Updated 18/8/2006

Xvid guide refined, how to do audio (mp3) is now included.

Right.

So, youre standing here (sitting?) infront of your computer with some fraps'd footage. But damn, it's huge! REALLY huge! Freaking unimaginably huge! What you need to do, after you've done any editing/cutting to it (which I won't cover, its for you to find out how to do that ), is to compress, or encode it.

Encoding basically means that you take out any part in the movie that the human eye can't see. What both XviD (DivX as well), WMV, and all those so-called "MPEG-4" * codecs do is to combine parts from several frames to create one. Like so:

* (MPEG-4 is a compression standard with different substandards, constantly evolving with more and more features.)

One frame:



The frame after:



Now, since I am not moving the camera, there is little that is different from frame 1 and frame 2. You can take the terrain from frame 1, put on the difference in the casting bar, and other things that move, and voila - you have frame 2 - but its going to be really small because theres barely any info written to it - only that which is changing.

This is what a MPEG-4 codec will write to frame 2:



The target of target frame appears, the casting bar moves slightly, and the coooldowns on the action bars turn around a few degrees.

Now. Myself I'm a user of Vegas Video, so thats what I'll cover here. The settings for xvid do look the same in any program, so you should be able to figure it out anyway.

This is how your vegas project settings should look. The stuff encircled in red is whats important.



Resolution can vary of course. 640x512 is half 1280x1024 which is what most people record at, but set it to whatever your footage is.

Frame rate should be 30 - this is pretty much the limit for what the human eye can notice, and most computers dont record at much more than 30 fps anyway.

Leave Field Order at "None (Progressive scan)". For gods sake, do NOT set this to anything else unless you really know what youre doing - It sucks to watch interlaced movies imho :/

Pixel aspect ratio is 1.0 for normal computer monitors so that should work for most people.

Now, for the actual encoding. WMV, the easiest one by far, comes first, while XVID comes second.

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Encoding with WMV (or: The easy way)


Choose this instead of AVI:



Press "Custom...", make sure the quality on the first tab is set to "Best", then head on to the "Audio" tab:



Use these settings, it should be good enough for anything pretty much.

Move to the video tab, and:



The stuff in red are the important ones.

Set these the same as your project.

The average bit rate looks a bit differently than the XviD one. 2 M means 2 mbit, you could type 2000 K if youd like that better (2000 kbit, the same as xvid uses).

Note that this box uses bit per second if you just type in a value, while xvid uses kbit per second by default. So DONT forget your "M" or "K" after there. 2-3 M is good quality. Over 3 M is overkill.

The remaining two tabs aren't terribly interesting, so just leave them.

Now just save the movie and wait - takes a lot of time, wmv is slow, but you'll get it out eventually, hopefully with nice results.

Encoding with XviD (or: "The-damn-tricky-but-produces-the-best-results-says-Thiras-method")

First of all, you need to download and install the XviD codec from www.koepi.org.

Now, go File -> Render as...

This is what you should see:



Choose .AVI from the list and press the "Custom..." button.

First tab, set Video Rendering Quality to "Best" if it isn't already.

Second tab is where its interesting.

The important stuff is marked, again, with red.



Set these exactly the way you set your project settings, then hit "Configure."



The interesting stuff is marked in red - everything else is fine and should be left as is.

First, set the dropdown box to "Twopass - 1st pass".

Set the top dropdown box to "Unrestricted"

Press the "More..." button at the top.

This is what you shall find. The two other tabs are cool, so just care about this one.



Profile @ level has to do with xvid restricting certain options for compability with hardware players etc. We dont give a damn since we're gonna play it on a computer anyway, unrestricted is good.

Quantization type has to do with how xvid puts things together. H.263 is one of the previously mentioned substandards of MPEG-4 and it should be left at that.

Adaptive Quantization is a feature that tries to remove bits from big areas filled with one color where the human eye won't notice it, and add them at places where they are more needed. However nice this may sound, it's a highly experimental feature and tends to make your movie look "blocky". I recommend leaving this off.

Interlaced Encoding is to be left OFF. OFF OFF OFF. This is what you set before in Project Settings. Progressive is just tons better than interlaced, I can't stress this enough.

Quarter Pixel is another feature that *may* improve your video quality slightly depending on what it contains. What it will most likely do is degrade the quality however, so leave it off.

Global Motion Compensation adds some support for when the whole picture moves in a direction, this saves bits for your movie and it's good to have on.

B-VOPs should be left on if you want good quality. A B-VOP is a frame which takes info from both the frame behind and the frame infront to make up its content. The example I posted above would most likely turn out as a B-VOP (or a b-frame) since there is little changing in it.

The max consecutive BVOPs, quantizer ratio and quantizer offset should be left as they are. Packed bitstream is recommended to be checked as well.

Now, press OK and go into "Advanced Options..."



Motion search precision should be set to "6 - Ultra High", VHQ mode to 4 - Wide Search. These settings are the slowest, but produce the best looking movies, so those are the settings I recommend you use.

Use VHQ for bframes too should be checked, as well as Use Chroma Motion, two features that will increase the looks of your movie at the cost of some encoding speed.

Turbo disables some stuff in the encoding process - it will go faster, but it can theoretically degrade your image - you should leave it off and just wait the few extra minutes this could've shaved off for you.

Frame drop ratio MUST be at 0, otherwise it will skip some frames and not encode all of it - screwing up your movie nicely.

Maximum I-frame interval should be around 10x your framerate, so leave as is.

Next tab:



A quantizer is basically a quality setting. Each frame is assigned a quantizer, where 1 is the highest, and 31 is the lowest.

You want all "Max something-frame quantizer"-s to be at 2. 1 is indeed highest quality, BUT - it's a LOT larger in physical size, but produces an image almost identical to one which uses quantizer 2. In the end having frames with quantizer 1 will probably just end up lowering the quality of your movie since they steal bits so nicely.

So. All max quantizers at 2 and all min quantizers at 31.

Check Trellis quantization, it should save you a few bits as well.

Press ok.

Save the movie.

When its done, do it all over, except change xvid to "Twopass - 2nd pass" and set the bitrate somewhere between 2000-3000. Higher than 3000 is overkill in any case.

THE PART ABOVE IS VERY IMPORTANT

Save it again.

Now go to File -> Render As... again, select mp3:

Save it with these settings:

When it's been saved, download (if you don't have it already) VirtualDubMod.

In VirtualDubMod, open the SECOND PASS you saved before in Vegas.

Go to the video menu, and set it to Direct Stream Copy.

Go to the "Stream List":

Heres where you add the MP3 you saved in vegas before.

If there already is something in the list (like in the picture), double click it so the diagonal lines appear, indicating that track is "disabled" (it wont be saved).

Next hit the "add" button, choose your mp3, close the stream list, go File -> Save As... It should only take a few seconds because youre basically just copying the stuff from one place to another.

WIN!!!!

/Thiras