Recording Codec Help/ Editing

[JoshuaProGamer]

Ok so i record with Bandicam cause i like it, and it's simple to use but one thing that is not simple is the Codecs i want to know what is the best codec that's lossless but doesn't make my editing software be slow as hell because as you know the more compressed the recording is the slower your editing software will be at editing it. i did try in bandicam AVI MPEG-1 cause a lot of people said "oh it looks good and doesn't make your FPS eat shit while recording" but when i was done recording a 2 HOUR VIDEO and was going to edit it i noticed the quality was CHOPPY AS HELL, i recorded at 50FPS but it looked like i was looking at 15FPS. So then i tried AVI YV12 which was at first perfect looked beautiful absolutely lossless quality but then i noticed that a 2 hour recording was 556GB's of memory sooooo yeah i can't do that and for some reason my editing software doesn't support AVI YV12 files. So is there any Codec either on Bandicam or External that will give me good quality but also be easy on an editing software?

 

if you're wondering i use Adobe Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve 16, and i do videos for youtube.

 

Edit i am a gamer i don't use Mac to edit so Mac Codecs are a no go

[Staidey]

You should use ShadowPlay if you have Nvidia GPU. That all

[JoshuaProGamer]

7 minutes ago, Adkatka said:

You should use ShadowPlay if you have Nvidia GPU. That all

yeah that's a no go i have always for some reason had problems with ShadowPlay giving me weird audio glitches and being choppy randomly and before you ask yes i have tried changing LITERALLY EVERY SETTING on there to get it to work but it just sucks. Bandicam never gives me any stutters and only effects my FPS by like 2-4 which is nothing.

 

and obviously shadowplay uses H264 which HIGHLY compresses videos which is what i'm trying to avoid because like i said i want my editing software to run smoothly so i can drop new videos on my channel as fast as possible

[mariushm]

AVI is not a codec, it's a container like MP4 , MKV

In the container, you can use various codecs to compress the video content and the audio content. Your file size was super large because Bandicam probably either chose no codec (lossess, lik saving a series of bmp pictures) or chose a default codec with very small compression.

There are lossless codecs which can do good compression, probably one of the best these days if MagicYUV : https://www.magicyuv.com/ - the FREE version is fine for your needs. Other lossless codecs that are well known are HuffYUV or Lagarith.  So you have to go in Bandicam, choose AVI and then choose the codec and its options.

 

 

These codecs will use CPU to compress the captured data, so the games will have less CPU for themselves, so you'll get less FPS.

 

I'd suggest giving up Bandicam and going with OBS. 

You have the choice of sticking with software compression (using x264 to compress captured stuff to h264 with your own settings) or you can use hardware compression and choose some preset that's very high quality, like 40-60 mbps, resulting in a bit lossy but quite high quality captured stuff. 

With the software option, you can configure x264 to use very little cpu but produce high size files, but would still be smaller than lossless avi files.  For example, you may get around 100 GB for one hour of 1080p content instead of 250 GB per hour.

 

If you're interested about that, I can give you more details, but basically it's just using proper custom parameters for the x264 software encoder in the obs configuration.

 

 

[JoshuaProGamer]

13 minutes ago, mariushm said:

AVI is not a codec, it's a container like MP4 , MKV

In the container, you can use various codecs to compress the video content and the audio content. Your file size was super large because Bandicam probably either chose no codec (lossess, lik saving a series of bmp pictures) or chose a default codec with very small compression.

There are lossless codecs which can do good compression, probably one of the best these days if MagicYUV : https://www.magicyuv.com/ - the FREE version is fine for your needs. Other lossless codecs that are well known are HuffYUV or Lagarith.  So you have to go in Bandicam, choose AVI and then choose the codec and its options.

 

 

These codecs will use CPU to compress the captured data, so the games will have less CPU for themselves, so you'll get less FPS.

 

I'd suggest giving up Bandicam and going with OBS. 

You have the choice of sticking with software compression (using x264 to compress captured stuff to h264 with your own settings) or you can use hardware compression and choose some preset that's very high quality, like 40-60 mbps, resulting in a bit lossy but quite high quality captured stuff. 

With the software option, you can configure x264 to use very little cpu but produce high size files, but would still be smaller than lossless avi files.  For example, you may get around 100 GB for one hour of 1080p content instead of 250 GB per hour.

