Do most of you use your cap card for footage instead of DLing clips on EA's site?

[DIZthis]

Spent the last few days filming a bunch of shit to make my first video/montage and made the mistake of assuming that by buying the Filmers Pack an their "HD" option would actually be good when it was uploaded, lol it's not, it's acceptable I guess but it's really not great - pixelated on far scenes and shit like I'm sure you all know, so yeah gathered 5 mins worth of shit not saving the "edited" clips now I'm clearing the reel to free up some more space for some more clips. So I assume most of you guys use your cap card to just playback an cap your clips right? Just dealing with the annoying menu button on the bottom left?

Anybody good at making vids and feel like kicking me up some shit in your free time? I'll send you all my shit lol.

[Ayreon]

nah most people still use the site. And the quality is pretty good. I dont know what your talking about. Most cap cards from what I've seen are worse quality.

[m.seven]

what are you converting your clips with and to what format?
could be the reason for your quality issues,but yeah maybe a handful of guys use cap cards/pvr but i'd say most use the skate.reel

[DIZthis]

Well I'm not saying it's that bad, but it's not even in full "HD". Opening up the raw downloaded file (FLV, which you can tell is compressed pretty high with the small little 4-5mb sizes) the resolution is 1152 x 656 and the picture is noticeably grainy, due to the high compression EA uploads the file at, and if your skater is kind of far in the distance that's when you notice some pixelation issues. When you got your cam zoomed up real close things look pretty good, but it's when things are unzoomed is when things become more noticeably 'average' an iffy. Again, I'm comparing the clip to what my TV outputs the game on my system - so full quality. So maybe my expectations were a little too high? If you have a real nice TV, play your replay clip (not uploaded clip) then play the uploaded clip after downloaded on your computer. See what I mean? Not near as good as it is on the TV feel me?

I haven't started converting the files yet, just DLed my maxed out skate.reel an placed 'em in a specific folder - going to go back an do the rest of my saved replays, edit 'em, uploaded 'em, DL 'em and then get to converting and doing a video edit in Sony Vegas. I did however hop on Team Viewer with a buddy of mine who's doing the same thing, installed Xilisoft on his system to convert the files to be compatible with Vegas an converted 'em to MPEG 4's @ 720P 15000 bitrate @ 30fps. That sound good? Didn't notice a real quality degration from raw FLV to the converted mp4 so that's what I'm probably going to do myself unless you guys suggest some other settings or formats. Appreciate your responses guys.

@ Ayreon - See I got a Black Magic Intensity Pro so the quality that thing caps is insane, exactly what you see on your TV is what comes outta that thing - perfect quality.

[fallingskyline]

i use a haupauge hd-pvr, cap with 720p60 (1280 x 720 at 60 fps) with a bitrate of 13500. that's just fine for me. i bit better than reel. i just use reel when forced to, for collabs and such. truth is i bouhgt the cap due to reel issues, generating time, upload-time and of course our wellknown "an ea nation error has occured"...
there was not one second i regret buying the cap-card since you can be so much more productive not having to wait like 3-... minutes for a 4-5 seconds clip since generating takes ages...

[m.seven]

yeah,i see what you mean with the quality difference as you describe it.i usually film pretty close so i guess i never really noticed as much
conversion settings are pretty much same as i use but i use a cheap editor so my quality isn't as good as what Vegas would be,but i'm pretty amateurish when it comes to computers so simple is the route i take.

[briden]

Not sure what you were expecting from a video game, but don't forget about post-production. Even just a little color correction can go a long way.

[knexzor]

Pick your poison; either full HD with the Hide mark or the 'HQ' upload without watermarks. If I were you I'd go cap card all day, just to avoid the hassle of uploading, downloading and converting.

[mamba12]

cap cards cost money which is the main reason people use the reel.

[emericaridr11]

if you have a Black Magic Intensity Pro, then why in the hell are you not using that instead of the reel?

[DIZthis]

if you have a Black Magic Intensity Pro, then why in the hell are you not using that instead of the reel?

Haha, long story short. I have the USB 3.0 Shuttle version of the Intensity Pro, which before I bought they promised 1080P @60fps support within a future firmware update - never got it. Instead they announced a Thunderbolt version that will support it, so they made an exception because of the salesman's promise and swapped me out the USB 3.0 version for the Thunderbolt version. Only problem now is there's no Thunderbolt PCI-e card available for PC yet, and I don't have a mac which comes with Thunderbolt ports - so I can't use the thing yet.

For sure though, thanks for the responses guys. I'll post up my vid when I get it done within the next week or so, it'll be my first so it'll be nice to get some tips from you dudes.