How to recreate the benchmark videos from Digital Foundry | Tutorial

Most gamers are familiar with the in-depth analyses of the YouTube channel Digital Foundry. These content creators use their own tools to analyse the resolutions, framerates and frametimes of gameplay footage on different consoles and platforms. However, there are open-source alternatives you can use to analyse the framerate and frametimes of gameplay yourself.

Do you create content about games and want to use in-depth analyses of gameplay videos with the framerates and frametimes included on a visual graph?

These types of tools remained out of reach of gamers and other content creators, but the open-source software TrDrop helps you create videos similar to Digital Foundry.

In-depth frame-by-frame analysis

TrDrop is an open-source video analysis software that makes it possible to analyse the individual frames of an uncompressed gameplay video to detect the differences between two frames.

This method means that TrDrop can analyse uncompressed gameplay footage from both consoles and computers.

Framerate and frametime analysis

To estimate the framerate of uncompressed gameplay footage, the TrDrop tool checks for differences on a frame-by-frame basis and counts the different frames. The result is added as an overlay on top of the gameplay video.

At the same time, the software uses algorithms to analyse the frametimes of the different frames. The frametime is an indication of how long every frame is shown as a still image in the gameplay video.

Tear detection and advanced features

The TrDrop software also detects tears in the frames. These tears do not have an influence on the framerate, but are shown in the graph.

To make the software even more advanced and complex, it is even possible to make comparisons of up to three different videos in parallel. This feature makes it possible to compare the framerates of different versions of the same game.

The software exports each frame as an individual picture. This makes it a harder to create a video as you need to import every picture in the video editing software of your preference, but allows you to export the graph as a transparent source too. A helpful addition.

Uncompressed gameplay videos

As mentioned before, you need to use uncompressed gameplay footage to make a proper analysis of the framerate of the video. Any form of compression in the video file will result in errors or inaccuracies in the different algorithms.

Even with an uncompressed video, the TrDrop tool gives you an estimated demonstration of the real performance of a game. An exact representation of performance has to be provided by the developers themselves to be as accurate as possible with in-game information.

Commercial use

The developer behind TrDrop has given users the permission for commercial use of the software. This means that users can use the TrDrop software and include the gameplay videos with the added framerate and frametime graphs in your own videos.

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Disclaimer. This post contains copyrighted images from TrDrop, an open-source video analysis program. The fair use of copyrighted works for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting or research is not considered as an infringement of copyright.