Game Recording Software.

What is your favorite game recording software?

• FRAPS
• MSI Afterburner
• PlayClaw
• Other

Personally, I love MSI Afterburner. Can't beat free! The only thing it is missing is a live commentary feature, but there is a workaround for that.

I originally used FRAPS, but I really dislike that it locks my FPS to whatever I'm recording at (or a multiple of such). With PlayClaw, I could record at X fps and play at Y fps with no issues, but the live voice quality was bad. =\

EDIT:
Since the above-mentioned workaround won't work for everyone (and may cause issues with some VOIP programs), I created one with Audacity. This one is a little more time consuming, but should work for everyone, and allows you to easily edit your voice if you so desire.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vtRFVYVZTs&hd=1

 

That "work around" is not a fix nor will it work for everybody. It is hardware dependent the stereo mix is a feature of the realtek onboard that some people will not have.

A real work around that will work for everybody is to just use a separate program to record the audio like Audacity that is also free, this way you also get your voice track separate from the game audio allowing you to set the proper levels and clean the vocal track of noise and make the final product sound much better.

 

Thanks for the information. I did not realize that.

I used to post-commentate my clips in Vegas, but that got to be quite tedious.

EDIT:
Since the previous workaround won't work for everyone (and may cause issues with some VOIP programs), I created one with Audacity. This one is a little more time consuming, but should work for everyone, and allows you to easily edit your voice if you so desire.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vtRFVYVZTs&hd=1

 

I think your in the right direction but still not really to the point that the video is educational and what I would call a tutorial.

You didnt show how to actually do anything, just providing a link to download audacity would have been pretty much as effective.

What I would do is show the hardest part of the process, how to mux and sync the audio/video files together in a free editor program so that anybody can do it.

Also I would not be teaching people to export the audio track as LAME MP3 because it will compress it and cause a loss of quality. If you ever are telling somebody to compress you should give recommended compression settings as well.

You never compress anything until the final product is being rendered. This voice track is going to be going into an editor and used as part of a project and thus is not in a final product and it will be compressed again and causing more quality loss.

Just export from Audacity as a .WAV this will keep all the quality and also there is no plugin/codec/encoder business to deal with.

With my harsh criticism aside you have clear audio and a good speaking voice so you have the foundation to be good at this, I think you just need to work on the content more.

P.S. You should give credit to your peers when they teach you something

 

I use WeGame. It costs money to unlock the full version with native resolution recording, but the free version lets you record at half-resolution, which is what I prefer anyway because of its much lower impact on frame rates. Also does not have a time limit or lock your frame rate to the recording frame rate, unlike Fraps, and file sizes are significantly smaller.

 

last time i record something was back in 2007, did it was fraps and it was super easy so it should be even better now

 

I use FRAPS, it works well and is easy enough to record voice at the same time. Sadly it can't record some older things like games in DOS box. I thought I might be able to use the Windows Aero monitoring to record it, but DOS box decides it needs to disable aero so that didn't work.

 

Thanks for the criticism Vicious! It is much appreciated! I am new to recording videos, so all tips are helpful. I'll probably just redo the second video - what you're saying makes a lot more sense than what I did and is probably what I should have done in the first place.

EDIT:
As soon as YouTube comes back up (maintenance) I'll credit you in the description (as I should have already done).

 

I have a question about these choices. I already own fraps, but well... is there anything that uses less resources while recording, that still delivers high quality?

With my current fraps settings, 1 minute of 1080p, 30fps footage with audio included comes out to about 1gb filesize. I also want to know if there is something that doesn't immediately halve fps during recording. Obviously I realize I could just tell fraps to record at half-res, but people really like HD videos (me too!) and for some things, 720p minimum is required to spot little details.

Basically I want to be able to capture BF3 videos at native, or at least decent resolutions (I might have to drop down to 900p for BF3 ingame), and want to know my options.

 

I have a little project.

Going to do a FRAPS vs MSI Afterburner comparison video since those seem to be the top 2 choices.

I need a game with a pre-defined built in benchmark this way I can record the same exact video with both software and then overlay them and compare a few things.

Crysis sounds good even though its not built in there is a program that runs a benchmark I just hate to install a huge game like that. Any other good games that are a small download/install?

1.) Quality of Video
2.) Size of Video
3.) Actual Benchmark Scores (to see if one hurts game performance more than the other)
4.) Other thoughts (ease of use, compatibility, cost, etc)

When all said and done I will render a video that is half FRAPS and half MSI and upload it to youtube so you can see if there is any visual difference.

the Motion JPG codec used by MSI is super old school but not very efficient so not sure how things will stack up. It has to have a 64bit codec or it wont work with my 64bit editor and that will right away eliminate MSI as a good screen capture program since the newest versions of Adobe Premiere are 64bit only and Sony Vegas has had a 64bit version of its editor for a long time.

Now thinking back I think MSI did the same thing just I could not see the video it was all black without a 64bit codec, but the video stream was a tad longer than the audio stream. It is only a part of a second but it bugs me to no end so I hope I can fix it.

