I'd appreciate some help here. I haven't really figured out how to use this plugin. My biggest issue is that my videos come out slow motion even though I think I'm doing everything right. Could someone who actively uses this plugin show their settings in the plugin and Avidemux that would result in a good balance between quality, file size and rendering speeds? I have RTX 2080
For your problem ...
I do my editing in Davinci Resolve not Avidemux ... but a classic way to get a speed shift is to not have the speed of capture not set in the editor (Avidemux). If you are capturing at 60fps and Avidemux happens to be defaulting to 24 fps like standard movies/TV it will come out as slow motion.
But I also think that the new Timeline plugin can do more time tricks now? I don't remember previous a setting for "realtime" versus "frametime" in the options for each animation sequence. When capturing you want "frametime". It defaults to "realtime". The current scene I'm working on has triggered triggered audio and fully dies when set to realtime.
The plugin can't "drop" frames so it can never get out of sync when set to gametime. One frame rendered is one delta time of audio.
Cool Trick: You can even do things like triggering appearance changes and other things that take time and you don't see it in the output. The capture plugin stops and waits. This means you can do far-far-far more complex scenes captured than you can ever run in real-time VAM. The ability to do appearance and clothing swaps and otherwise immersion breaking triggered actions as part of the animation is a big bonus.
For scene and rendering recommendations ....
I can't give you advice on what "reasonable" looks like. In the pr0n world everyone seems to want to max out their Quest 2 and I can give tell you how I do that.
In VAM...
While rendering scenes I have the standard VAM set to .5 with no aliasing. The plugin doesn't care. It runs it's own render pipeline and has it's own settings for that.
You want to set shader quality to max that one matters. Smoothing to taste.
"Usually" in game engines you want the physics rate at the desired frame rate. But the latest thing I'm working on has so much soft body, hair, and clothing VAM just stopped cold. I ended up flailing a solution by doubling the physics rate and setting the queue to 3. A game engine shouldn't need to compute physics more than once time per frame or ever need to queue physics ticks - so *shrug*.
The only thing I use PostMagic for is LUT if the scene I'm rendering already uses a LUT. Otherwise I do the color grading in Davinci. I can't think of any other plugins I use that make more pretty or change how things are computed.
In the capture plugin settings ...
My 2080ti is able to handle ful 8x anti-aliasing and 2048 per cubemap face (for 8K capture) without running out of vram. You should be able to do teh same with the 2089.
You have to enable the post effects check mark to catch anything done by PostMagic (the LUT). I capture 60fps with no frame skipping.
I changed jpeg from 99 to full max 100 - cuz why not? PNG would be even better for post editing but it's way to slow even for me. Especialy if I don't do any color grading.
Assuming VAM can render out fast enough (for my latest scene it definitely can't) I'm getting about 180 frames (jpeg images) per minute written to disk. So a 3 minute video takes about an hour to render fully.
In my latest capture the least jpeg friendly 8K frames are saving as 10meg each on disk. A "pure black" 8K frame is 3 megs on disk.
For my editing and compression in Davinci Resolve ...
(I used the $300 pay version but the only version most people need is free. I definitely recommend it.)
If you are rendering for a Quest 2 - the max it can handle in it's decoder is ~80 Mbit/s of h.265 "target" bitrate.
In my latest clip the actual bitrate after encode was 93 Mbit/s.
The resulting for size for 35 secs of 8K video was ... wait for it ... 400 megs.
Think that's big? Fun fact ... YouTube can handle uploads of Avid files. The VC-3 compressed DNxHD version is 16 gigs ... just for 35 seconds of 8K video.
The "sweet spot" in my opinion is 5K 30Mbit/s h.265 encode from 7K capture in VAM. Playable in a Quest 1 and still looks great in a Quest 2.
The actual bit rate after encode was 47 Mbit/s with a 200 meg file size.
What are the encode settings used?
This is the guide for the newest nvidia preset naming schemes.
https://docs.nvidia.com/video-technologies/video-codec-sdk/nvenc-preset-migration-guide/
I believe the highest quality setting in Davinci for h.265 encodes in using settings similar to the "P5" profile level of nvenc.
Using 7K plugin output, tweaking down the target bit rate to 60 and lowering the profile to P4 (old name "HP" for High Performance) might be closer to what someone calls "reasonable".
Hopefully this long winded non-answer can give you some ideas for your own captures and encodes.