Platinumoxicity on 13/7/2012 at 08:58
I have the latest Tafferpatcher on Thief 2 and I'm trying to record a series of ghost playthroughs, but Fraps uses compression that makes darker areas look really bad. If I could increase the gamma, those areas wouldn't get so heavily compressed, and I could turn the brightness down during editing. The problem is that the ingame gamma setting has no effect on what Fraps records. Even if I set the gamma to full, it always records the footage at zero gamma. The dark footage is full of compression artifacts, and even 720p videos look horrible. And even when I only use 1 CPU for Thief 2 and 3 CPUs for Fraps, my PC performance is not enough for raw recording. Plus I would run out of hard disk space very soon.
Fraps already has a problem, that its videos are too dark. I have a converter to get around that problem because it's just something Fraps normally does, but that doesn't change the fact that Fraps somehow records darker footage from the game that what the game actually shows on-screen. The ingame gamma setting does absolutely nothing.
So is there any way to get a recording program to see the higher brightness setting in the game? Actually, what is it that the Dark Engine does with the gamma setting, that renders in invisible to a recording program? How is it even possible to dodge the program if it takes the direct output data that the GPU driver is processing?
EDIT: For example, the DDfix ini has a lot of options. The effects that DDfix adds during post processing do show up in Fraps recording. Is it possible to adjust the base gamma value with DDfix?
EDIT2: I just realized that the program I use to convert the Fraps recordings to "compatible" files is the point where the horrible compression is applied. I'll see if I can just use the unconverted Fraps videos for my projects. But still I don't understand why the gamma setting in Thief simply doesn't effect the recording at all.
jermi on 13/7/2012 at 12:48
It's hardware gamma and it's only applied to what is sent to the display device. The frame buffer, which is what Fraps sees, never has any gamma applied on it.
It would be possible for a capture utility to read the hardware gamma ramp and apply it to the data as it's being compressed and written to the disk, so some utilities might have this option.
You can make things a lot brighter by setting ModulateShift=1 or ModulateShift=2 in ddfix.ini. This affects also the captured video.
Platinumoxicity on 13/7/2012 at 22:41
Nevermind. It seems that I won't be able to record anything anymore anyway. Since I got to "First City Bank and Trust" -recording became useless. All the other missions so far worked flawlessly. The framerate never dropped under 30 when recording 50fps, so drops were unnoticeable when rendering in 25fps after editing. But for some reason when I play Bank, the game runs horribly when recording. Whenever I move, turn, or do anything other than stand still, the framerate fluctuates between 25 and 50, and constantly drops to 0 for several seconds. I don't understand what's going on.
I play Thief 2 on core 0, obviously, since it can only use one core. Thief 2 is installed on drive D. I run Fraps on the remaining cores 1, 2 and 3, and Fraps is installed on drive C. Videos are recorded on drive C. I analyzed the disk and and it shows 0% fragmentation. There have been no software or hardware changes between recording Eavesdropping yesterday, and recording Bank today. I don't understand why it worked perfectly so far, and now that I'm finally able to make high-quality videos without ruining it with unnecessary conversion, I can't make videos at all because the recording slows down and freezes the game. Everything is the same, I just proceeded to the next mission.
What's so special about the Bank level? What is it about it in combination with Fraps running on separate CPUs that just spells doom?
demagogue on 14/7/2012 at 00:13
See that your previously recorded videos aren't like 4GB and you don't have much memory left.
But the Bank level has always been a little buggy with certain things. It also crashes for multiplayer.
As for the gamma issue, in one of fenphoenix's walkthrough videos he talks about this issue, since everybody that records with Fraps has it. IIRC his basic advice was to use a video editing program to bump up the gamma after the recording in post-processing. I think there are a few free video editing programs that could do this... Adobe Premier? I don't know because I have Vegas & use that.
Platinumoxicity on 14/7/2012 at 08:16
Quote Posted by demagogue
See that your previously recorded videos aren't like 4GB and you don't have much memory left.
But the Bank level has always been a little buggy with certain things. It also crashes for multiplayer.
They are supposed to be 4GB. That's the whole point with raw video. And so far in every other level, they have been that large. Only in the Bank the framerate jumps constantly. Even during times when nothing is going on, for example when I'm staring at a wall.
But if it's true that it's the Bank level that does it, then what does it exactly do? Fraps can only use the CPU resources that Thief doesn't. So it can't be that. Fraps only uses the hard disk that Thief doesn't use. So how can it be that? I don't see any real link between what Thief 2 does and what Fraps should be doing.
jermi on 14/7/2012 at 08:48
Doesn't sound right to me either. Without Fraps, there are no problems? And if you go back to the previous mission with Fraps, that still works flawlessly?
demagogue on 14/7/2012 at 12:57
Quote Posted by Platinumoxicity
They are supposed to be 4GB.
Yes I didn't put the emphasis in the right place. What I meant was, given that they are like 4GB, check that you still have plenty of harddrive space. When I first made some videos, I found it started slowing down when I started running low on harddrive space -- and "running low" is something like under 10GB. But when I deleted some of them, it was back to full speed again when I had the HD space.
BTW, there are other recording programs like FastStone... maybe they'll have better luck with the gamma? You might just send a PM to fenphoenix on these forums and ask him directly yourself what he does to fix the gamma problem, because his recordings definitely don't have the darkening problem you're talking about that I've seen too.
DJ Riff on 14/7/2012 at 12:58
I had similar issue in Precious Cargo. When I enter the Cetus' control room while recording or start recording inside, the game crashes. If FRAPS is just running in background, only showing an FPS counter, everything works fine.
Keeper Jonas on 14/7/2012 at 15:26
I use IObit's Game Booster while using FRAPS to record Thief videos, the frame rate of the videos and the stability of the game during recording both seem to benefit from it.
Platinumoxicity on 15/7/2012 at 08:48
Quote Posted by demagogue
Yes I didn't put the emphasis in the right place. What I meant was, given that they are like 4GB, check that you still have plenty of harddrive space. When I first made some videos, I found it started slowing down when I started running low on harddrive space -- and "running low" is something like under 10GB. But when I deleted some of them, it was back to full speed again when I had the HD space.
I have 141 GB free space for recording, so I think I got that covered.
