Thirith on 25/1/2021 at 09:18
A question for those of you who record and edit gaming videos:
I've been capturing footage from our Arma 3 sessions and editing them for a while now, but at some point I started realising that the footage I was recording with Nvidia ShadowPlay was no longer synchronised properly when imported into Movie Studio, which was something of a bummer. (Apparently the reason is that ShadowPlay records in Variable Frame Rate, which Movie Studio has some problems with.) So I tried capturing footage via OBS Studio, which gave me beautifully crisp 3440x1440 footage - but when I tried to edit this in Movie Studio, the video preview was so laggy that I simply couldn't edit, as I couldn't get the footage to play smoothly in the editing software.
Which leads me to my question: is there a way I can record footage (ideally at 3440x1440) that looks good, is smooth and works well with Vegas Movie Studio? Or, alternatively, is Movie Studio the problem and I should edit my footage using another program? For the record, the captured gameplay footage I've got is recorded at a bitrate of 50'000 Kbps, the format is mp4 and the encoder is Nvidia NVENC H.264, recommendations I got from people who regularly record, edit and upload gaming videos.
P.S.: I did download DaVinci Resolve 16 and briefly tried that one. It plays the video footage well enough, but it also seems highly prone to crashing, so I'm not sure it's currently an option.
henke on 25/1/2021 at 11:10
Hmm, can you just re-encode the ShadowPlay footage with something to get a stable framerate?
I use Shadowplay and Adobe Premiere, which is good but a kinda pricey monthly cost.
Thirith on 25/1/2021 at 11:14
I tried that, but had the same problem with Movie Studio not playing the footage smoothly, even at Preview or Draft quality, though it may have been the settings I used to re-encode the footage.
Do you know what Premiere Elements is like these days? It might be adequate for the Arma videos. Perhaps I'll download the trial version and give that one a try next time we run an Arma session.
henke on 26/1/2021 at 06:38
Last version of Premiere Elements I used was 2013, but that one worked just fine for relatively simple projects like this. It is what I used for (
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPIuNtUI6OAX_6f72hS1yyOjZXcfuh9Dw) all of my Arma vids. Worked fine with all my Shadowplay footage too. Altho IIRC the encoding options were pretty limited and poor. If you look at some of my earlier vids in motion it can't render all that vegetation crisply. So, yeah, try out the newer version, see what you think.
Thirith on 26/1/2021 at 08:37
Cheers, will do. I'm still hoping I'll somehow get things to work with Vegas Movie Studio, because I've got used to its quirks, but at least I know that there are alternatives. And who knows? Perhaps I'll still manage to get the Variable Frame Rate footage from Shadowplay to work with Movie Studio somehow. That's the weird thing: unless I just didn't notice (which is possible, to be honest), the desyncing problem only started after I'd been doing the videos for a while.
ZylonBane on 26/1/2021 at 22:50
Pfft, I'm still recording with FRAPS, and just transcode its files to high-quality H264 for editing.
As for variable frame rate video, a cursory Googling yields numerous free solutions for converting them to constant frame rate.
Thirith on 27/1/2021 at 06:51
Thanks, ZylonBane, I am aware of that and did try it, but it led to the same problem with Movie Studio as the videos I'd captured using OBS: they wouldn't play smoothly in the editor, so I couldn't edit properly.
Thirith on 30/1/2021 at 12:43
I've figured out the problem - though I had earlier done things that should've fixed it already. I used an older file as a template to work from, but that file had used video footage in a different format (i.e. the VFR of Shadowplay) and had therefore been set to that particular format, which meant that Movie Studio had to change the footage on the fly to match that format. I thought it might be something like this, which is why I had tried to change the project's video format to match my footage, but somehow Movie Studio still reverted to the old format. In the end, I just started a new project from scratch, imported the footage, and hey presto! Movie Studio takes over the video format and everything works fine.