Starfall: Planet Rendering

I just posted a quick youtube video to demonstrate the current state of the planet renderer. This is early development stuff, and the eye candy is minimal, but it should give you some idea of the scope.

Part of the rationale behind this video is to streamline the whole video capture and posting process. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been entirely straightforward so far. I went through a number of video capture tools before settling on FRAPS, which works well enough (though I would have prefered a free tool).

I also have had a terrible time converting the video for youtube – ATI’s Avivo video converter is blazingly fast, but apparently produces an incompatibe audio codec in any of the high-quality settings. I was forced to fall back to the CPU-based Auto Gordian Knot, which both does a worse job, is very slow on my little Athalon 64 x2.

I am now experimenting with ffmpeg, but the command line options are confusing to say the least. If anyone has any clues/tips/tricks for getting FRAPS encoded video (and audio) into a suitable format for youtube HD, please let me know.