Atari st video snaps

[billyc99]

ok after trying to find the best method of capturing these.

I've found steam and camtasia works best together.

now I just need to know if its ok to have the black borders , to retain the aspect ratio

 

ive attached a title snap for you to check out.

 

also if there's anyone wanting to help on these let me know and ill get a file list up

capture-1.avi

[Circo]

What you want to do is in virtualdub use the resize filter and crop out the borders

Sent from my XT1060 using Tapatalk

[billyc99]

the border is top and bottom , meaning the vid would not be 640 x 480 anymore. did the st have a widescreen type res

 

juts checked it would be 640 x 400, should I set camtasia to record at 640 x 400

[DamnedRegistrations]

Actually what I do is add a null transform filter first followed by the resize filter. Highlight the nullsoft filter and use that to do the cropping so you have a dedicated cropping filter. Then under resize, set it to 640x480, set the "Codec-friendly sizing" to multiples of 2 (for encoding with x264 lossless) and save as default so you have a template in place for every vid. Works perfectly.

[brolly]

DR, resize to 640x480? But that would screw up the aspect ratio pretty badly if the original resolution is 640x400. You should be resizing to 768x480 instead to keep it at 480p and also maintain the original AR. Then again I'm not exactly sure on how Circo usually handle a scenario like this.

 

I wouldn't bother too much with the cropping for now as that can be done with a batch script afterwards if the cropping is the same for all games. Main thing would be settling on the resolution to capture at.

 

[Circo]

It all comes down to how it was displayed on the screen for me vs resolution. If the screen was 4:3 then the video should be 4:3. The comparison I always use is the arcade version of street fighter, the internal resolution had nothing to do with how it was displayed on the screen.

Internal aspect ratio

How it actually looked on screen

Atari ST def looks like a 4:3 screen as almost everything was back then

So unless I am missing something I would resize to 640x480

Another thought on the cropping, if they are all the same then might as well crop it in the first place as its no additional effort and we dont have to blow up a small video later down the line which can affect quality. ie if its submitted at 640x480 cropped to 580x 400 and then resized back to 640x480 there can be added blur and or artifacts.

[billyc99]

here's the 1st division manager 1 again this time , I've set to borderless and set it to 480p

its easier to see the aspect ratio distortion from the code masters logo ,  there' s no sound as I need to change my audi settings when I record. also its not fully centred as its only an example

capture-2.avi

[brolly]

Circo, the ST had a 4:3 monitor, but the games run at 640x400 which mean they were displayed with black bars at the top/bottom I think, if you crop those bars out and resize the cropped video to 640x480 you will be distorting the original AR. And stretching a video vertically from 400p to 480p will be quite noticeable imo.

This is pretty common on a lot of the 8-bit/16-bit personal computers, Many Spectrum or C64 games had colored borders around the whole gameplay area for instance.

 

[billyc99]

Let me know which to go with and ill begin

[DamnedRegistrations]

I think I've only tried Atari ST once before. Didn't realize it had such an odd resolution. I'd say just go with whatever doesn't look too stretched then. 768x480 sounds like it'd work as long as you crop them beforehand.

 

Personally I always do all the cropping before uploading here because sometimes it isn't best for this to be automated. Plenty of games I've done where completely taking out the borders would stretch the aspect ratio too much.

[Agrajag]

The ST had three different resolutions / colour modes:

High = 640x400 / monochrome

Medium = 640x200 / 4 colours

Low = 320x200 / 16 colours

They all looked 4:3 on screen and most games ran in low res.

[billyc99]

The ST had three different resolutions / colour modes: High = 640x400 / monochrome Medium = 640x200 / 4 colours Low = 320x200 / 16 colours They all looked 4:3 on screen and most games ran in low res.

 

yea I noticed that. obviously wont be using high res as its monochrome. medium res that's the weirdest and made me wonder what it must of looked like on a 4:3 ratio screen, I don't ever recall seeing any super wide monitors in them days. low res is what ive set it at and recorded at 480p (768 x 480p)no borders  they look good to me, im going to do 500 at a time, I should have the first 500 title done by the weekend, and then I can start on the gameplay

[billyc99]

**update** well I got the 500 title's done and 40 gameplay up to now, but im also finding the best version of the rom and configuration settings for each as I go , im trying to find all the games that will auto boot instead of showing the gem desktop. also any game that as more than 2 disks try to get an hdd version

[Agrajag]

medium res that's the weirdest and made me wonder what it must of looked like on a 4:3 ratio screen, I don't ever recall seeing any super wide monitors in them days.

It looked weird alright! Everything was tall and thin. I don't think it was used very much.

By the way, there are quite a few games that can be run in hi-res mono, and some that are mono-only.

http://www.atarimania.com/list_games_atari-st-p_total-page-step-resolution_385-1-200-high_S_G.html

[billyc99]

hi everyone been a while, not done nothing for a while due to personal circumstances, but hopefully I can back to helping out soon

[brolly]

I was wondering where you have been , thanks for the heads up hope you can get all those matters sorted out sooner or later mate.