Basic q3fuel 2 quality tutorial

Basic q3fuel 2 video quality tutorial for q3 game engine

Programs and tools needed :

- tga_hook http://perso.wanadoo.fr/gazouille/TGA_Hook_Latest.rar

- virtualdubmod http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/

- movie cfg available in the package

- bitrate calculator (excel) available in the package

- coffee not in the package

1st/ Game Configuration

If you don’t have a cfg for quake 3 then you can try mine. It was made for osp 1.03a and quake 3 1.32. Look the //record part, you’ll need a timescale of 0.1 and a cl_avidemo of 100 during the screenshots process (1000fps). The more frames, the better.

You can also change the r_mode value. Always record at high resolution, this way you’ll have a natural antialiasing (default 6 = 1024x768)

Then go to your videocard drivers and change the antialiasing to 2x (not above, because opengl don’t handle antialiasing very well) and anisotropic as high as your videocard can.

2nd/ Tga_hook

Tga_hook is a tool made by camping_gaz with a lot of usefull features. Here we only need the blur feature. Download the latest version and unzip it into your quake III arena folder. Rename your pb (punkbuster) folder to something else or you’ll have a conflict. Execute hook.reg and then launch regedit (win + r, regedit). Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\14K\TGA_Hook. Change the base filter multiplier to your own need. Increase the value and you’ll have a stronger blur effect (default 8 decimal). Then change the SaveFrameEvery to fix your fps (default 20 decimal). Ex : 1000fps/20 = 50fps movie.

3rd/ VirtualdubMod

Download a stable version. Record a screenshot sequence via tga_hook.exe. Launch vdubmod, open the screenshots folder and select the first frame. Go to video/frame rate and change your fps to the appropiate value (here 50). Then video/filters/resize and downsize your video (select lanczos3 as filter method). 640x480 is a common value but again do as you want. If you select a resolution near the 16/9 instead of the 4/3 format, you will gain a lot of space for the final encoding. Example :

Normal 4/3 resolution 640x480 = 307200 pixels

Remove 64 pixels in height 640x416 = 266240 pixels (gain 15.4%)

Remove 64 pixels in width 576x480 = 276480 pixels (gain 11.1%)

After that save your video file/save as, select full processing mode and no compression.

4th/ Video editing and codec

For the codec part, just go to the tox|c tutorial. You’ll find a lot of usefull tools but don’t forget to update the codecs stuff.

Now the fun part, open bitrate.xls. Change values except grey part. You can decide the bits/pixel value, but above 0.2* the video quality will not increase that much but your filesize yes! Also remember that if you use sharpening filters or stuff like that your bits/pixel will need to be raised.

Copy/paste the value for your enconding, kbps for mpeg-avc codec and targetsize (kbytes) for mpeg4 codec.

*Note : 0.2 for mpeg-avc codec like x264 is enough, but mpeg4 codec (xvid, divx) will need a bigger value like 0.25.

5th/ Additional note :

- the lines above will give you the same quality as q3fuel2. It’s not necessarily ‘The way’ to go, just mine

- make your own settings and testings, there’s a lot of improvement room

- a good motion blurring = free time needed :’)

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