Creating a Celestia Video

[Lady_Syhoitta]

Hey gents!

I'm an intern with the Georgia Southern University Planetarium and have been tinkering with Celestia. We use it during shows to do our 'solar system tour', but we were hoping to create a video to play while people are taking their seats. I've been able to create videos... but they're awful! They're horribly jerky and slow; in no way fluid like when one actually uses the program. I'm so confused as to why the program isn't running smoothly.

When I start the video, I have it on 30 fps and 1024 x 768 (also tried with 720 x 480) with the uncompressed option. 2.1 Ghz tri-core processor, 4 GB RAM, video card is an Nvidia GTX 260.

What on Earth am I doing wrong?


Malz

[Fenerit]

Uncompressed option. If 260 has more than one DVI or HDMI output, do attach it to an external DVD/BlueRay recorder.

[Lady_Syhoitta]

Quoting my boyfriend here:

Compressing it should make it slower.


So, if the uncompressed option is the issue, then that means I need to compress it. The program allows for like 5 different ways of compression, I think. Anyone know which one is best? I've never had to deal with compression before, and the boyfriend, do forgive him, is skeptical about compressing the video to make it work better. Any hints?

[selden]

I have a vague recollection of a bug in a previous version of Celestia causing the framerate specified in the resulting video to be 1/2 what it should be. Might that be the problem?

Could you provide a copy of the video somehow? on YouTube, perhaps?
Having a copy of the video would make it possible for someone to make an independent check for problems.

[Fenerit]

Quoting my boyfriend here:

Compressing it should make it slower.


So, if the uncompressed option is the issue, then that means I need to compress it. The program allows for like 5 different ways of compression, I think. Anyone know which one is best? I've never had to deal with compression before, and the boyfriend, do forgive him, is skeptical about compressing the video to make it work better. Any hints?

Compressing is instead more fast, because it is performed on RAM and then is wrote on disk a much less data per frame, and the final file is short. "much less data" mean loss of quality, of course; thus you must play around with the compressor's settings, in order to find the fitted quality for you needs.

Divx or Xvid should be optimal. Xvid is a free encoder/decoder, so it allow also the compression; while the Divx is free just in the part of the decoding. It allow the compression under not-free registration.

Anyhow, for better results, the way suggested of to record through external device should be optimal, because what you see is what you get, should be in real time and is performed by the graphic card, without to write anything on disk. I do not know how 260 is "plug 'n' play" under such aspect, but through the Nvidia control panel, the output for the recorder should be the same for the double monitoring.

[Lady_Syhoitta]

Thank you, dear!


I will most certainly play around with the settings. Once I finally come up with something, I'll most certainly place it online via youtube and post it here for y'all to see my newbish attempts. xD

[Reiko]

I highly recommend using a program called FRAPS to make videos with. I've had better results using that than using Celestia's built in video maker.

[Romie]

These are my celestia videos, creating with celestia itself no other software...
Hope you all like them

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tcrsI28s80
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9W7LDvNfYs

[dimavj]

Hi, this topic http://www.shatters.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13722, Jogad sent me a nice script that takes screenshots every 0.x seconds (depending on your computer and g.card power finally)

see Jogad's post there
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13722

So, you can compile and compress a perfect video file just after. (shure, with a video-editing program )

I used it in combination with cel scripts with just some nice camera movements in a very slow velocity, (that permits good capture rate).

It's a slow process but effective, I was using Menu:file>capture-movie feature with no compression but it was only for 30 sec because it generates 2-4Gb files in this time and some were not usable.

May i t help you...