Screen Recorder Gold

[Tomuk]

Being a complete novice at screen capture to video, I followed Lin's example and downloaded a copy of

Screen Recorder Gold. But I am having one or two problems.

1. The file size of even a short movie (5 mins or so) are very large.

2. I am using the default preferences...... has anybody got any recomendations?.

3. I have been hearing a lot about DIVX Pro 5.2.0 codec from Lin and others. How do I obtain a copy and install into preferences?.

4. My final problem (if the above is not enough) I seem at have a sync problem audio to video...ie.. the sound track seems to be running slightly behind the video.

Please can anybody help before I tear out what little hair I have left.

Tom

[Lin Evans]

Being a complete novice at screen capture to video, I followed Lin's example and downloaded a copy of

Screen Recorder Gold. But I am having one or two problems.

1. The file size of even a short movie (5 mins or so) are very large.

2. I am using the default preferences...... has anybody got any recomendations?.

3. I have been hearing a lot about DIVX Pro 5.2.0 codec from Lin and others. How do I obtain a copy and install into preferences?.

4. My final problem (if the above is not enough) I seem at have a sync problem audio to video...ie.. the sound track seems to be running slightly behind the video.

Please can anybody help before I tear out what little hair I have left.

Tom

Hi Tom,

Yes, the default sizes of AVI will generally be very large because you must remember that the program is capturing a larger number of frames per second. For example, if you use a frame rate of 30 frames per second, a sixty second clip would contain 1800 separate images. If you multiply even a moderate sized image in bytes times 1800 you have a substantial amount of data.

So the way you minimize is to cut down on the frame rate. For these tutorials, I've been using 15 frames per second, but even that produces some fairly large AVI files. BJC uses 3 frames per second and gets excellent results, but remember that the lower the frame rate the more "jerky" the movie where movement is concerned. Of course the other side of this coin is the amount of "compression" that the codec places on the files. Compression saves storage space and makes it more convenient to upload/download a file, but has no effect on actual "memory" when the file is actually loaded into memory and run on your computer. Even jpg files which are highly compressed anyway must be expanded in memory when they are actually viewed.

Years ago when computers didn't have a lot of memory like they do today, we used to play jokes on fellow photographers by scanning high resolution images at high dpi rates then creating a highly compressed jpg. We would give this jpg to unsuspecting novice computer users who would then lock up their computers when they tried to load the file. An innocent looking jpg with a file size of perhaps 400K bytes might actually be hiding a true memory requirement of 40 megabytes or more. This happened in the days when computers only typically had a few megabytes of RAM.

So some codecs seem to have better "compression" algorithms than others, and the DivX Pro codec seems to have some excellent characteristics. If you downloaded Screen Recorder Gold before last night, please uninstall it and download it again. I discovered a bug in the way the program reads codecs as it loads and informed the developer who corrected the problem last night and posted the new version. So download the latest version and go to the "Options" tab the click on "Preferences" then beside "Compressor" use the down arrow to again check whether you may already have the DIV X Pro codec. If you don't have it you can do a quick search on the Web or you can go here to download it:

http://www.divx.com/divx/windows/codec/

Best regards,

Lin

[Tomuk]

Hi Tom,

Yes, the default sizes of AVI will generally be very large because you must remember that the program is capturing a larger number of frames per second. For example, if you use a frame rate of 30 frames per second, a sixty second clip would contain 1800 separate images. If you multiply even a moderate sized image in bytes times 1800 you have a substantial amount of data.

So the way you minimize is to cut down on the frame rate. For these tutorials, I've been using 15 frames per second, but even that produces some fairly large AVI files. BJC uses 3 frames per second and gets excellent results, but remember that the lower the frame rate the more "jerky" the movie where movement is concerned. Of course the other side of this coin is the amount of "compression" that the codec places on the files. Compression saves storage space and makes it more convenient to upload/download a file, but has no effect on actual "memory" when the file is actually loaded into memory and run on your computer. Even jpg files which are highly compressed anyway must be expanded in memory when they are actually viewed.

Years ago when computers didn't have a lot of memory like they do today, we used to play jokes on fellow photographers by scanning high resolution images at high dpi rates then creating a highly compressed jpg. We would give this jpg to unsuspecting novice computer users who would then lock up their computers when they tried to load the file. An innocent looking jpg with a file size of perhaps 400K bytes might actually be hiding a true memory requirement of 40 megabytes or more. This happened in the days when computers only typically had a few megabytes of RAM.

So some codecs seem to have better "compression" algorithms than others, and the DivX Pro codec seems to have some excellent characteristics. If you downloaded Screen Recorder Gold before last night, please uninstall it and download it again. I discovered a bug in the way the program reads codecs as it loads and informed the developer who corrected the problem last night and posted the new version. So download the latest version and go to the "Options" tab the click on "Preferences" then beside "Compressor" use the down arrow to again check whether you may already have the DIV X Pro codec. If you don't have it you can do a quick search on the Web or you can go here to download it:

http://www.divx.com/divx/windows/codec/

Best regards,

Lin

Hi! Lin,

I apologise for taking over 24hrs to reply as it took me this long to digest you very comprehensive advise and act upon it.

I followed the link you provided and was surprised to find that I had to purchase a whole package of software just to get the DIVX Pro Codec which comes free with the bundle. The Total cost was only £13 sterling so was cheap at the price.

After purchase and installation, I proceeded to carry out some tests (video quality, sound sync and overall file size) I was surprised to find that with a frame rate set at 15 as you suggested, I was getting equally good results from a codec I already had on my system (Cinepak codec by Radius) , a lesson learned is a lesson shared .

My screen capture videos are now very good quality and it is mainly down to you, Thanks once again.

Tom.