Problem posting Atari 2600 video to YouTube (60 to 30 fps)

[jschl3]

I'm not a video expert so the info I'm finding online to fix this is only making me more confused, so I'm hoping the AtariAge community can help.

 

I'm working on a game version of the Dark Crystal movie, just for fun (not planning to sell or anything due to copyright / IP). The "game engine" is Atari 2600 and works similar to Below The Root (if you know that old C64 game) - a side-view, non scrolling world. In order to achieve the desired "multicolor" background effects I want (and to allow the character spites to move through some background playfield real estate while interacting / colliding with objects / platforms / ground), I am strobing two different multicolor playfields for each room. the effects look pretty fantastic through stella when rendered faithfully at 60 fps (30 fps for each of the two playfields). Same, for FRAPS video capture - I'm capturing 60 fps and viewing it in windows media player pretty well.

 

But when I try to upload to YouTube, as you may know YouTube automatically renders it at 30 fps. It seems to be dropping every otherframe. Which completely undoes the strobe effect - we're left on youtube viewing incomplete playfield graphics. So, trees become only their leaves, houses are only the roof and floor, etc.

 

I have learned that I need something called "resampling", which I believe is a technique that take 60 fps video and "resamples" it down to 30 fps, by combining frames 1 and 2 (interlaced), then 3+4, 5+6, etc. This should perfectly solve my problem...but I don't know how to do it. I've got Adobe After Affects and can download any freebie video editor sw. But I'm a total neophyte on video capture / edit (learning to use FRAPS was a major step for me!)

 

Has anyone else experienced this problem, and resolved it? Thanks!

[+Random Terrain]

For the video below, I used Stella, pressed Alt + P to enable phosphor effect, then recorded it using the extra-super-duper easy to use Bandicam.

 

youtube.com/watch?v=WJ5phkEZqsY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ5phkEZqsY

[+stephena]

I assume that if you're using 30 fps alternating, then half the scanlines are drawn in one frame, and the other half in the next. If so, Stella has a mode called 'phosphor effect'. Essentially, it combines the frames together in exactly the fashion you need (odd and even scanlines are blended together). You can toggle the phosphor effect by pressing Alt-p while the emulation is running. Note that you'll have to do this each time the ROM is loaded, unless you want to save it to the internal properties database, which takes a little more explaining.

 

EDIT: RT beat me to the explanation

[Thomas Jentzsch]

EDIT: RT beat me to the explanation

By seconds!

Edited September 8, 2013 by Thomas Jentzsch

[jschl3]

Oh wow....thank you both RT and stephena. I had no idea it was that simple! Yes stephena, that's what I was doing - I've got two standard multicolor playfields, 15 lines deep, and just swap between them every other screendraw. Plan to use that to build dozens of rooms (using extended RAM options, not sure how big I'll need to go yet)

 

I wasted about 10 hours today adding effects and rendering overly large .AVI files from Adobe After Effects...taking 60 fps down to 20 and adding echo effects to blend the two playfields. For what it's worth here is the result on youtube:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q2IAEl8AAk

 

I will try the Stella phosphor effect - saw people talking about that at times in this forum, but never knew what it meant!

[ZylonBane]

I assume that if you're using 30 fps alternating, then half the scanlines are drawn in one frame, and the other half in the next.

 

No. The 2600, like almost every game console prior to the 32-bit era, produces a non-interlaced display. That's how it can animate at 60FPS without sawtooth artifacts-- it outputs only odd (or only even, one of those two) fields.