Recording game software tips?

Tried camtasia and fraps games run fantastic but recorded videos are all choppy with stutters? I want to fix this because viewing videos people will think its the games doing it.

Tips? Better software?

 

Lower video settings and resolution while recording will improve video playback.

 

Hmm I just got an idea, I'm going to install Fraps on my SSD and see if I get an improvement through much faster write speeds. I'll give it a test.

 

Just listen to ViciousXUSMC. He's a master at this kind of thing!

 

Thanks WingNut (Happy B Day BTW, gotta buy you a drink)

There is not a whole lot to know when it comes to "tips" for recording. The simple most important tip that most people do not know of is making sure that your recording to a separate hard disk than the one your game is loading from.

Recording sends a ton of write data to the disk and if the disk has to simultaneously read the game data it will slow things down causing game performance issues and making your hard disk hate you.

The rest of the stuff you should know is more just knowledge more so than tips. If your having performance issues run a performance monitor and see if your cpu is reaching max load, see if your RAM is fully being used. Any bottleneck in the system like this can and will cause recording issues.

I guess the last tip is just be aware that Camtasia is not a game capture program its a screen capture program. Designed to do like tutorials and things so it may not give desired results if trying to record a 3D computer game. I only use it to record 2D emulators and in windowed mode. FRAPS is ideal and you may be producing perfect videos and not know it because if your recording full 1080P even a monster computer will still play the video choppy while its still in the large file size and encoded with the FPS1 codec (FRAPS Codec) once you encode it to a smaller size it will play smooth if the size/codec was the only issue.

That leads me to the last thing, just make sure you have all your codecs installed and a good media player to test things with.

I use CCCP codec pack and the included MPC player and sometimes VLC Player.

 

Thanks ViciousXUSMC never thought about using a separate hard disk.

I was using Camtasia to capture the video and also record the sound as I talked, using the separate hard disk has made that butter smooth

Windows media encoder allows me to cut the file size in half and not give up to much quality.

 

I'd suggest encoding to H.264, something more standard than what WME does.