Making Trainz Videos

[Mick_Berg]

I'd like to put up some Trainz videos on my website. How do you get the best quality, smallest file size, etc? I want to use Flash videos on the site, and Fraps for the capture. In my experimenting so far the results haven't been good enough, and if anyone has come up with the correct settings, it would save me a lot of time.
Thanks,
Mick Berg.

 

[Mick_Berg]

Well, that's enough for me, no-one replied to my post after a whole day so I'm going to give up on Trainz, throw my computer, and my laptop, and my wife's Mac, and her Macbook in the trash and go into the garden and eat worms. On second thoughts, maybe I'll have a look at the Fraps Forum. There's some good advice there. And the worms are a bit tough, maybe I'll have a latte instead.
Mick Berg.

 

[Tanvaras]

Hello Mick

With all the fraps capturing I have done over the years I always went too the Fraps forums too get help I needed with converting files too better quality etc. But I usually use what Fraps captures it in, but yes that may be abit too large in file size too put for downloads etc on a website.

I am pretty sure teh Fraps forums will help you out with your question.

One thing thought, keeps ya PC's but might as well throw that Macbook in the bin

Cheers

Trent

 

[Johnk]

Hi Mick,

As a veteran Trainz Forums user you should know that 24 hours is not a long time to wait for a reply. Crikey, I've sometimes waited weeks.

Okay, Fraps does give the best video results, but like any video capture program it just saves a series of (very large) screenshots to your computer's hard disk at the rate of 25+- a second. If you're using full screen mode to run Trainz along with a high resolution monitor and minimal memory, each screenshot can take a while to be saved, thus causing severe flickering on playback.

If you think about all of the above, it takes a pretty powerful computer with heaps of memory just to run Trainz properly. Add to this, a program (FRAPS) that also needs heaps of memory to work properly, you really are fighting an uphill battle.

Here's a couple of things you can try, followed by what I did to get reasonable results:

Reduce your monitor resolution to 800 x 600 or even 640 x 680. The lower the resolution, the smaller each screenshot will be in kilobytes or megabytes.

Only record part of the screen if FRAPS allows this. I use CamStudio and it certainly allows me to do this.

When making videos I actually run Trainz in Windows mode with a resolution of 640 x 680. I then use the "Part Screen" capture in CamStudio to make the window even smaller. Even with a dual core processor, 2 gig of ram, a super fast video card with stacks of memory, plus a SATA hard disk, the results are less than perfect.

I've been thinking about writing a tutorial on this, but I've been on the road for several months working out of Internet cafes and from a NetBook using mobile Internet. I can't do anything until I get home and get in front of decent equipment.