out.
Any ideas on why it takes so long to record? Could that be part of the issue with L4D?

[WindPower]

Originally Posted by dubel_07

Ok, I appreciate the help. I'll let you know what I figure out.
Any ideas on why it takes so long to record? Could that be part of the issue with L4D?

No, I doubt it's L4D's fault (check with another Source game to verify).
Check for antivirus software trying to be helpful by scanning every file as it gets created, including all frames rendered by the game in the mountpoint folder; this tends to slow down things a lot, but usually not by that much. If it's not that, I'm not sure what it is.
But if you're not going to use much blending (such at this render-at-60fps-with-blendrate-2 configuration) then SrcDemo2 doesn't bring much benefit over Source Recorder anyway (except the filesize reduction), so you wouldn't lose much by not using it in such cases.