Greetings all,

As a newly Registered User and Supporter of Bandicam, I would like to share a video capture test that I did for my gaming blog, playing Diablo3 yesterday (Launch Day), woot!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBOuev_r374



The video is short, but I was mainly testing a few things:
1) D3's performance, with all options maxed out
2) Capture quality of Bandicam's 'For Edit Premiere/Sony Vegas' Preset, performance/lag of using it
3) The Logo/Watermark capability of Bandicam
4) YouTube's quality maintainability

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
For people trying out Bandicam and finding your recordings are choppy/laggy on playback (when looking at the original generated/recorded file), you should find that compressing it to a file with a smaller bitrate/size in a format you will keep it permanently in, it will play back that file just fine


** The above 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] because the original upload was down-sized to 1280x720 by YouTube and looked much worse, see here below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m0B9OOOJGA




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 worked great, 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.

If you are having problems with Color Banding, try MJPEG as your 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 with these settings. The recompressed MPEG-4, resized to 1080p file, has an average bitrate of 20Mbps and is about 140MB in size.

While this Preset in Bandicam is designed for compatibility with editing programs (every frame an independent Keyframe or I-Frame (Information Frame) that can be cut/started from), an original was uploaded directly from the recording/generated file to test the effects of uploading to YouTube from an original recording.

If you are planning on editing, Bandicam's 'For Edit Premiere/Sony Vegas' Preset has wonderful compatibility with video editing programs (I use Sony Vegas and it recognized the recording instantly, using it without a problem)

The Result:
Recorded at 1680x1050, YouTube had resized that one 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, and since it was not 1080p, it simply scaled it down.

The resized-from-1050p-to-1080p version 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, Bandi! I'm glad I bought your product

Hi,

Thank you for your sharing the high-quality video.
We have added your video in Diablo 3 recording manual.
http://www.bandicam.com/product/diablo- ... recording/

Hi,

Thank you for your sharing the high-quality video.
We have added your video in Diablo 3 recording manual.
http://www.bandicam.com/product/diablo- ... recording/

Thanks, that's great!

I have finished the entire write-up at the blog on this Bandicam/Diablo3 Preset Quality test here:
http://gametipsandmore.blogspot.ca/2012 ... icams.html
There is not much different from this post however, other than a comparison of still frames from the videos and only slightly more explanation.

I am having a ton of fun with Bandicam and it is working great, thanks again.

Thanks for the tech details. I bought Bandicam the other day, and I've been playing about with settings trying to get the best quality for Youtube videos for my gaming based vLog.

One thing that does annoy me about Bandicam though is the slightly washed out feel when red & green text are on screen. Also Red text tends to get very artifacted for some reason, regardless of output codec or quality used.

This is present in both the videos above, and renders the red text completely unreadable in the 720p video.

Thanks for the tech details. I bought Bandicam the other day, and I've been playing about with settings trying to get the best quality for Youtube videos for my gaming based vLog.

One thing that does annoy me about Bandicam though is the slightly washed out feel when red & green text are on screen. Also Red text tends to get very artifacted for some reason, regardless of output codec or quality used.

This is present in both the videos above, and renders the red text completely unreadable in the 720p video.

Hi and I'm glad it was helpful I hoped it would be for people that wanted it, so I included a bunch of technical details for those that could use it.

Red is hard to compress without loss, due to the frequency needed to represent it. A quick search of 'red text video' will show that both Green and Red are difficult to deal with. Unless you record Uncompressed, the video will compress it and Red loses it's high response (this doesn't happen with just screenshots). FRAPS was recording in YUV24 (8-bits per pixel) by Default but there is a checkbox that is supposed to allow "uncompressed" recording. I think it goes to YUV 4:4:4 bpp (24b) but unless you record/stay uncompressed rgb (basically a sequence of bitmaps - very large file sizes await), you will lose some bandwidth on the colours and Red and Green (against black especially) will be affected (again, only in video/movies, not on a screenshot of one image from the video frame buffer directly).

The above video that was recorded was 1050p (my monitor maximum vertical at the time) and YouTube recompresses it 'yet again' for both the 1080p (even if it is already 1080p) and down. The 720p and lower do not represent at all what the original recording looks like, as YT uses a very lossy algorith it seems. It is understandable that they have to recompress everything to save space.

So, Red and Green (esp. against black) are hard to deal with, it's a limitation in the video codecs.
That looks like an emulated game. If you let me know the game, I can try mess with different settings and see if I can help out with finding what can reduce the affect the most.

Good luck!

I'm using it for Diablo 3 as well

Mainly though it will be for World of Warcraft videos, where error text and incoming damage are displayed in red text, and healing and guild chat are represented in green text.

It is something I'm willing to try and workaround (such as applying unsharpen mask and contrast filters in Premiere Pro), but this makes the render/export time x3 as long

I'm currently working on a 1680*1050 monitor as well, and am hoping to upgrade ASAP to a 1920*1080 native resolution monitor, but in the meantime I'm upscaling it to 1728*1080 as you suggested which seems to work ok.

Thanks for the input so far though

BTW your blog appears to have disappeared from Blogger?

...
Thanks for the input so far though

BTW your blog appears to have disappeared from Blogger?

Just popping in to say You're Welcome I'm glad those tips helped

Yes, working with Google to get the Blog back up, hopefully it will be available again soon...

Have fun!