Recommended Video Capture Software?

[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
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

[Kittra]

@Kittra
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

Hmm, strange.

Are you using Window Capture or Game Capture for the video? (My guess would be Window Capture)

I would recommend setting up some capture hot-keys in Settings > Broadcast Settings and just set it to something like Alt+P for both stop and start. Then, try playing the game in the foreground and then press your hot-key to start recording and see if that works.

You can also try Game Capture mode, which is the recommended capture mode when using OBS for games.

@Kittra well that would explain my current problem then 8D
Only one hard drive with one disc. Would prolly explain a lot lol
thanks for the help though :3
One last question though. I doubt it but would recording from a Flash Drive work? It's my only other option now.

Flash drives are, unfortunately, not well suited for video recording unless special codecs are used (like what you get with DSLR cameras). =(

Don't give up!

Keep messing with some settings on OBS or give another program a whirl. Sometimes it's the stupidest things that can lock up a recording, but it feels great when you finally figure it out. =)

*EDIT*

I almost forgot to ask.

Have you removed your power saving options from your laptop at all?

It's possible your recording problems (past and present) are being caused because Windows is causing your CPU to throttle in power.

Example, it may say it's operating at 1.6ghz, but in power saving mode you typically use 5-15% power which = 300-500mhz. That's about the operational speed of my old 1991 Gateway 2000...

[Shirana]

@Kittra
yeah, I've had my battery on max performance ever since finishing a semester of college and using my free time to get back to games 8D
ANd I wasn't quite sure what to put for the resolution to make it 480p so I re-read your post earlier and set it to Resolution Downscale 852 x 480...was closest to "960x540 which falls in the realm of a 480p video on YouTube." that you mentioned earlier. Though it came out kind of blurry it worked just fine! SO I am happy. I care little for HD/Very high quality anyways. 360/480 is what I watch on youtube anyways even if 1080 is available lol I see nothing wrong with it besides the slight lack of clarity. But it works just fine so I can play around with the settings more till I got something nice :3

Edit: Also disabling coding while previewing helped wonders too. And Turning off preview in general also helped

@lxSch & Shakarlyn
I honestly don't know what you're talking about. I just know, from guessing mostly from settings in OBS, that this uses x264 and you are suggessting a recorder that uses huffyuv/lagarith or MJPEG/RTV1 or something.

[Kittra]

@Kittra
yeah, I've had my battery on max performance ever since finishing a semester of college and using my free time to get back to games 8D
ANd I wasn't quite sure what to put for the resolution to make it 480p so I re-read your post earlier and set it to Resolution Downscale 852 x 480...was closest to "960x540 which falls in the realm of a 480p video on YouTube." that you mentioned earlier. Though it came out kind of blurry it worked just fine! SO I am happy. I care little for HD/Very high quality anyways. 360/480 is what I watch on youtube anyways even if 1080 is available lol I see nothing wrong with it besides the slight lack of clarity. But it works just fine so I can play around with the settings more till I got something nice :3

Great!

Going by your screenshot, the reason the picture is blurry is due to the bit rate it's using to encode.

Higher bit rates require more power, but you can find a nice balance through experimentation.

You can change the bit rate in the "Encoding" setting by increasing or reducing the Max Bitrate (kb/s), the Buffer Size (kbit) (which is usually set to 0 or the same as the Max Bitrate) allows you to dial down, or dial up the bit rate spent in high motion scenes to make them look better or tell the CPU take it easy on those frames, because you don't see what's going on when spinning the camera anyways.

I don't recommend you set the Buffer Size to 0, because that basicly tells the program "You know what, lets toss caution to the wind and drive this Sports Car at 200mph (321kph) and have the time of our lives... or spin out of control and fly off a cliff!" if you get my meaning. >_>

*EDIT*

Oh, also: 852 x 480 = 480p video and will probably look better than 960x540 because YouTube won't have to downsize it to 480p resolution. =D

[Shirana]

Great!

This is how it looks now :3
It's really good now imo, since I never expected awesome quality anyways xD
And it seems to have little impact on my games performance though the real test will be CT when I try it tomorrow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjjL9ZnLBMw
ANd yes set the quality settings to 480 in the youtube player. 360 is what it looked like even on 480 before messing with buffering.

I don't recommend you set the Buffer Size to 0, because that basicly tells the program "You know what, lets toss caution to the wind and drive this Sports Car at 200mph (321kph) and have the time of our lives... or spin out of control and fly off a cliff!" if you get my meaning. >_>

And this made me Lol 8D

[lxSch]

It does not matter what software you are using - they all use same 3rd party codecs to encode the video.
Huffyuv/lagarith - lossless codecs (huge file size), very little cpu usage.
Mjpeg/RTV1 - lossy, high file size codecs, light cpu usage.
x264 - lossy, smallest file, huge cpu usage.
H264 (hardware) - no cpu usage, uses videocard to encode the video (intel/amd/nvidia), small file size. Shadowplay uses H264.
If you have enough disk space (considering 1 minute = 1 gb) - try saving and huffyuv/lagarith or MJPEG/RTV1 and encoding later.
If you do not have enough space - you can try utilizing H264 codec that requires OpenCL (i think your amd hardware should have opencl enabled). I think OBS should have this codec available, and msi afterburner should have it available too in some future.
Also, try reducing game fps to 30 and resolution to 720p - those are specs youtube converts video to anyway, so playing/recording at higher is pointless.

[Shakarlyn]

It does not matter what software you are using - they all use same 3rd party codecs to encode the video.
Huffyuv/lagarith - lossless codecs (huge file size), very little cpu usage.
Mjpeg/RTV1 - lossy, high file size codecs, light cpu usage.
x264 - lossy, smallest file, huge cpu usage.
H264 (hardware) - no cpu usage, uses videocard to encode the video (intel/amd/nvidia), small file size. Shadowplay uses H264.
If you have enough disk space (considering 1 minute = 1 gb) - try saving and huffyuv/lagarith or MJPEG/RTV1 and encoding later.
If you do not have enough space - you can try utilizing H264 codec that requires OpenCL (i think your amd hardware should have opencl enabled). I think OBS should have this codec available, and msi afterburner should have it available too in some future.
Also, try reducing game fps to 30 and resolution to 720p - those are specs youtube converts video to anyway, so playing/recording at higher is pointless.

What lxSch says it is golden. You're complaining about CPU time, this is the best method since you do not have an Nvidia card that supports ShadowPlay (There isn't an AMD equiv yet). You could also look into other H264 recorders like what he's mentioned.

[Kittra]

What lxSch says it is golden. You're complaining about CPU time, this is the best method since you do not have an Nvidia card that supports ShadowPlay (There isn't an AMD equiv yet). You could also look into other H264 recorders like what he's mentioned.

I think the problem here is that Shirana is using a Laptop, which typically doesn't have a hard drive capable of writing fast enough for Huffyuv/lagarith not to mention the space requirements. =\

The only thing I can really think of that will work 100% is FRAPs. Once again though, huge file size, the need to encode later, it all gets tiring after a while.