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Poker Video: Misc/Other by DeathDonkey (Micro/Small Stakes)

Great video, was looking for something like this for a while now, thanks!

Are the streaming vids on Deuces in the WMV or flash format (flv/swf)?

Are the streaming vids on Deuces in the WMV or flash format (flv/swf)?

Neither -- they're in MP4 (we'll do a video on the process we use to convert to H264-encoded MP4s in a future Coaches Corner video).

Rob

Choosing the techsmit default codec on the avi is the most easy way probebly, but its not compatible for people that have not installed the codec (which is the case with most people that dont have camtasia installed). Picking the PCM audio is a pretty stupid advise in my opinion, its just a waste of space if you pick a good bitrate and a poor codec if you pick a low bitrate. Its much better to encode the audio in VBR mp3 which is avi compatible.

Choosing the techsmit default codec on the avi is the most easy way probebly, but its not compatible for people that have not installed the codec (which is the case with most people that dont have camtasia installed). Picking the PCM audio is a pretty stupid advise in my opinion, its just a waste of space if you pick a good bitrate and a poor codec if you pick a low bitrate. Its much better to encode the audio in VBR mp3 which is avi compatible.

The MP3 setting on Camtasia (when recording) doesn't save a significant amount of space and tends to cause issues syncing the video after-the-fact with other recording techniques like Skype-recorded calls using Pamela. The main thing about recording in AVI is that it isn't going to be the final format -- you're going to record the camrec and then compress it either to WMV using WMA compression, or to MP4 in which case you'll be using AAC libraries. In either case, it makes sense to have the PCM uncompressed audio format (22.5khz is a fine sampling rate for pure vocal audio through typical headsets), and on some older computers this prevents Camtasia from eating it as badly as it can sometimes.

I've tried just about every recording technique under the sun for these settings and settled on them (TSCC/PCM) as the best for the majority of our users -- it's not something we flippantly decided at all. If we were sharing the AVI in its raw format (which is pretty stupid IMO) I would agree with using more compression on the audio, but since you're going to compress the video stream anyway, you may as well have as close to lossless as possible in the raw file for both video and audio -- hence these recommendations.

The TSCC codec can be downloaded for free here, btw.

Edit: 3000th post! Woo!

Rob

I dont exactly know what you mean by "If we were sharing the AVI in its raw format (which is pretty stupid IMO)" but saying that using avi as a share standard is stupid and on the otherside advocating wmv as a format to share ... is pretty stupid imo . A video using the xvid (divx compatible) codec with the right settings in combination with mp3 audio is compatible on almost any device these days (ipod I dont know? guess not) and is superior to WMV in my opinion (I encoded > 1000 xvid videos).

But well, as pre production the audio should not be much of a problem.

I dont exactly know what you mean by "If we were sharing the AVI in its raw format (which is pretty stupid IMO)" but saying that using avi as a share standard is stupid and on the otherside advocating wmv as a format to share ... is pretty stupid imo . A video using the xvid (divx compatible) codec with the right settings in combination with mp3 audio is compatible on almost any device these days (ipod I dont know? guess not) and is superior to WMV in my opinion (I encoded > 1000 xvid videos).

But well, as pre production the audio should not be much of a problem.

I think we're basically saying the same thing here. I'm not arguing about the efficiencies of the codec (PCM vs MP3). If I were, I wouldn't recommend using a lossless codec for the video compression, which is the majority of the filesize anyway. Basically, I was saying that if you want to produce an easily sharable format, the WMV creation that Chris walks through is the simplest process, because it doesn't require any additional software or codec packs. You can download Camtasia, record the video, and produce.

The purpose of this video is to show how to record and produce videos like we do. Our process is to load a camrec, edit it, level out the audio and check for noise issues, then to produce an AVI from that camrec. From there, we produce a WMV using Camtasia/WMEncoder, and simultaneously use a frontend to mencoder to encode an x264/h264-encoded MP4. That file is used both as a downloadable format and as a Flash Streaming format. Our AVIs are treated as our "master" copy, which is why we keep them in a large filesize format; it allows us to make all of the edits without compressing the data, and then compress the data using programs that specialize in that -- trying to do it from Camtasia isn't the most efficient. In addition to that, we've run into tons of bugs with Camtasia any time we try to produce using anything other than "default" settings -- for example, I just produced a 1-tabling AVI using the MP3 settings @ 44.1khz, Stereo, 128k bitrate, which should be 15KB/s overall on the audio end -- when the file finished producing, though, the AVI was 2x the size of a PCM-encoded AVI. Go figure. That's why we try to let Camtasia do what it's good at, and then take those final AVI files and move them over to programs that specialize in encoding -- it's not the most efficient workflow, but it has given ust he best results overall.

In terms of why we stick with WMVs, the main reason is because of Microsoft's dominance on the Media Player market. From my experience, XViD-encoded files don't always play back on default installations of unupdated software (WMP), but WMV files using the WMV3 codec (which is pretty damned good, FWIW) do. In order to support the greatest number of users in the greatest number of scenarios, the coverage provided by MP4+WMV seems to do the trick well. If Windows Media Player supported H264-encoded files out of the box, we'd really only be using one format (which would be great).

So yeah -- if you want to create an XViD-encoded AVI, this isn't the tutorial for you, because that's not our area of expertise, but we will be doing a followup on this video on "how to compress your AVI files without sacrificing quality."

Hope that helps explain a bit more what we do, and why Chris only covered lossless options in this for AVI production.

Rob

Thanks for the nice response entity. And ofcourse I was not looking for a "xvid encoding tutorial", I was just responding to the previous post and thats why I reffered to xvid, it could be any other free (read: open) and widespread codec.

I understand the choice for WMV since WMP supports it out of the box (WMV is like the only video codec that is installed on XP out of the box?).

Just another quick question: the techsmit codec is lossless with whatever setting you pick?

Just another quick question: the techsmit codec is lossless with whatever setting you pick?

AFAIK yes, I've never tried to tweak its settings but we leave it on the default/lossless settings. The main thing with these vids is we're looking to show (in this particular vid) what you can easily do from Camtasia, if we do another video displaying something like MediaCoder we may talk about the various encoding options, though in that case it's most likely we'd just say "use MP4/h264" as it's best to teach what you know (that, and h264 rules).

Rob