Nightyswolf is a Steam Workshop modder that I’ve grabbed a lot of mods from. You can get these outfits and others here.
Here’s a short video of them in “action.” Made me giggle.
The video editor program I’ve decided to use is called Shotcut and is pretty good for free, open-source software. Can do all the basic simple things most people would want to do. More importantly, it will read/open and handle my huge Fraps .avi files (at least on my PC), where a lot of freebie editors I’ve tried, can’t/won’t. I still use VirtualDub to do the initial clip editing then toss it in Shortcut for any transitions/titles etc. and the final compression to .mp4 for Youtube.
It’s a glitch that occurs if you’re using a Cheat Engine table to add Ardyn as a follower and then repeatedly use Avatara to switch Noctis appearance over and over. Adding this many WILL affect performance a lot. They do not follow you, and the duplicates do not remain upon reloading a save. But they do shuffle around and react to environment “spaces”, so you can bump into them to make them move if you wish, and they interfere with traffic and enemies will attack them, among other things. It’s hilarious.
It also works with Umbra, but that’s for another day.
After fruitlessly spending 2 days trying different video editors (DaVinci, Shotcut) and test uploading videos to YouTube over and over (with zero success at bettering YT play quality), I finally noticed something within the “Stats for Nerds” you can see by r-clicking on YT player. Then I found some videos explaining the meaning of what I’d noticed.
Basically, YouTube uses two different codecs when re-processing your uploaded file. So if your channel/videos get a lot of average views (you’re popular, in other words), YT will use the better quality codec (vp9) by default. If you don’t get a lot of average views, they use the lesser quality one. They might even later switch it to a vp9 version without you realizing, if the video becomes popular. Now that’s only a theory – I say that because I’m sure I wouldn’t have qualified for vp9 when I uploaded that Ignis vs. Turtle video, but for some reason it’s vp9 codec’d. Regardless, if you’re someone who rarely gets many video views, the only current reliable way around this is to always upload in 1440 (“2k”), which seems to default to vp9 no matter what.
I don’t know how long they’ve been doing this, but years ago all my pc gaming vids used the avc1 codec – I checked – and still looked good to decent at 720 and 1080. Newer videos using it now look like muddy crap (imo), particularly with fast action motion, no matter what bitrate/compression you use. So they must have reduced quality settings of that codec as well.
From YT’s point of view it may be logical in some way but it sure is annoying to the uploader. I wish they’d at least allow low-view accounts to have the vp9 codec if the video is very short (like under a minute) or relatively small upload (less than 50MB) which wouldn’t take tooo long to re-process regardless.
Oh well, at least I know the reason now and can stop obsessing over editors, compression techniques and the like. If you now want better looking videos on YouTube, record and upload in 1440. Got it. Edit: I tried upsizing a 1080 to 1440 and uploading, doesn’t seem to work, YT won’t recognize it as 1440.
I mean put both of these at 1080 and then full-screen, and see the difference. It’s not only motion, look at the weapon selector text/graphic and such. No these videos aren’t special, they were just good fast-motion tests. I still think below 1080 looks like crap on anything but small resized windows or mobile phone screens, even with uploading 1440. 😛
I always like this spot for scenic and pose shots. (4k)
The outfit Noctis is wearing is another mod – this time of the main chr. clothing (including the arm) from the game Sekiro. It’s another quality-texture outfit – looks pretty decent even close up. (1440)
I was wondering how well the built-in WordPress media players fare. Seems to work with Win7, Win10, and Firefox 61+ but I have no clue about other or older browsers. If you r-click on video while it’s playing, you can pick things like Loop, playspeed, etc. The audio player doesn’t seem to have those options. For really short video snippets – like that V drinking coffee one – it might be nice to not have to use YouTube, but I don’t have 200,001TB of server storage to be able to often upload lots of long/large videos. Plus I’m not sure how much the media containers affect load time of the website. So this is mostly curiosity/testing. There’s probably some free/paid WP plugins that work better, of course, but not sure I want to go that route unless I was going to devote a site to videos.
Uploading audio occasionally is more likely. For testing laughs, here is a stupid song mix I made years ago, using Boone’s voice lines (Boone is from Fallout:New Vegas). I recall liking it when I made it but now it sounds overbearing and silly. lol.
But I wouldn’t mind making silly projects again, using voice files, with FFXV stuff. I’m that bored lately, yup. The problem is converting all the audio files into mp3’s vs. their original uncommon format. I don’t currently have a tool that can do them all wholesale. Last time I looked at them I only converted a handful of Ignis’ lines then gave up. 😛 Need to look around again.
Since I now have 8TB of HDD storage space, I feel more inclined to video record more. I have two choices: play on the 4k TV and record at half-size for 1080/60fps videos, or play on the pc monitor and record full-size 1440/60fps videos. 1080 is normally fine for videos in my book, but the thing is, if I want to grab frame by frame stills from a video, like I’m doing in the picture above, 1080 images feel too tiny now. Sadly trying to record smooth 4k/60fps at high game settings, with performance-hitting Fraps, isn’t quite doable even for this new rig of mine. No I don’t want to use Shadowplay (Nvidia Experience is ICK).
With 1440 videos I can grab pretty decent stills from them, like this one of Cindy during that early photo cutscene (yup that really is a video still grab – Fraps raw file format quality is awesome which is why I still use it). Meaning I can get any cutscene or combat frame without having to time pushing of any buttons, and thus I can focus on actually playing uninterrupted more often. I mean it’s not as good as Ansel, but for some things video grabs are just fine. But I so much prefer playing on the 4k TV. Guess I’ll have to keep swapping back and forth … no I don’t expect anyone to care. I’m just “blogging.” Pfft. 😉
