Advice sought on screen capture

[haloumi]

I am looking for video encoding advice. I'm about to record 24 hours of video from screen capture and my camera overlayed onto the screen (via iShowU HD). Suggestions as to codecs, fps and sizes that will give me enough movie to be able to edit, without consuming 500GB, would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

[alexwinolj]

Can you give a bit more context? What sort of video are you recording?

I'm not an expert on this; there are a zillion video codecs out there. But I'd suggest you film a short test segment (a couple of minutes) in the highest quality you can manage, convert it to various codecs, and see just how bad it gets. What's the lowest bearable resolution? Can you get away with 5 frames per second? Don't forget about the audio (if indeed you're doing audio). Doing audio in mono rather than stereo can make quite a difference. Speech can survive compression to a very low bitrate; music and other sound effects may or may not suffer, depending on what it is.

[sambushell]

Well, what *is* your budget? If I assume 500GB, and I divide by 86400 seconds, I get 5.7MB/sec, or 46 Mbit/sec. Which is a start; experiment with H.264. Screen capture generally has a lot of static areas, so temporal compression is a big win -- hopefully enough that you don't need to kill the frame rate. If your storage budget were a few times higher I'd recommend ProRes. And then, what size? You didn't make it clear how you were going to deliver this, or how readable the screen needs to be; the dimensions during delivery should probably guide how you set up the screen resolution during capture and compression.