Question about recording gameplay videos on the PC

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TamaNeko

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I have a noob question about those gameplay-recording programs that lets people upload their own videos on Youtube - doesn't it affect overall gaming performance for higher-end games like Crysis by having it recording while you're also playing at the same time? Wouldn't recording gameplay vids outside on the monitor with a camcorder be a more accurate recording of the game's performance, even if the video quality isn't as good?
 
generally, you would record an in-game demo of the game and then use fraps or whatever to record the demo. well thats what i did when i was making a ut2k4 fragmovie

and yes frapsing ingame owns it to the point of slideshows sometimes
 
Hmm, the game I specifically had in mind to do this (Fallout 3) doesn't have any in-game recording demo options though...
 
Using software to capture movies of games is a big drain on system resources, leaving less resources to run the game.

What essentially happens is the software take a series of screenshots and adds them together to create a movie, if you're taking a screenshot at a rate of say 30fps and each screenshot is 1mb (this differs depending on your screen resolution) then you're writing approximately 30mb per second to your hard drive.

Generally this is very CPU intensive and does loads of writing to the hard drive, running it at the same time as a game can decrease performance a lot. Using a tool like fraps to record your screen is a bad way to display performance, if measuing performance is your goal then you'd need to film the screen with a cam, or use some specialist hardware to take a copy of the screen output and record that independently.

You can do some things to lessen the impact to performance, get a fast CPU and more importantly get a multicore CPU, running the capture software on one core and the game on another greatly reduces the impact on frame rate, although most new games are multicore capable so even this doens't always help. Also write the movie to a fast drive, preferably not the system drive (C:), RAID 0 setups are good for this with increased performance, in fact to capture at something like 1920x1200 or 2560x1600 you may need a RAID 0 array to write at appropraite speeds as you're probably talkng about 100-200mb per second at this res.
 
FRAPS is quite intensive since you're recording uncompressed video. The video quality is pretty much flawless, but it's like 1GB per minute of video.

If you're having trouble recording with FRAPS, I'd recommend WeGame. The video recording quality is better than YouTube HD quality and it's much less system intensive. It syncs audio better as well.
 
You can always load up fraps, have it display the FPS on the screen and then hit record and see if it drops...If you got a solid rig, you will probally be all set :)

Happy Fraggin!
 
Yeah, if you are recording a video you should drop the resolution down.

Are there any programs that will record a compressed video?
 
even on a solid rig and recording to a different drive than the OS/Game Fraps still sucks the life out of everything.
 
Why not run the system in Clone Mode and send the video output to a DVD recorder by S-Video or Component (my Philips recorder has component inputs for recording)? Then use some program afterward to convert the video to something that YouTube can use.
 
vicaphit said:
Yeah, if you are recording a video you should drop the resolution down.

Are there any programs that will record a compressed video?
Click to expand...

Baring in mind that to compress video in real time to a saved file takes more CPU power :p
 
with the bottleneck in the right place (heavily GPU) then you may see little to no slow down, it's not usualy the case though, surprised you got Crysis out at a decent FPS, what resolution was that recorded at?
 
1280x720

I knew I was going to be uploading it to YouTube, so I set my resolution to 720p as that is what YouTube accepts for HD.

If you plan on uploading videos to websites like I did, there is no reason to play the game at any higher then 1280x720. It will make it eaiser to keep a decent FPS. If you aren't recording then by all means bump the resolution.
 
Ah right well 720p is a pretty small resolution.

Your overclocked quad is what is really helping with recording games like Crysis with little or no slow down.
 
720p IS small when you think about it terms of gaming resolutions, but if you are going to be uploading it to a video site (youtube, vimeo, etc..), its the maximum resolution they accept. So to get the best performance while recording, you might as well drop your resolution down to 720p, then back up again to whatever you choose when you are just playing the game.
 
yeah 720 p for gaming -> youtube. With their new hd they really should take bigger formats
 
Einhanderkiller said:
FRAPS is quite intensive since you're recording uncompressed video. The video quality is pretty much flawless, but it's like 1GB per minute of video.

If you're having trouble recording with FRAPS, I'd recommend WeGame. The video recording quality is better than YouTube HD quality and it's much less system intensive. It syncs audio better as well.
Click to expand...

Although the quality of FRAPS is near-flawless, its far from uncompressed. Otherwise, a clip would fill up a 500 GB hard drive in no time ;)

It's not even losslessly compressed, as some color information gets lost. I don't know whether its an issue with the colorspace it uses, or if it butchers chroma information to increase efficiency, but it's definitely not the full RGB colorspace that we see in real-time while gaming.
 
I think any recording program that is using resources has a chance to slow down the performance of a game. You can do some things though to minimize the hit. You're going to have to optimize some things. Set the cpu affinity in the off chance that both the recording program and the game are trying to use the same core. Also make sure to max out the ram, with xp you might as well throw 4gb at it although you won't see it all. For a 64 bit OS go with 8GB, why not, that way everything can breath.
You're also going to need a video card with a good amount of ram, 512 being the minimum, so if you're using something older time to upgrade. Also see if there is an option in the recording program to offload the processing to the cpu. Also minimize the amount of programs and services running in the background.

Will all of this help? maybe. I don't think most people use recording programs to capture real-time performance. It's more used for highlight type reels and to catch cheaters. I routinely record gameplay in bf2 at 60fps. It's just something to waste my time with editing quick highlights, as well as learning how I can play better by analyzing my play.
 
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