This video is purely a quality test showing some Borderlands 2 gameplay. For anyone looking for help finding their perfect settings here's what I've discovered after trial and error.

Bandicam: Full Size, 29.97fps, 90quality, Motion JPEG, PCM, 48.0KHz, stereo

Rendering in Sony Vegas for YouTube: Internet HD 1080p preset under MainConcept AVC/AAC (*.mp4;*.avc) exports as .mp4.

Nice compromises for great recording quality, not too big of a file size, doesn't lag my system. Here's the video (and remember that YouTube automatically drops some of the quality themselves, also note the link only takes you to 720p but you can go up to 1080p if you would like): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25ZIVcB ... tu.be&hd=1


Hope this is helpful!!!

EDIT: Here's a tutorial video I made on getting it setup with these settings: https://youtu.be/d1A29IDRNOM?hd=1

Hi thanks for sharing. I'm curious as to what "not too big of a file size" means in terms of exact numbers. Thanks! I output a 10 minute video at full size, 30fps, 80 qual, Motion Jpeg, PCM 44k and I believe the final size was 5.6GB or so. After processing in premiere pro cs3 in order to remove mic hiss, I finished with a 11GB file or so. To me that was just way to much, granted I'm not a pro nor am I going to be doing a whole lot of processing etc. The less I have to do, the better. That's why I picked Bandicam. After testing a ton of codecs including some externals, I've decided to just use the standard MPEG-1 set for 720p at 30fps and quality of 40, with PCM 44.1k as my recording sessions. I tested out a 3 minute 26 second clip and ended up with a little over 320MB, which for compression/quality vs in-game performance of about 30 fps with Bandicam running, was pretty great for me not having to render for an hour (which is how long it took 10 minutes of video) and then wait for probably 5 hours or so for the 11GB video to upload to youtube.

40 seconds is one thing, but what are your larger file sizes coming out to, how long does it take for them to render when you process them, and how long does it take to upload them to Youtube?

Thanks for your time and thanks for detailing out your experience so far!

I didn't remember the exact numbers so I recorded my desktop three times, once in 80, once in 90, and once at 100 quality for Motion JPEG, here are the results.

(Per Minute)

80q: 285 MB
90q: 297 MB
100q: 755 MB

This shows you that you can get slightly better quality for very little file size, so why not? Obviously the jump to 100 quality is a huge hit to file sizes which is why I don't use it.

Note that I'm doing this in 29.97 FPS which shouldn't make a huge difference, but seems to be the better option from what I've read. I responded to you about my headset on YouTube but I'll mention it here as well. My headset gave some nasty hissing over 3.5mm and I was not interested in editing the audio to remove hissing every time I made a video. So I played around and found that over USB there was zero hissing, so if you don't have a USB headset I recommend getting one. I did zero audio editing in the YouTube video that you watched.

If your file size doubled after rendering it in Premiere Pro then you're using the wrong codec/settings. For my tutorial video that you watched, the footage before editing was 2.7 GB and five minutes long. After editing it was 3 1/2 minutes long and came out to 313 MB when rendered as an .mp4 in 1080p using Sony Movie Studio (it's a budget version of their Vegas movie editor). That is what I uploaded to YouTube.

MPEG-1 in 720p at 40 quality seems like it would be very low quality, but maybe I'm off base here. Note that my video of similar length came out to a similar file size using higher quality settings and a higher resolution. I think it's not what you're recording in Bandicam that's the problem, I think you're using incorrect rendering settings in Premiere Pro which are causing the exported videos to be unnecessarily bloated in size.

I think my 3 1/2 minute video in 1080p took roughly 10-15 minutes to render. I have a pretty good machine though (freshly built) but I still think your settings are off in Premiere and fixing those would likely do wonders. What file format are you exporting them as? And note that sometimes there are multiple ways to export a file even if they use the same extension so that doesn't always tell the whole story. Maybe you can find comparable settings in Premiere, here are the options that I use in Sony Movie Studio when rendering for YouTube (note that these are all default settings for their "Internet HD 1080p" rendering option, so I didn't change anything).

