I have the Hauppauge HD PVR, and I use the software that came with it, I also have Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 and I’m curious as to the best way to optimize my settings to get a crisp clean clear video.
My first attempt got me this video. Bad gameplay aside, it was not nearly as clean as I wanted it to and I believe I can make much better videos and I’m looking for advice on best to do that.
So please help me anyone for I am wanting to start a Halo 4 Channel going, I don’t expect to do much but it’s nice to be able to contribute.
-Edit-
My experience with video editing is noob level. I can learn kinda fast but I don’t know much so I will need a decent explanation on the settings to get a decent HD video that doesn’t look like the above I made.
In addition, if there are any better free programs to render in HD that’s good for YouTube feel free to suggest, as I don’t feel like buying another $100+ video editing program, but once again, I will take all suggestions into account.
I use version 11 of the same program so this should work:
One of the main things is setting your project (and render) framerate to 29.97. Then making sure to disable video resampling.
Above you video preview window there should be a little grey button with some lines and an arrow on it: these are your project settings. When you go to ‘file-render as’ click ‘Customise Template’ and make sure the frame rate settings are also 29.97 there. (your xbox 360 outputs at 59.94, but Halo only renders at half that. By cutting out these doubled frames, you are saving yourself time and bandwidth)
Then, on every piece of video footage you have, right click, ‘properties’ then click the radio button ‘Dsiable resample’ - this makes it just select 1 nearest frame for the final video and stops it trying to blur two frames together. This gets rid of a lot of ‘ghosting’ you might be seeing. Reach, with the Temporal Anti-Aliasing will still have ghosting in certain scenes, but this will stop the renderer adding any more.
Make sure it’s set to render a progressive scan video too (Field Order: None). For gods sake don’t introduce interlacing. Square pixels, etc.
One thing I do is always upload in 1080p - and I think you should too if you have the time/bandwidth. YouTube’s encoding settings for video are far from ‘crisp’ and are optimised for low-bandwidth streaming than quality. You can get YouTube playing back something a little closer to what you recorded by rendering your footage into a 1080p, then playing back in 1080p as well. Again, the compression settings YouTube uses means that 1080p probably still won’t look as good as what you uploaded, but it’s something.
p.s. there are pretty much ZERO free, good, HD-capable editing programs. Vegas Movie Studio is also what I settled on without wanting to break the bank. There is also an option from Adobe - Premiere Elements - with a similar price range and feature set. But I preferred the UI of Vegas.