 

If you're interested about that, I can give you more details, but basically it's just using proper custom parameters for the x264 software encoder in the obs configuration.

 

 

yes i know AVI is not a Codec i said AVI because in bandicam you can only use XVID, MPEG-1, Motion JPEG, YV12 and RGB24 in AVI mode if you switch it to record in MP4 it only gives you the options of HEVC (or H265), H264, and MPEG-4 that's why i said AVI YV12 to clarify that you can only use YV12 in AVI mode not MP4. Also like i said i would like a Codec that doesn't compress the video file or very little so something in the middle of H265 and YV12 because H265 or H264 is toooooo compressed to the point that it makes Premiere Pro lag even on 1/4 resolution because it has to try to decompress all of that while at the same time having effects and other things stacked on top.

[JoshuaProGamer]

22 minutes ago, mariushm said:

AVI is not a codec, it's a container like MP4 , MKV

In the container, you can use various codecs to compress the video content and the audio content. Your file size was super large because Bandicam probably either chose no codec (lossess, lik saving a series of bmp pictures) or chose a default codec with very small compression.

There are lossless codecs which can do good compression, probably one of the best these days if MagicYUV : https://www.magicyuv.com/ - the FREE version is fine for your needs. Other lossless codecs that are well known are HuffYUV or Lagarith.  So you have to go in Bandicam, choose AVI and then choose the codec and its options.

 

 

These codecs will use CPU to compress the captured data, so the games will have less CPU for themselves, so you'll get less FPS.

 

I'd suggest giving up Bandicam and going with OBS. 

You have the choice of sticking with software compression (using x264 to compress captured stuff to h264 with your own settings) or you can use hardware compression and choose some preset that's very high quality, like 40-60 mbps, resulting in a bit lossy but quite high quality captured stuff. 

With the software option, you can configure x264 to use very little cpu but produce high size files, but would still be smaller than lossless avi files.  For example, you may get around 100 GB for one hour of 1080p content instead of 250 GB per hour.

 

If you're interested about that, I can give you more details, but basically it's just using proper custom parameters for the x264 software encoder in the obs configuration.

 

 

i'll try that MagicYUV real quick and see if i like it

[mariushm]

1 hour ago, JoshuaProGamer said:

yes i know AVI is not a Codec i said AVI because in bandicam you can only use XVID, MPEG-1, Motion JPEG, YV12 and RGB24 in AVI mode if you switch it to record in MP4 it only gives you the options of HEVC (or H265), H264, and MPEG-4 that's why i said AVI YV12 to clarify that you can only use YV12 in AVI mode not MP4. Also like i said i would like a Codec that doesn't compress the video file or very little so something in the middle of H265 and YV12 because H265 or H264 is toooooo compressed to the point that it makes Premiere Pro lag even on 1/4 resolution because it has to try to decompress all of that while at the same time having effects and other things stacked on top.

AVI YV12  and AVI RGB24 are uncompressed formats.

 

If I remember correctly, YV12 makes groups of 4 pixels, and uses 6 bytes to store the information about that: 1 byte for brightness information for each pixel so 4 bytes in total,  then 2 bytes with color information (the color info is shared between the 4 pixels, so you lose some color information, it's not 100% lossless)

 

So a 1920x1080 picture will use 1920x1080 / 4 (groups of 4 pixels) * 6 (bytes for each group of pixels) =  3,110,400 bytes per frame ... 60 frames per second  = 60 x 3,110,400 = 186,624,000 bytes per second = 178 MB per second.

So an hour would take 3600 seconds x 178 MB = 640 GB ...

 

RGB24 stores 3 bytes per pixel, red, green and blue for each pixel, so it will use more bytes per frame.

 

MPEG1 is very fast but is bad for near lossless, as it was not designed for that ... think of it like a codec designed to be like when you save JPG pictures (to lose some detail while still giving good quality), but because it was designed decades ago when computers were much slower, it's simply not designed to retain a lot of quality,  think of it like you have a quality slider for quality between 1% and 100% but mpeg's maximum quality is something like 70%, you can't do better. 

