Ar Tonelico II - I.P.D. Lv 6 Battle (Oka) [Version 7]

Go! Face Falling Shurelia's Suteki Medicine!
(Courtesy of Jakuri.)

This is my first youtube video and my first gameplay footage post of Ar Tonelico II. As such lots and lots of (possibly far too many) details follow.

You'll notice the gameplay being demonstrated isn't particularly striking in terms of skill. I'd just finished fighting a couple level 7 IPDs, so when a level 6 came up I was feeling complacent and didn't guard as well as I normally do. Also I probably could have ended the battle much sooner. Additionally it hadn't occurred to me to press Alt+Enter to maximize the window after I started recording, so i was playing this in a little 640x480 window on my 1680x1050 monitor.

I did a lot of experimenting with optimizing encoding. Note the version number 7.

I recorded this (some weeks ago, now) with my WinFast TV2000 Xp Expert card at 640x480 resolution, S-video In. I'm one of those people who will never be happy without having high dollar professional equipment I can't hope to afford, but that being said this card is probably the best $25 I ever spent. I got it on NewEgg a while back, and they don't sell it anymore. Yeah there's lots of little niggles about it that annoy me (can't seem to record in virtual dub and have to use the provided WinFast PVR) but it was $25 so I really shouldn't be complaining.

I use DScaler for normal play. It has some noise added noise when using it over the PVR, and the screen occasionally shakes, and the deinterlacing on it seems not as good as the PVR... but it upscales much better than the PVR which just gets blurry when I use it full screen.

When I recorded the video with I I used Xvid. I Forge the quality setting I used. It was at least 400 kpbs (I think it was more like 1000), and after converting the audio into 128kbps MP3 the file size was roughly 166MB.

I then tried lots of different XviD settings after cropping off the black border since in mot TV Card captures. I am tempted to go on about the previous 5 version, but I will resist. Here is the procedure I ended up using for this version.

I used VirtualDub to crop off the black border and resize it down to 320x240, and also applied the sharpening filter with a strength of 10 to compensate for youtube's blurriness. I then did a 2 pass XviD encode at 1400kbps using the Advanced Simple @ L5 profile. I had the Chroma Optimizer enabled, but not cartoon mode, though I tried that on earlier versions. Yes, I saw the 1400kbps figure on MasterLL's website. It's almost certainly higher than the bitrate the video was initially recorded at, but after trying lower ones, I decided to go for it to minimize generation loss, even if nothing is gained by going higher than the original. (From now on I will record my originals at 1400kbps or higher, I think. I also plan to make up an AviScript file to automate my filter settings. [I really want to use H.264....])

I'm tempted to try a version 8 with Cartoon Mode on for the heck of it, but really I think my time would be better spent moving onto video recorded at a higher, less ambiguous bitrate.

Seriously I've probalby watched this video 20 times now, sometimes multiple versions at once.

It goes without saying, any suggestions on better encoding are welcome.