Recommended Video Capture Software?

[Shirana]

What would you recommend? I use CamStudio (though not for like a year since I rarely record anything). However CamStudio wasn't made to record things like games. It will make the game window pixelated in the video. I've tried hypercam about a year ago too on my desktop computer but it had issues. It would only record sound from my mic and never ever from my speakers/sound card/whatever. What would you recommend? I want a nice recording of CT to add to my youtube private collection sometime *-*

Edit: Using a PC~

[Mogi]

PS4 will be a nice way:P but on pc maybe fraps?

[reality_check]

Use ShadowPlay! It's amazing.

[Shirana]

@Mogi I haven't tried fraps *-* and yes this is a pc thanks for reminding me to mention that I'll edit my first post xD

@reality_check I just googled that since I never heard of it and I don't even have an NVIDIA card, let alone a GeForce which I get the feeling is prolly a really expensive graphics card lol

[Kittra]

What kind of PC hardware are you using?

Different recording programs work better with the type of system you have.


Personally, I've found FRAPs to deliver the best quality, but the video needs to be compressed by an encoder later to bring the size down and then you run into a bunch of technical things like how to set up an x264 codec, XVID, etc. for the best quality after compression. There's also the fact that FRAPs has not had an update in a very long time... so as Windows updates itself little errors can happen with the program, such as a video stutter every 10 seconds which has caused me to drop FRAPs completely in recent years.


Probably the most customizable program (and most importantly, one that receives regular updates) is DxTory. However, DxTory becomes a bit more technical if you want to use an encoder to compress while recording the video.

Compressing a video while recording at the same time also puts a lot of stress on your system, so if it's not up to the challenge, the video can come out a bit rough unless you tune the settings for what your system can handle, which usually means reducing the quality or increasing the video file size.

[Vactus]

MSI Afterburner Supports damn near every card and is amazing. OH and it's free. FRAPS is not. You can record about 30s to a 1min with FRAPS without paying. Kind of useless.

[Kittra]

MSI Afterburner Supports damn near every card and is amazing. OH and it's free. FRAPS is not. You can record about 30s to a 1min with FRAPS without paying. Kind of useless.

MSI Afterburner is pretty cool, but it uses a lot of CPU power while recording, more so than FRAPs.

While FRAPs and DxTory are not free, and I would never recommend them to people without the PC to support the purchase, they are both more suited to video recording than the current release of MSI Afterburner.


I almost forgot about one more program that you might want to check out.

Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is an open source recording and streaming program that receives frequent updates, and I've had great success with running it in the background.


My personal preference is to use a capture card pared with OBS for the best possible quality and 0% impact on the game session, but even by itself OBS is a pretty powerful tool. It is also 100% free and the community supporting it is awesome.

[Shirana]

@Kittra
Taking it from my FF launcher, I have:
AMD Radeon HD 7600G graphics chip
AMD A8-4555M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics (4 CPUs), ~1.6GHz
It's a laptop and not amazing but plays FF just fine even in CT (though I always turn off all special effects and keep everything on low settings since I do know laptops have heating issues with games. I do keep shadows on sometimes though).

And yeah like 1 min recordings are pretty inconvenient.

Edit: I'll look up Open Broadcaster Software too then o:
Looking for a nice recording software I can use. I want to record CT but I might record often if it's a really good program and not too hard on my laptop. There's lots of fun things I like in FF that would be fun to record for friends inside and outside of FF :3

@Vactus
Is this going to make changes to my laptops settings? It seems like it's one of those third party graphics accelerators, if I got my terms right, that auto change your computers settings.

[Kittra]

@Vactus
Is this going to make changes to my laptops settings? It seems like it's one of those third party graphics accelerators, if I got my terms right, that auto change your computers settings.

I can answer that.

MSI Afterburner is primarily a GPU overclocking and fan controller program with the added bonus of having a utility to record video.

It does not change your settings automatically, but instead will just allow you to see your system operating temperatures/voltages.

Since you don't have discrete GPU, it shouldn't have any settings you can change that would harm your PC.


As for your Laptop specs; I wouldn't expect that particular CPU to be all that adequate when it comes to recording videos in full HD, especially if you have the power saving options enabled (they are enabled on all laptops by default).

FRAPs allows you to record at half resolution, which can take a ton of stress off of your machine, but then it is half your screen size. An example would be the half screen size of 1920x1080 = 960x540 which falls in the realm of a 480p video on YouTube.

Open Broadcaster Software allows greater flexibility and you can set the screen recording size to whatever you want. Example: Screen size is 1920x1080, but you can set the recorded video resolution to 1280x720, 852x480 or any custom size you like. This gives you the freedom to find your Laptop's "Optimal" recording settings through experimentation.

On another note, DxTory also has a custom resize feature.

[Shirana]

@Kittra
Sorry for the late reply I was trying Open Broadcast software and had to play around with it to understand it a little. As for MSI Afterburner I think I'll pass. Sounds like stuff I wouldn't understand Lol.
Open Broadcast has impressed me though. And yeah I set the recording size to match the 1280x720 resolution I have set for the game. I got OBS to record the game (and audio thankfully >.> unlike HyperCam. I LIKE the games music) but it only records video for like one second then the video recording freezes and I only get sound after that. I'm guessing it's too much for my laptop? lol
I checked Task Manager while recording and my CPU was hovering around 70% but I'm not tech savvy so I could be wrong :c
http://i60.tinypic.com/23rpmro.png
^ Notice the difference in recording to where I am in game? lol it just stays like that right after I switch to FF14 (but if I keep the active window OBS then it records just fine and if I switch to FF14, it stops recording video, and back it starts recording just fine again. wtf 8D

Edit: Just saw the little warning flag at the bottom left. So I guess my computer is too slow to play AND record at the sametime