What are the advantages of rendering?

[j3sperado]

Hi,

I was wondering if there is much of a point to render gameplay that isn't going to be cut or have effects at all? I understand that you have to render if you do all this with overlays, effects, music etc, but if I want to upload for example a let's play, wouldn't it be better to just use the raw recording?

I also know that if you render it, the video file will become smaller. But when I render, the quality dips somewhat.

What are the other advantages of rendering?

 

[nuttynut]

There's no need to rerender video if you don't need to compress it, have it in a different format, or edit it. And yes, any lossy video codec will have some effect on quality.

 

[Solandri]

When you capture video in real-time, it's using fixed compression. Since the compression algorithm doesn't know whether what's being displayed on the screen is going to be static or have a lot of action in it, it just picks a certain level of compression and sticks with it. This results in the static scenes taking up more space than needed, and the action scenes being over compressed.

When you record raw video (or lightly compressed video) and render it after, that gives the compression algorithm a chance to look over the video before compressing it (two-pass compression). It can then use a high level of compression on the static scenes to help reduce size, while using a lower level of compression on the action scenes to help maintain quality. The end result is higher quality video at the same file size as video captured in real-time.

 

[j3sperado]

There's no need to rerender video if you don't need to compress it, have it in a different format, or edit it. And yes, any lossy video codec will have some effect on quality.

I see. Thank you for your answer!

 

[nuttynut]

When you capture video in real-time, it's using fixed compression. Since the compression algorithm doesn't know whether what's being displayed on the screen is going to be static or have a lot of action in it, it just picks a certain level of compression and sticks with it. This results in the static scenes taking up more space than needed, and the action scenes being over compressed.

When you record raw video (or lightly compressed video) and render it after, that gives the compression algorithm a chance to look over the video before compressing it (two-pass compression). It can then use a high level of compression on the static scenes to help reduce size, while using a lower level of compression on the action scenes to help maintain quality. The end result is higher quality video at the same file size as video captured in real-time.

But rendering a preexisting video doesn't automatically give the benefits of Variable Bitrate Encoding (VBR). You have to choose this in the encoder settings, or it will use less-efficient Constant Bitrate Encoding (CBR).