Questions for the Crimson Echoes team

[Truthordeal]

Ok, here's my question, it's a technical question, though and I hope that's ok.

I've started using the ZMV feature of my ZSNES program to upload some footage I've played to Youtube(to avoid sounding like an asinine advertiser, I won't say what or where or why) but the quality is kind of...bad.

I've seen your footage at the CEMemorial, and its pretty high quality, and I was wondering what settings you used to make it so HQ?

Like I said, this thread may only be for gameplay, storyline or hacking questions, and my question might not be relevant to this discussion, but hey, I saw "Questions for the Crimson Echoes team," and thought I would jump on it.

[FaustWolf]

Truth, which codec are you using to dump? I always use the XVID Lossles codec. I believe all video from ZSNES will be dumped in 224x256 frame size.

But the culprit may be any compression you're doing when processing the video in a video editor. In VirtualDub, I've made sure to use the "direct stream copy" feature as much as possible after Ramsus pointed out to me that the very first preview we did for CE had loss-of-quality issues due to compression. "Direct Stream Copy" ensures that the video is preserved as-is and not run through a codec during whatever processing phase it's in, whether you're adding music or recutting video segments or whatever.

[Truthordeal]

Yes, XVID Lossless.

I'll have to look into Virtual Dub to see about the quality issue.

But will I need the LAME encoder to compress everything in the original ZMV or can I do that in Virtual Dub as well and yield the same results?

[FaustWolf]

Is LAME the MP3 encoder? If so, ZSNES should dump separate video and audio streams unless you manually specify for the streams to be muxed as it's dumping. Usually I keep them seperate, and mux them in VirtualDub later with the "Direct Stream Copy" option turned on. That preserves the video quality while allowing you to do different processes in the video editor.

The reason why I keep the video and audio streams separate is that I like to do some extra processing on the audio in Audacity sometimes before interleaving it in VirtualDub.

EDIT: Oh, I guess there's an option for compressing the WAV/MP3 dumped by LAME? I always use whatever the default option is for that; not sure whether it's supposed to compress by default.

[Truthordeal]

No, you have to use the LAME .mp3 encoder for it to compress automatically. I probably should have made that more clear in my last post.

Oh, well, anyway, I'm definitely looking into your suggestions.

Thanks a bunch!