Frame size smaller than screen size, etc.

Hi. I'm just gettting started wit machinima. I have a powerful new gaming system, along with a new 24" LCD that I use as the main screen along with my old 19" as a side screen. I have a few questions about making best use of this arrangement.

1. The panorama view looks great, but it makes for big files and can't be shown on most web machinima venues. Frap doesn't seem to allow partial screen views, and it shows all the UI elements that you put on the screen. CamStudio has wonderful framing that is exactly what I want, but the movies I'm making (with a 1920 x 1200 resolution) are all screwed up. That's the next question.

2. My CamStudio tests split the movie into repeated images oy horlizontal layers and do all sorts of interesting but non-deliberate things, such as showing a light outline of things on a solid black background, dark outlines on light areasm jerking, and pixel spekling. Any ideas as to the problem?

3. My SL frame rate can move between 10 fps and over 100 fps, depending on the settings and the sim I'm in. With all the graphics setting maxed out, 512 draw distance, anistropic filtering, etc., I can get 30 fps on a good day, but it fluctuates quite a bit. I'm beginning to think I need to sacrifice some image quality to gain a steader fps. To any extent, one loses a good bit in the capturing and compression anyway. I know this must have been asked and answered many times, but what are the most suitable fps settings, screen resolutions, and graphics preference settings for movies that will eventually be shown online?

thanks.

1) control-alt-1 to hide screen elements
2)
3) unless for some reason you need it while filming, drop your draw distance to at least 128, maybe less.

1. You might try Hypercam3 for getting patial screen view. Fraps will not do that, I believe. You probably have no use for those high resolutions. I use Fraps at half-screen res. because that works well with YouTube. Hide screen elemnents as Geius said. The is more to know about that -- covered on my FAQ page:
http://www.thinkerer.org/Studios/StuFAQ.htm

To resolve problems with CanStudio, you probably need to find the forums specifically for that. Personally, I would not do that without very strong needs. If you really need to get partial picture, check what you can do in your editing software.

I find that anything above FPS=15 is adequate to make videos for YouTube. In addition to dropping draw distance, look for a quiet sim. Try Thinkerer Quests if you want. I keep the load down and get good frame rates all the time.
TM

Thanks for your suggestions. I'm looking at thinkerer now and will check out hypercam shortly.

1) You are taking more raw data than you need for machima and creating huge wasted files sizes. Using HyperCam using select region will improve this. 1920 x 1200 is a very large resolution and goes beyond the capabilities of even a widescreen TV. Normal TV is around 760x526.
2) Sounds like the scan rate of your monitor, trying to keep up with bottlenecks such as physical HD write caching and GC processing.
3) Use around 128 for draw distance for general work, more for landscape views. Turn off anistropic filtering for most work except for very close up work, you will not see the difference once you apply any form of codex to the data. Try for 25fps min 35fps maximum, as this matches the PAL standards, any more and you will create large files and dropped frames during rendering, less and you will get ghosting from the rendering tweening.
Graphic settings are a bit of experimenting relative to the SL conditions, sometimes you have to reduce one thing to gain another.