I'm planning on getting a MacBook Pro, 17" with the 100GB 7200rpm hard drive in the near future. I want to use it to record myself playing WoW, and I was wondering a few things...

1) How will the performance be? I understand that it is not a universal binary yet, so it will improve once it gets to that point, but I'm asking for right now, how much of a performance hit will this be?

2) Would it be any better to record to an external drive? I know I'm getting at least a FireWire 800 external drive for extra storage, but I was also thinking maybe a portable 60GB 7200 FireWire 400 (You know, with no external power supply, runs off the power from the firewire port) or something, as well... Would either of these show a performance increase over saving to the main drive? Would the FW 800 drive be noticably better than the FW400?

3) How much video would 60GB hold? To my understanding, depending on compression, files can be quite big... Any insight into this would be much appreciated...

Thanks in advance!

Hello-
It's difficult to say what kind of performance we'll be able to get with a Universal Binary of SP X until we've actually been able to do some extensive testing.

However, SP X can do capture now on the Intel machines in its current form, and gets excellent frame rates - there's no reason to think an Intel native version would be any worse.

There isn't any way to send the scratch files to an external drive as you're recording in the current version of SP X (not without some pretty serious file manipulation that is beyond the scope of tech support - Kepi where are you!?), but you can do a final save to an external drive. It does take a bit of trickery. First create the destination folder on the drive you want to save to. Make an alias of this folder. Then place the alias into your Pictures folder.

The next time you invoke SP X, that alias will be listed in the Send to popup menu.

To calculate file size of raw video files*:

width X height of selected area = # pixels per frame

# pixels per frame X bits per pixel (determined by color depth: thousand of colors = 16, millions of colors = 32) = bits per frame

bits per frame/8 bits per byte = # bytes per frame

# bytes per frame X frame rate = bytes per second

bytes per second X duration = total raw video file.

Or course audio files add to the raw file size.


* blatantly ripped off from Kepi's calculations in a previous post

Um...this can't be right...

To calculate file size of raw video files*:

[1,680] wide X [1,050] high = [1,764,000] pixels per frame (From a 17" MacBook Pro with native resolution)

[1,764,000] pixels per frame X [32] bits per pixel = [56,448,000] bits per frame

[56,448,000] bits per frame / 8 bits per byte = [7,056,000] bytes per frame

[7,056,000] bytes per frame X [30] fps = [211,680,000] bytes per second

[211,680,000] bytes / 1024 bits per kilobyte = [206,718.75] kilobytes per second

[206,718.75] kilobytes / 1024 kilobytes per megabyte = [201.87] megabytes per second

[201.87] megabytes per second X 60 seconds per minute = [12,112.43] megabytes per minute

[12,112.43] megabytes per minute / 1024 megabytes per gigabyte = 11.83 GB/Minute????

How can that possibly be right? I plan on recording a LOT (It's a seeeecret why though =P) so Snapz wouldn't work for me unless theres some way to downsize raw files...

Never fear, I'm here! And the post on how to move the location of the scratch file is over there



Well, because it is. The settings you indicate will result in a lot of data being captured. As an example, I'm sitting at a 20" Cinema Display that has the same resolution as your MacBook (1680 x 1050). I took a screenshot and did the calcs based on the size of the file; I ended up with 1.3GB/minute but you have to remember, the screenshot is a compressed JPG. Do the same capture again but as a BMP (uncompressed raw bitmap) and you get just shy of 9GB/minute.

It's a bit deceptive to look at a screen and then look at the resultant capture size, but unfortunately, that's how it is. Of course, compressing the video afterwards will shrink the filesize, but it will still be quite large. Remember, 1680 x 1050 is more than midway between 720p (1280 × 720) and 1080p (1920 x 1080) in terms of High Definition; it's big

To reduce the raw file size there's a bunch of things you can do, but all will in some way affect the quality of the outputted file.

- reduce the dimensions of the recorded area
- reduce the bitrate of the data being captured. Switch to Thousands [16bit] from Millions [32bit]; that alone will cut the filesize in half.
- reduce the framerate. Drop to 15fps from 30fps and you again halve the file size. 15 - 20fps is still more than acceptable for most motion. If you're doing something like a screencast, 5 - 10fps is all you need.

Hello-
Right on Kepi - I knew you'd come through!

One thing though, we've found the portables are very poorly optimized for thousands of colors, so much so that setting it to thousands and trying to record the screen will actually have worse performance than at millions, even though it's less info to handle.

This may no longer be the case with the MacBooks, but I'm guessing it is.

My tests with Snapz pro and wow have left me rather unexcited about it.

Few things you should know: You can't turn on recording without going to window mode, and it's not all that flexible about when it can save or record. So you need to go to window mode, start the recording, go back to full screen, wait a couple seconds for everything to get back to sorts, then hope that what you were going to do is still available. Once you do get some good footage, you need to minimize again, and then start rendering. You need to render everything you've captured, so it's all or nothing. Also, you're stuck rendering for the next 30 minutes (depending on how long you recorded). If another fight that looks promising comes along you're screwed. So then you find yourself not stopping to render after one good fight, and then you have a couple duds or just waiting for something interesting to happen... now suddenly you're faced with a 60 minute render for that one fight clip you want... what to do?

Plus it's very unforgiving if you make an errant mouse click. You can easily destroy an hours worth of footage without so much as a confirmation dialog. You go get a really nice clip, hit save, there's a bit of lag as it starts processing the data, you're not sure what's going on... you hit save again... Waitasec, the Save button just turned to the cancel button. I think it gives you the option to resume saving but all I've gotten out of that in a few tries is a corrupted file that quicktime can't recognize. And you better do a lot of testing before you start recording, because after you hit save you're committed to that format and settings. If you get an hour clip and try codec a with settings x (only a small still preview to judge the codecs on ) , wait a couple hours to render, take a look at the final product and say "actually I should have used settings y or codec b", well... I hope you can reproduce what you did a couple hours ago because snapz sure can't help you.

It gets the job done but there are a ton of rough edges. If you're going to be running a MacBook I'd seriously look into booting into Windows and running Fraps. While I haven't used it myself I'm amazed at what some middle of the road systems can get out of it and it seems to have a lot more control on when you can record and when you can render (and I'm assuming it lets you actually specify a scratch disc... but then again I said the same thing about snapz).

~BS

Hello-
Sorry SP X wasn't what you'd hoped for.

Batch processing, processing later and the ability to set a scratch disk are all on the To Do list for the next revision of SP X.

How about a better preview system? And not having the save button change to the delete button?

Will batch processing allow me to save as format a and then save the same source as format b?

~BS

Hello-
How do you mean by better preview?

You will be able to make multiple saves on the same original file so you can use different compressions schemes for different targets. You'll be able to save a high res large version for DVD distribution, and a low res smaller file for web delivery.