Will Sandybridge improve FRAPS encoding time?

[Anusha]

Hi,

I have the PC in the sig. Yesterday I was encoding a gameplay video to upload to youtube. I checked the CPU utilization and it was around 80~90% mark. Not 100% as you would see usually when encoding videos. I was wondering if this was because the FRAPS files are so huge that the hard drives are bottlenecking in this case. As in, not giving data to the CPU at the rate CPU would like the best. If this is the case, I doubt overclocking the CPU further, or upgrading to a faster CPU (i.e. 2600K @ 4.6GHzish) would improve the total encoding time.

What do you guys think? Maybe I should check this for myself by overclocking to 4GHz and underclocking to around 3GHz.

btw, I used Windows Live Movie Maker.

I wonder if QuickSync will do a better job. It should not, if the hard drives are the bottleneck, right? I was wondering whether to upgrade to a 2600K (not just for the performance, but also I need a new toy to play with), but if I cannot utilize QuickSync in this case, then I don't gain anything by the upgrade. If I encode videos, that would mostly be these FRAPS gameplay videos.

 

[erocker]

Hi,

I have the PC in the sig. Yesterday I was encoding a gameplay video to upload to youtube. I checked the CPU utilization and it was around 80~90% mark. Not 100% as you would see usually when encoding videos. I was wondering if this was because the FRAPS files are so huge that the hard drives are bottlenecking in this case. As in, not giving data to the CPU at the rate CPU would like the best. If this is the case, I doubt overclocking the CPU further, or upgrading to a faster CPU (i.e. 2600K @ 4.6GHzish) would improve the total encoding time.

What do you guys think? Maybe I should check this for myself by overclocking to 4GHz and underclocking to around 3GHz.

btw, I used Windows Live Movie Maker.

I wonder if QuickSync will do a better job. It should not, if the hard drives are the bottleneck, right? I was wondering whether to upgrade to a 2600K (not just for the performance, but also I need a new toy to play with), but if I cannot utilize QuickSync in this case, then I don't gain anything by the upgrade. If I encode videos, that would mostly be these FRAPS gameplay videos.

Most likely FRAPS doesn't use 100% of your processor due to leaving some room for other things. Your best bet would be to ditch Movie Maker and use AVIVO. I get the best results using something like VDUB for splicing my .avi's together (FRAPS recordings), then encode with AVIVO which uses the GPU and it's much faster with much better quality.

 

[Anusha]

By 80-90% utilization I meant in windows live movie maker while saving the wmv file. I use it because I can upload the video directly to youtube through it. Since I have a pretty fast Internet connection I don't care what the file size is. The file I uploaded yesterday was over 400MB. That's a separate story.

So how do I use AVIVO? Specifically which software? Last time I tried cyberlink MediaShow Espresso, I didn't see any difference between CPU and CPU + GPU time.

 

[erocker]

You access AVIVO through AMD Vision Center (formerly CCC) but you must first download and install it.

Get it here: http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D23FD98DA7

That works just for encoding. It's fast too, I just encoded a 4gb file in about a minute and twenty seconds. I find that MPEG-2 1080p gives the best results for YouTube.

If you need to splice things together give VDUB a try. It's pretty straightforward, you add an .avi segment, then append the next segment. Be sure to have "Direct Stream Copy" ticked in the Video options. Once you have everything in order, select "Save as .avi" and then procede to encode with AVIVO.

*I'm uploading a video right now with using this method, haven't done it for a while.

 

[Anusha]

Ok I'll try that out and report back later. thanks.

 

[Anusha]

Tried it. But it is no good.

It was not as convenient as Windows Live Movie Maker NOR it is faster. Ability to edit and upload video straight to youtube is an added convenience.

For a specific FRAPS video file I recorded at half the frame size of full HD @ 60fps, I got
(1) AMD Video Converter from CCC
Time: 41.7s
CPU utilization: ~50%
File size: 110MB

(2) Windows Live Movie Maker
Time: 42.9s
CPU utilization: ~80%
File size: 128MB

Could I be doing something wrong? This is what you were talking about when you said AVIVo, right?

Forgot to mention that when I was using AMD Video Converter, the GPU utilization measured using GPU-Z was around 1%. >_<

 

[Anusha]

OK I tried underclocking the CPU to 3.2GHz. Windows Live Movie Maker would still use ~80% CPU, which means that the hard disk is not the bottleneck.

For a certain video,
3.8GHz -> 3.2GHz increased the encoding time from 49.7 to 57.8. So probably a 2500k at 4.6GHzish would do it in 35s. 2600k even faster.

 

[cadaveca]

memory performance matters a bit too, you may want to look at lowering memory speed, then increeasing it, to see if this affects encoding times.

 

[Anusha]

memory performance matters a bit too, you may want to look at lowering memory speed, then increeasing it, to see if this affects encoding times.

There is a difference of about 1~2 seconds for that same video, but nothing noticeable.

 

[ViperXTR]

i thought the thread was about FRAPS using intel quicksync to record/encode in realtime gameplay, effectively offloading the CPU and GPU to process the game >_>

 

[cadaveca]

Huh. Interesting thought. Could be done, i suppose, just need FRAPS to write a version that utilizes the HD2000/HD3000 in the SB chips installed on Z68 and H67 boards. Might work really well when using Lucid's Virtu software, also required to make use of the GPU while using discrete VGA solutions.

 

[Anusha]

Huh. Interesting thought. Could be done, i suppose, just need FRAPS to write a version that utilizes the HD2000/HD3000 in the SB chips installed on Z68 and H67 boards. Might work really well when using Lucid's Virtu software, also required to make use of the GPU while using discrete VGA solutions.

yes that would be awesome as to lower the performance hit when recording video. it is also important to be able to transcode them to something light weight to upload to youtube etc.

 

[Peter1986C]

I am not sure whether Avidemux is capable of using the Fraps codec, but if it is you should try transcoding the video with that using x264 (i.e. basically H264) or Xvid. Decent quality and hopefully decent transcoding speed (you may need to experiment a little with the video codec settings though). Especially if you put the audio on "copy". The container I advise to you is Matroska (.mkv).
Best use the 64 bit version: http://sourceforge.net/projects/avidemux/files/avidemux/2.5.5/

 

[ViperXTR]

Huh. Interesting thought. Could be done, i suppose, just need FRAPS to write a version that utilizes the HD2000/HD3000 in the SB chips installed on Z68 and H67 boards. Might work really well when using Lucid's Virtu software, also required to make use of the GPU while using discrete VGA solutions.

Yeah, that idea came to mind when ive read this thread lol. I suppose the only overhead/performance penalty would be Lucid Virtu managing the distribution of load. Could be useful specially in my case that i only have an i3