ZD Soft is not free its $40.00 to buy, however it has a fully functional 30 day trial and I imagine if you so desire you could uninstall/reinstall the trial after 30 days.

 

Update: Project done - No video to show because my worst fear was correct. MJPEG is pretty outdated and thus there is no standard x64 MJPEG codec and thus any 64bit video editor can not use the footage provided by MSI Afterburner I just get a black screen.

Also the sound length did not match the video length so I think it has some issues with recording sync properly.

So in summary its totally useless no matter what advantages it may have as far as not capping frame rate if you use a 64bit editor.

Adobe Premiere CS5 is ONLY 64bit, and I use Sony Vegas 64bit.

 

Well that is good to know, I use sony vegas x64 to put videos together too... guess we're stuck with fraps!

 

I got a new one for you guys that I am trying out. So far I think it has the potential to be the BEST of them all.

ZD Soft

The reason I like it so far is how configurable it is, and it does not have the one big pitfall FRAPS has where it limits your frame rate. Games run full speed while recording at your desired frame rate.

Unlike say MSI Afterburner this one you CHOOSE the codec to record with. It comes default with H264 compression and this is very compressed and uses some cpu power but it is not "lossless" so its not what I would record with.

Using it though set to CRF 20 the same game benchmark I recorded with fraps that was 1.81GB was only 29MB and looked pretty much identical. So for most people not obsessed with being lossless quality like me this is going to be huge.

Again it lets you choose the codec to use though so I set it to use Lagarith a free lossless codec I use when I export footage from my editor before I encode it with my encoder for final compression and distribution.

Lagarith does have about 20% small file size than FRAPS and is 100% lossless so you get all the original quality. Its also 64bit and 32bit as well as mutli threaded so if you have a multi core cpu chances are the recording/encoding process is not going to cause performance problems in your game.

Other things, it lets you capture windows sound, mic sound, and line-in sound all selectable independently or together and of course choose the audio codec as well. It defaulted to LAME MP3 but I changed that to PCM.

My only issue so far with it is that for some reason when I look at the footage on my editor it has about the last second of audio missing. I cant figure out the cause or problem. I am not sure if the last second of audio is simply not recorded, or more importantly the video length and audio length are not being set properly in the .avi container and the editor is shrinking/stretching one of them causing the 1 second difference.

I emailed ZD Soft support to see if I can get an answer, if they have good support and can fix it, they very well may convert me from fraps.

 

I looked at the website and noticed this,

I don't really like the idea that I have to buy multiple copies if I'm going to use it on multiple computers.

 

I also don't like the fact that it is being detected as a virus by some scanners... even it is is benign the devs should have the brains to ask the companies to whitelist the file/label it as false positive.

 

MSE did not detect anything, it may need more than one license for more than one computer but it is like fraps in that its life time updates and never expires.

If your like me you encode on one machine so its not a big deal.

Just saying politics aside its the best capture program so far I have found.

 

How much of a hit do you take for ingame performance with zd? Even if it doesn't lock your framerate I would imagine there is some overhead... let's say a somewhat demanding game like BFBC2 with everything on high at 1080p, I usually get around 45fps (drops to 25 in smoke). Recording with fraps is generally a nightmare if I want to be decently playing, since fraps will cut me down to ~23fps when standing still.

If I can still play at 40fps or so and record at full resolution then yeah sign me up. I'm not sure what rig you are using V but is it possible for you to pick a game and compare them overhead-wise? You can unlock the framerate in fraps or set it to record at an absurd level (60 fps) to try and avoid any framelocking fraps does.

 

I took a 0 performance hit, but this would greatly depend on your setup and recording settings.

Using a H264 codec and encoding is going to use the cpu, if you use enough cpu power that it starts to cut into some cpu power the game needs it would cause loss of performance.

In my case I use lagorith and it is not super cpu demanding and I have a quad core cpu with lots of extra processing power to spare so I got the exact same benchmark scores when recording as I did when not recording with this software.

FRAPS hurt the score very harshly because instead of 200fps it was a max of 30fps.

That does not mean it would hurt gameplay though, for some games 30fps is more than enough. Its mostly first person shooters that I desire to have more than 30fps. My current LP of Dead Island I can definitely feel the effects fraps is having on the game when recording, its not as smooth. I think the game engine itself kind of hates having the frame rate capped as Borderlands was not too bad @ 30fps.

I dont think doing a test @60fps+ recording is very valid it would still cut performance on the benchmark due to frame rate lock and in real life use I would never be recording @ 60fps due to file size and the idea that that many frames per second is totally overkill and pointless (unless your going to use super slow-mo effects)

I just recommend you download the free trial and use it yourself as I am to see if you like it and how it performs on your machine. If you need some help setting it up with the codecs like I am using I can help.

Here is the LAGS codec I use to capture with, this is the same codec I encode with and sometimes even use with Camtasia for screen capture.
http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html