Steam Community :: Video :: Quality Test - Diablo III and Bandicam ('For Edit' Preset) / Upload Test (1080p)

Quality Test - Diablo III and Bandicam ('For Edit' Preset) / Upload Test (1080p)

Diablo III

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Testing Bandicam's "For Edit" Preset, designed for creating game recordings that are compatible with video editors for later editing and reviewing. 
Tips For Game Recording can be found at our blog here:
http://gametipsandmore.blogspot.ca/2012/05/tips-for-game-recording-currently-text.html

Recorded with: Bandicam 
 - v.179204 (Latest at time of this post)
 - 'For Edit (Premiere, Sony Vegas)' Preset
 - MJPEG, "Full Size", 80%quality (Preset), 30fps, Uncompressed PCM Audio at 48kHz
 - Logo option (our GTAM watermark), lower right, 10% opacity

Game: Diablo III (Retail Release) Launch Day
- Witch Doctor, Cathedral Level 3
- Texture Quality: High
- Shadow Quality: High
- Physics: High
- Clutter Density: High
- "Anti-Aliasing" checkbox ticked ON

Resolution: 1680x1050 (1.6AR) recorded at 1680x1050 ("Full Size")**
Filtering: 4xMSAA, 4xAF, set in Control Panel of Videocard
Framerate while not recording: 80-100fps
Framerate while recording: 80-100fps

With the Bandicam "For Edit" Preset, every frame is an independent Keyframe or I-Frame (Information Frame), which is a type of frame that can be 'cut' or started from in video editing programs (technically, every frame is a JPG picture). Also, the audio is Uncompressed, which means that any video editor should be able to recognize the sound data. Errors in programs like Virtualdub saying "Error initializing audio stream decompression" or Sony's Vegas showing "Stream attributes could not be determined" will not occur and these will open the audio just fine with this setting.

**This video was Lanzcos3 resized from the original 1680x1050 capture to a 1728x1080 (1.6 AR) MPEG-4 H.264 AVC/AAC file with a bitrate of 20000kbps (audio at 384kbps) using a Deblocking Filter setting of +0+0.

I chose this clip because it was a good example of both fast movements/action on the screen, as well as slow/non-moving parts, including text. It has dark and light areas, high contrast edges, and tests wide area panning as well.

Bandicam's "For Edit" Preset seemed to hold up well with clear text and action in the original recording, while flatter, darker parts were not overly compressed which would create excessive macroblocks or be too smoothed out. There were some Gibbs Effects/Mosquito Noise around text and on some of the button logos in the original recording, but you had to look closely to see it, which is pretty good for not being a 100% Quality setting. The very small amount of color banding present in the original recording was somewhat generated by the Game Engine (seen in the lower-right quadrant of this video, and in the Diablo3 login screen around the moon, etc.), and there shouldn't be much, due to using MJPEG as a recording codec.

Average bitrate of the original was about 40Mbps, which meant a writing stream to the disk of about 5MB/s, which any hard drive can handle (recorded onto a drive capable of 150MB/s). 
Framerate during recording was maintained at 80-100fps (same framerate as not recording). 
The original 1 minute file is about 300MB in size, recording with these settings. The recompressed MPEG-4, resized to 1080p file, has an average bitrate of 20Mbps and is about 140MB in size.

Recorded at 1680x1050, YouTube had resized that original upload to 720 vertical lines. The Gibbs Effects were no longer present because of this, but excessive smoothing and other compression artifacts were introduced. Text was far less readable and nothing on the screen was as crisp as the original 1050p recording. Aliasing was also introduced. This was unfortunate but understandable however, as YouTube can no doubt not keep 'everything' at 'very high bitrates' on their servers.

This resized-from-1050p-to-1080p version then, has maintained much of its detail after uploading to YouTube. The text is closer to the crispness of the original recording, and there is only slight smoothing and deblocking being done. There are some macroblock artifacts and color banding accentuation in the darker areas however (for instance, the lower-right quadrant much of the time) but other than that, it is a decent quality version of the 1080p upload.
For those recording at 1680x1050, I recommend upsizing it to 1728x1080 so that YouTube keeps most of the detail of your recordings.

Well done, YouTube (and Bandicam).

For those interested in a comparison of Fraps vs Dxtory vs Bandicam that was done and the results/filesizes/quality/etc.:
http://gametipsandmore.blogspot.ca/2012/05/testrun-quick-edition-fraps-vs-dxtory.html

Tips For Game Recording (to help with laggy, slow performance) can be found here:
http://gametipsandmore.blogspot.ca/2012/05/tips-for-game-recording-currently-text.html

A few more tips for game recording, specifically with Bandicam, can be found at the Bandicam website here:
http://www.bandicam.com/faqs/how_to_reduce_lag_when_recording/

Have fun!

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