Behind The Scenes Video: Making FPS Videos (Patreon)

Hi everyone, it's Rich here! We were having an interesting conversation on the Discord the other day about the making of frame-rate analysis videos and how we are evolving the process. Since I was about to start work on the Resident Evil Village Demo video the next day after that chat, I thought that I'd shoot some behind the scenes video just before I started out on the project.

So this is bit more informal and 'ad hoc' and off the cuff, but in this video I'll talk about the old process of capturing video in a mathematically lossless format, cutting out individual clips for analysis in our tool, FPSGui, and then exporting that video. In fact, back in the day, I made a whole video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVg19CbkXR4

The workflow was unusable for 4K video where the files were just too large, so we shifted to a system of capturing video *and* performing analysis as the data came in, but *before* compression. This means we could move away from mathematically lossless codecs and use a high quality intermediate codec instead. It also meant that we 'automagically' had fps analysis on every clip we captured. But we still needed to 'cut out' the points of interest... until recently.

In the Resident Evil Village Demo video and many others, I used a system of nested sequences to give me access to every piece of performance data from all the capture sessions, while the process of lining up those clips also gave me head-to-head comparisons too. So it's all a bit 'inside baseball' perhaps but shows the building blocks of building these assets. At the end of the video, I actually show you final sequences and the final timeline, which is pretty neat and tidy bearing in mind what's going on beneath!

As I say in the video, if there's anything more you'd like to see about the creation of the content, do let us know! Here's a direct link to the video on the site: http://digitalfoundry.net/2021-05-05-patreon-behind-the-scenes-how-to-make-an-fps-comparison