Youtube Compression of Thief Footage

[FlowstatePhoenix]

I'm wanting to record and upload footage of a lot of different FMS to youtube, but the footage always comes out so compressed, it's awful. Does anyone know a way to alleviate this? I thought raising the gamma might work, since the problem mostly happens in the dark, but the in-game settting doesn't seem to affect the gamma of the recording. Thanks for any help.

[FenPhoenix]

1. YouTube compresses video to a different quality level depending on resolution. 720p is terrible, 1080p is okay, 1440p and up is much better. Even if you yourself can't record in 1440p, if you upscale it to that before uploading, YouTube will create a much higher quality video.

2. You can make gamma be captured in recordings, here's how to do it. Open cam_ext.cfg in your Thief game folder, find the following line:

;d3d_disp_sw_cc

and remove the semicolon from the start, so it looks like this:

d3d_disp_sw_cc

Then gamma will be properly captured by recording software.

[FlowstatePhoenix]

Okay, I'll try these things. Thanks

[Meowdori]

Don't raise the gamma just to make video compression less visible, play with gamma that looks good, before all. You should start from checking up your encoding settings and adjusting them so the recording quality is high enough not to get entirely thrashed after YT's reencoding. What are your current settings (and what recording software do you use)?

[SlyFoxx]

On a related note. Dunno how this might help. When I did my LP Dev Commentary vids years ago I was getting results that were just too dark. I wasn't using fraps and I don't remember what program I was using. I found a decent solution was to simply open the mission in dromed, up the ambient light of the map and re-light. Yeah playing the map was bright for me but the resulting videos were worlds better. Of course I wasn't too picky about the fidelity of the video as that wasn't the main point of the LP's. Just tossing that out there.

[ZylonBane]

I believe YouTube now has the ability to adjust the gamma of a video after uploading it.

[Meowdori]

On a related note. Dunno how this might help. When I did my LP Dev Commentary vids years ago I was getting results that were just too dark. I wasn't using fraps and I don't remember what program I was using. I found a decent solution was to simply open the mission in dromed, up the ambient light of the map and re-light. Yeah playing the map was bright for me but the resulting videos were worlds better. Of course I wasn't too picky about the fidelity of the video as that wasn't the main point of the LP's. Just tossing that out there.

This was most probably caused by the fact that recording software captures the framebuffer before the picture gets gamma-corrected by the GPU according to in-game setting. To ensure the exact same image is being recorded (as what you see while playing), you need to take advantage of one of NewDark Engine features to process the gamma in software. Uncomment the d3d_disp_sw_cc line in the following part of cam.ext.cfg:

; enable software (ie. shader) based gamma and color processing (improves quality at the expense of performance,
; and also enables in-game gamma to be applied in windowed mode)
d3d_disp_sw_cc

[FlowstatePhoenix]

I use OBS and stream to youtube. So far the recordings have just been saved streams. The bitrate is 8000. Recording quality is "same as stream." Might be the problem.

I brought up the bitrate to 12000, and tried uploading a recording with higher quality than the stream, but it still looks pretty bad, pretty much the same. It looks fine in the light, but dark areas just look terrible.

[Cigam]

I stream Thief videos through my media player so I can increase brightness. If I was to try watching them on the website I'd just be looking at a mainly black screen. I find the same with screenshots of Thief on the net. They are always too dark for me.