 

XVID is h263 or mpeg4 asp, what was before mpeg4 avc / h264, and it's much better than mpeg1 and good for lossy compression, but not optimized for more than SD content (less than 1280x720)... it will still work well with HD but you get better results with h264.

XVID has a lossy mode which has better quality than mpeg1 and also has a "near lossless" mode which can compress your frames in an almost lossless mode, basically visually not noticeable. You can use its settings to trade cpu usage for bigger file sizes but the cpu usage is still quite a bit high.

Problem with xvid / mpeg4 asp is that it's not that well supported by editors.

 

h264 is your best choice especially if you use OBS and use hardware encoder in your video card to capture, because you don't use any cpu. You can configure the hardware encoder to make bigger files retaining as much quality as possible - if you go with a high bitrate like let's say 60-100 mbps (around 1 GB per minute of video) you'll probably get the maximum quality the hardware encoder can offer.  It won't be lossless, but considering that Youtube will recompress your video anyway, and that you'll send a compressed video to Youtube in the first place, it's debatable if you really need near lossless or lossless video as source. 

 

The software encoder x264 can be used in OBS and this uses strictly the cpu to encode the video so it will use cpu usage, but it's more versatile. You can configure it to be true lossless (but the format used is not so well supported by editors, so not recommended), it can be near lossless (visually lossless, but probably around half the size of uncompressed video) or you can configure the amount of quality you want to keep. Also has loads of parameters that you can tweak to trade cpu usage for bigger file sizes.

 

[JoshuaProGamer]

On 1/17/2021 at 3:46 AM, mariushm said:

AVI YV12  and AVI RGB24 are uncompressed formats.

 

If I remember correctly, YV12 makes groups of 4 pixels, and uses 6 bytes to store the information about that: 1 byte for brightness information for each pixel so 4 bytes in total,  then 2 bytes with color information (the color info is shared between the 4 pixels, so you lose some color information, it's not 100% lossless)

 

So a 1920x1080 picture will use 1920x1080 / 4 (groups of 4 pixels) * 6 (bytes for each group of pixels) =  3,110,400 bytes per frame ... 60 frames per second  = 60 x 3,110,400 = 186,624,000 bytes per second = 178 MB per second.

So an hour would take 3600 seconds x 178 MB = 640 GB ...

 

RGB24 stores 3 bytes per pixel, red, green and blue for each pixel, so it will use more bytes per frame.

 

MPEG1 is very fast but is bad for near lossless, as it was not designed for that ... think of it like a codec designed to be like when you save JPG pictures (to lose some detail while still giving good quality), but because it was designed decades ago when computers were much slower, it's simply not designed to retain a lot of quality,  think of it like you have a quality slider for quality between 1% and 100% but mpeg's maximum quality is something like 70%, you can't do better. 

 

XVID is h263 or mpeg4 asp, what was before mpeg4 avc / h264, and it's much better than mpeg1 and good for lossy compression, but not optimized for more than SD content (less than 1280x720)... it will still work well with HD but you get better results with h264.

XVID has a lossy mode which has better quality than mpeg1 and also has a "near lossless" mode which can compress your frames in an almost lossless mode, basically visually not noticeable. You can use its settings to trade cpu usage for bigger file sizes but the cpu usage is still quite a bit high.

Problem with xvid / mpeg4 asp is that it's not that well supported by editors.

 

h264 is your best choice especially if you use OBS and use hardware encoder in your video card to capture, because you don't use any cpu. You can configure the hardware encoder to make bigger files retaining as much quality as possible - if you go with a high bitrate like let's say 60-100 mbps (around 1 GB per minute of video) you'll probably get the maximum quality the hardware encoder can offer.  It won't be lossless, but considering that Youtube will recompress your video anyway, and that you'll send a compressed video to Youtube in the first place, it's debatable if you really need near lossless or lossless video as source. 

 

The software encoder x264 can be used in OBS and this uses strictly the cpu to encode the video so it will use cpu usage, but it's more versatile. You can configure it to be true lossless (but the format used is not so well supported by editors, so not recommended), it can be near lossless (visually lossless, but probably around half the size of uncompressed video) or you can configure the amount of quality you want to keep. Also has loads of parameters that you can tweak to trade cpu usage for bigger file sizes.

 

yeah i just decided to use H.264 4:4:4 Lossless because it looks great and isn't super compressed