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877371 Posts in 32862 Topics- by 24299 Members - Latest Member: aarkling

May 19, 2013, 11:05:43 AM
TIGSource ForumsDeveloperTechnical (Moderators: Glaiel-Gamer, ThemsAllTook)Recording Game Footage
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Bezzy
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« on: May 03, 2007, 03:03:13 PM »

We have to submit some footage of our game to a company soon. Just wondering what people use to capture footage?

Our game in particular uses a lot of CPU, so things like FRAPs barely make the grade (forcing our gameplay down to 30FPS etc). Does anyone have any tips about capturing both video and audio without affecting your games' performance?

Video camera on tripod? LCD screens (no screen refresh recorded)?
Is there a way to feed S-Video out into a cameras?

Tips!

I need tips!
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Guert
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« Reply #1 on: May 03, 2007, 03:52:04 PM »

I used this software a couple of time. It wasn't for profesional work, just to catch some tid bits of gameplay but it may help you... It's not free but you can use the demo to see if it can be an interesting purchase or not.

http://www.zdsoft.com/
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Steve Swink
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« Reply #2 on: May 03, 2007, 03:55:29 PM »

Have you tested camtasia for frame rate impact?  Sometimes I get better fps with that than with Fraps. http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp

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Steve Swink
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« Reply #3 on: May 03, 2007, 06:06:50 PM »

most recent video cards have an S-video out on the back. You can feed to a DV cam and record, then recapture the footage back. Massive, lossy technique but it works in a pinch.

Has anyone tried http://www.camstudio.org ?
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Bezzy
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« Reply #4 on: May 03, 2007, 07:01:07 PM »

Thanks all! I'll give them a try.

I'd quite like to go for the DV camera feed approach, but the camera we have doesn't seem to have an input... only output.
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guillermo
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« Reply #5 on: May 03, 2007, 07:44:56 PM »

I have tried Cam Studio for capturing small 320x240 windows, no audio. Under such conditions it worked great, only complaint is that you have to define the region you wanna capture manually, with the mouse, you cannot adjust it entering its dimensions/position, and that's not exactly very precise. Maybe I have an old copy (v.1.22) so chances are they improved it or something, dunno. If you are capturing full screens, then, no problem.
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Anthony Flack
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« Reply #6 on: May 03, 2007, 10:14:04 PM »

Check your camera's manual - sometimes you can set the camera's output to act as an input, but on my camera at least, the way to access this mode was non-obvious (I had to switch it into playback mode and hit record-pause).

Unfortunately, I was then defeated by this weird damn issue with Macbook Pros running in Windows. Apparently, the one thing that just will not work under any circumstances is the TV-out. Drats! I ended up going with Fraps and just putting up with the lower framerate, and editing out the stutters.

Pointing the camera at the screen, even with an LCD, comes out a little bit too crappy to be properly usable.
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« Reply #7 on: May 03, 2007, 11:27:07 PM »

Personally I have the functionality to record gameplay demos in terms of keypresses. If I was doing a video I'd simply play back a demo and then dump each frame to the hard-drive taking as long as it took and not having to worry about framerates.
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Anthony Flack
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« Reply #8 on: May 04, 2007, 03:36:36 AM »

And the audio? What about the audio, hmm?
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« Reply #9 on: May 04, 2007, 08:25:08 AM »

Yeah, I had a screenshot-movie feature that was working pretty quickly until I realized I couldn't record the audio.  Embarrassed

I have seen VGA recorder boxes for sale at TigerDirect and a few other security camera stores, but I don't think they have very good quality at all.

A lot of the screen-scraper apps on Linux just slap a recorder onto the VNC framebuffer but that doesn't grab sound either.

Other movie-recording apps for Windows: HypercamDX (used to be really popular), ScreenCam

If you have an OS X port of your software, you might wanna try out Display Eater paired with Audio Hijack Pro.

In a pinch, you could always modify your game's timing to run at half-speed and then just speed up the video in the editor until it looks good.

I wish I knew how publishers captured such nice-ass video.
« Last Edit: May 04, 2007, 08:28:11 AM by ravuya » Logged

Bezzy
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« Reply #10 on: May 04, 2007, 10:16:29 AM »

Personally I have the functionality to record gameplay demos in terms of keypresses. If I was doing a video I'd simply play back a demo and then dump each frame to the hard-drive taking as long as it took and not having to worry about framerates.

Ahk. Playbacks are something I'd like, but which I don't know if I have time to add.
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goo1boy
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« Reply #11 on: May 06, 2007, 11:51:00 PM »

We've used something called SnagIt for video cap.. The software has that lovely windows shareware app bloat, but otherwise pretty useful.

http://www.techsmith.com/snagit.asp
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« Reply #12 on: May 07, 2007, 01:46:15 PM »

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Snapz Pro seems like one of the best video capture programs for the mac.
$70, though. And it's Mac-only.
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DrDerekDoctors
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« Reply #13 on: May 08, 2007, 01:26:34 AM »

And the audio? What about the audio, hmm?

I'd dub over a copy of A-Ha's "Take On Me". Wink
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« Reply #14 on: May 08, 2007, 03:58:15 PM »

Another one I found is Taksi:
http://taksi.sourceforge.net

seemed pretty full featured but I couldn't get it to recognize my game (most likely because it's 3D). Might want to give it a shot, it's free-fifty.
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