Description: Use this setting to create an MP4 (AVC/AAC) file for progressive internet downloads.
Audio: 192 Kbps, 48,000 Hz, 16 Bit, Stereo, AAC
Video: 29.970 fps, 1920x1080 Progressive, YUV, 12 Mbps
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.000

The file exports as an .mp4. Unless you're attached to Adobe Premiere I'd recommend trying out Sony Movie Studio. I'm assuming you either have a student discount or torrented it since Premiere Pro is insanely priced, and Premiere Elements isn't very good from what I hear. Sony Movie Studio is a budget version of Sony Vegas and you can get it legally for around $75 which is why I went with it (it's also highly reviewed). I'm actually still on the free trial but I'm definitely getting it. Glad someone found my video useful, and I'm sure you'll have plenty of new information to digest in this huge post.

So it looks like recording a 10 minute clip with the MPJEG in Bandicam would have a file size of about 2.9GB using your settings at 90% quality.

I'm a web developer/graphic designer (although I generally don't work with video editing) that's why I have CS3, which by now is quite old. I'm in a professional field now so I don't need to --spam-- anything anymore lol! I can actually buy software, which is a nice change. I love supporting companies that make good products. The CS3 software I bought quite some time ago when I was doing more freelance work. I've never really used Premiere Pro for much and my lack of video encoding knowledge is due to that.

I'm doing some number running and it seems that your 3.5 min clip would have been about a little over a GB (1039mb or so) and that took your machine 10-15 minutes to process. I'll have to do some tests of my own, although I generally am pretty drained after work ha!

My machine is definitely getting a bit long in the tooth, amd 720be with 4g of ddr2 running one drive with 600gb free space (the drive is much larger but that's the free space.) If I really wanted to get serious with video rendering, I'd build a new box, but in all reality, I want the least amount of work when recording pc games ha! Like most things, I'll start out with this recording video period as something I'm playing with and eventually put more and more time into it, but for now I'm just running numbers like I usually do. I like collecting data on things before I really push them.

I did buy a license to this software last night after about 10-15 test videos, and I'm quite pleased with the minimal work involved in outputting a quality video.

I've only output one file that I've rendered in Premiere Pro, and that came from a 5gb file (10 min time) output from Bandicam with the "Premiere Pro/Vegas" settings being used and the PCM sound, and after I rendered with Premiere I exported as a quicktime mov with the h.264 encoding. I'm pretty sure I imported the video file with some custom settings that I had to create as none of the presets in Premiere CS3 had what I needed. It appears after a little searching that the newer versions of Premiere have better codecs associated and better setting. I'm sure my lack of knowledge with importing and exporting caused the issues that I originally came up with.

More testing will be needed, although if you're getting good results with Sony Movie Studio I will probably give that a try, especially at only $75. Especially considering that SMS has a trail period available, which to me is always kind of a must with PC Software when trying to see if your setup will work well with it. Borderlands 2 cost $60 plus tax when it was released...putting things into perspective as I usually do, $75 isn't much of a cost, but I'll still try the Sony software first before I buy. I also think that $39 is a hell of a bargain for Bandicam. I was so impressed with the ease of use that I didn't even bother testing Fraps out, which was my initial intention to compare the two product.

Thanks for your input once again! I'll continue to work on my recording process.

Hmm, maybe Sony Movie Studio lowered their price.
$45 - http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudio

Or maybe you meant the Platinum version?
$95 - http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiope

I actually might just mess around more with Premiere before bothering to download one of the others.

Well the cheap version you linked to is version 11, version 12 is the latest and is more expensive, but yes I was referring to Platinum. And it's cheaper on Amazon.

Awesome I totally figured out what I was doing wrong with Premier Pro. Thanks for the information though!