Gameplay recording - How good quality is 'enough'?

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Michael Trenton

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Basically, how high picture quality is there in games to begin with? Is there any real gain in recording uncompressed/RAW as opposed to using slightly more compressed settings and codecs (e.g like MotionJPEG?)

Lately I've been experimenting with gameplay recording and on forums I read about people recording in very uncompressed formats (even RAW according to some??) and are using RAID setups and some are even using SSDs in RAID just to get the write speed to deal with those massive files.

But does recording in such high quality have any real merit? Or will lossless formats like MotionJPEG be sufficient to capture 'all there is'?
I mean if you film or photograph real life with a camera the benefits of RAW are obvious as real life is so detailed when it comes to light, colours etc. But how detailed is a videogame to begin with? Does RAW or other uncompressed codecs record anything that e.g MotionJPEG will not?
 
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I get what your asking the problem is that really does depend on the game and m-jpeg compression being using (even when set to 100%). If you were say recording original "Doom" then probably wouldn't matter but new games that have high rez textures and support HDR and dynamic range could be a whole different story.
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TerryLaze

TerryLaze

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You will have much less compression artifacts especially in rapid motion but personally I don't believe it's worth it unless you work for a professional site,the cost is just way too high to justify it if you do it just for fun.

Personally I upload videos recorded with shadowplay at 1080/30FPS/15000kbit/sec and before I upload them I re encode them with quick sync to get an even smaller size.

Youtube will mess up your quality anyway no matter how good your video is.
 
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ikaz

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Well I bet those people are then taking that raw file and compressing it to another format to post but since they are doing the compressing they have better control of the final out put. There are two basic types of compression lossy and lossless with out going into to much detail lossless should provide the best "looking" file compared to the original since it retains all the data that was in the Raw file (think about ziping a file that uses lossless since you would want all the info when you unzip it). Lossy is like Mjpeg where it will toss out information that may not be needed most if not all commercial media is Lossy compressed. Blu rays (4k, HDR, etc) use compression like H.264 so compression is not a bad thing and it can look really good. I bet those doing raw just want more control how the final product looks.
 
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Michael Trenton

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I guess I didn't phrase my question properly. I'm not really comparing highly lossy long-GOP codecs like H.264 to RAW as the advantages of recording in RAW compared to such compressed codecs is evident,
I'm comparing high bitrate intraframe codecs like MotionJPEG (with quality at 100) to RAW and wondering whether there is any point at all to record in even higher quality than MotionJPEG.

In a real life situation where you're out shooting video or taking photos the benefits of RAW is evident, because nature itself offers a richness in colours, details and dynamic range that you'll want to record as much as possible of in order to have more latitude and options for colour grading etc in post-production.
But videogames are already artificially generated images to begin with. So my question is how high is the quality in those generated images to begin with? Are videogames really offering a dynamic range, richness in colours and light that warrants recording in RAW? Or is e.g MotionJPEG capable of recording every bit of dynamic range, colourspace that the game outputs?

 
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ikaz

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With any lossy compression you lose data period, if your asking if you will notices this lost compared to the original that really would depend on the game, resolution and color accuracy of the monitor/TV displaying the end results. I personally have looked to see if any current games offer say HDR but I know MS is releasing some game this year that offer those settings.
 
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Michael Trenton

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Yes you lose some data even with a high bitrate codec like MotionJPEG, but the important question is whether that data was there to begin with.
Consider for a moment that a videogame is in essense an animated CGI movie that's being rendered realtime. That begs the question what quality is it rendered in? How much dynamic range, colours and details are really there? Eg. is there data in the shadow areas and 'blown out' areas that you can retrieve from a RAW recording? Or is the simple fact that what the videogame renders is mostly 'what you see is what you get' in which case a codec like MotionJPEG may actually do the job 100% while RAW only will increase file size while not actually giving you any more data to work with (due to that data never being rendered by the game in the first place).

Imagine for a second that you play back an animated Pixar film on Blu-ray on your computer and make a screen recording of it. Well seeing as the Blu-ray format is so heavily compressed in the first place then likely a codec like MotionJPEG would be sufficient to record 'all there is' because there will be no further data in the shadow areas or 14-bit colour or whatever - all of that data isn't there - so in such a case recording RAW will add absolutely nothing in terms of quality. My question is whether something similar is also the case with videogames (e.g why would they waste computer Resources on rendering much higher picture quality than what you will actually see on your screen) or whether they render their pictures in so high quality that there is actually a benefit to recording RAW.

 
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ikaz

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I get what your asking the problem is that really does depend on the game and m-jpeg compression being using (even when set to 100%). If you were say recording original "Doom" then probably wouldn't matter but new games that have high rez textures and support HDR and dynamic range could be a whole different story.
 
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Michael Trenton

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I see. Yeah I guess it largely depends on the game in question then. I'll probably just continue recording MotionJPEG with quality at 100 then as most games I play aren't brand new. :)

 
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