I have created three more videos and posted them on YouTube for those who may be interested in comparing them. All three videos were created by the same Panda3D program.
All three were captured using CamStudio. The Microsoft Video 1 compressor option was used to create a large AVI file in each case.
The last two videos were captured on a different computer than the first.
For the first video identified as A below, the size of the Panda3D output window was adjusted to 640x480 and CamStudio was set to capture a 640x480 region.
For the second and third videos identified as B and C below, the Panda3D output window was adjusted to 320x240 and CamStudio was set to capture a 320x240 region.
The YouTube URLs for the three videos are:
A.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3zFejKsEgo
B.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8OE58QcT6k
C.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeH80wuj--Q
Windows Movie Maker was used to add a title to the beginning of each video and to write an output WMV file using the output encoding options shown below. The size of each output WMV file that was uploaded to YouTube is also shown below.
A-Size = 18,712KB,
Encoding = Windows High-Quality Video (large, 640x480)
B-Size = 4,400KB,
Encoding = Windows High-Quality Video (small, 320x240)
C-Size = 1,594KB,
Encoding = Windows Video for broadband (512 kbps, 320x240)
As you can see, the size of the third video was less than one-tenth the size of the first video, and was only about one-third the size of the second video.
Paraphrasing an old TV show, your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to compare the visual quality of the three videos and to decide for yourself which of these three options is best considering both file size and visual quality.
By the way, the ground doesn't appear to be in focus in the original output from Panda3D. That loss of focus is not a result of capturing the output in a video and uploading it to YouTube. However, everything else in the picture was well-focused, crisp, and clean in the original Panda3D output window. In particular the artifacts that you see in the white fur areas were not in the original Panda3D output. Further, there was very little of that in the WMV files when they were played in their original size. Most of that was caused by the format conversion and size change that took place at YouTube.
Dick Baldwin
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