Your choice of Free Capture devices and editting tools for videos for gameplay footage.

[Noble_Lance]

Hey folks, short version is at the bottom if this is TLDR

I found something clever I want to do with my summer. I decided I wanted to play around as a part time editor for videos as a way to help myself out since I may end up working on film projects if I get this job at a school[slightly unrelated to the job but its an extra part I may have to help with and it will help me look more credible if it comes down to the wire]. So I'm very new at it, however I got friends who are giving me a way to practice, I'm temporarily joining my friends PC gaming clan as an honorary member[way more stupider than it sounds I promise] and to promote themselves on youtube they want to get their gameplay footage sliced together and done up nice. [Honestly, they probably just want to get a partnership with whoever they can get but again, I could care less unless they are getting paid cause then I'll get a cut if I still work with them while they are there].



Basically, I need [free versions] of low memory video game capture device[without watermarks, for professionalism sake], and recommended editing software for a PC [not a Mac] and won't have access to one enough to even borrow a Mac for editting.

 

[ResonanceSD]

-_- anything free will carry a fatass watermark on it.

Fraps is pretty damned cheap.

 

[Bad Jim]

Taksi (screen recorder)
http://taksi.sourceforge.net/

Camstudio (screen recorder)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/

Xvid (codec)
http://www.xvid.org/Downloads.15.0.html

Virtuadub (video editor)
http://www.virtualdub.org/

Also something to note about Source engine games. If you record a demo, you can then use the startmovie command to create a .TGA image file for every frame in the demo and a .WAV audio file. You are not limited by the performance of your machine here, you can crank the settings to max even on a crappy machine and get a good result. Put it together with virtuadub. Requires tens of gigabytes of hard disk space though. Other engines may have something similar.

 

[Noble_Lance]

-_- anything free will carry a fatass watermark on it.

Fraps is pretty damned cheap.

Trying to avoid paying for anything because if I get the job, I'll have access to all of that at the school I would be working at, so it becomes slightly counterproductive. Maybe the better choice of words would be the least obnoxious watermark.

 

[sextus the crazy]

Hyper cam is pretty good as is Bandicam.

 

[Starnerf]

There's a free version of Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 [http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Encoder4_Overview.aspx]. It's limited to 10 minute segments and Windows Media formats, but I've found the interface of the previous version to be quite easy to use.

 

[Noble_Lance]

There's a free version of Microsoft Expression Encoder 4 [http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Encoder4_Overview.aspx]. It's limited to 10 minute segments and Windows Media formats, but I've found the interface of the previous version to be quite easy to use.

Good to know, I'm looking into everything at this point.

 

[Noble_Lance]

What do you guys recommend for editing software?

 

[Bad Jim]

I'd go for Virtuadub. It meets my needs anyway. You will need to download codecs separately though. You will generally find many decoders on your system, but no encoders. See my previous post for a free codec.

 

[Wolfram23]

I've been using MSI Afterburner to record footage. You can set the quality to be the raw capture, or use compression methods and reduce quality for lower PC resource usage. It's good, free, and no watermark. The only downside seems to be that occasionally, for whatever reason, it can slighly pause recording so there might be a 1-2 second pause in replaying the video which is weird. Not sure if it's related to HDD sequential write space or not.

For video editing you could check Lighthouse, but it is limited in the video formats it can use.

I don't know about the other video capture stuff mentioned here, I'll check them out later as I am also interested in a decent screen capture software. Right now the MSI AB one is the best I've used but those pauses are annoying (though infrequent).

 

[Noble_Lance]

The only downside seems to be that occasionally, for whatever reason, it can slighly pause recording so there might be a 1-2 second pause in replaying the video which is weird. Not sure if it's related to HDD sequential write space or not.

I don't know about the other video capture stuff mentioned here, I'll check them out later as I am also interested in a decent screen capture software. Right now the MSI AB one is the best I've used but those pauses are annoying (though infrequent).

Wait, since I'm really idiotic at this are you saying that randomly when I go to say post it/play it there will be random pauses midvideo recorded into the playback.

 

[Bema Jinn]

For Capturing PC I use FRAPS
For capturing from Xbox I use a Hauppauge HDPVR
For editing I use After Effects CS5.5

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

Taksi (screen recorder)
http://taksi.sourceforge.net/

Woo. I'm not the only one who uses Taksi. It can take a bit of fooling around with it and whatever codec(s) you decide to use to get it to work right and to get optimal results, but it's completely free and can be rather good once you have it all set up. What codec you use depends a lot on your hardware. XviD is not too bad, and you can crank the bitrate up to get decent quality out of it while turning the fancy compression options off to make it not use too much CPU. If you have a fast drive and a lot of free space to record to, HuffYUV is very fast and completely lossless, so you'll get everything at full quality to edit later. If you have a reasonably fast quad-core CPU, you can actually use the "ultrafast" preset with x264 and encode to H.264 in real-time, and that'll get better quality than XviD in a reasonable amount of disk space. I've recorded and encoded a game at full 1920x1200 in real time before without noticeably slowing it down. It's kind of awesome.

 

[Noble_Lance]

Taksi (screen recorder)
http://taksi.sourceforge.net/

Woo. I'm not the only one who uses Taksi. It can take a bit of fooling around with it and whatever codec(s) you decide to use to get it to work right and to get optimal results, but it's completely free and can be rather good once you have it all set up. What codec you use depends a lot on your hardware. XviD is not too bad, and you can crank the bitrate up to get decent quality out of it while turning the fancy compression options off to make it not use too much CPU. If you have a fast drive and a lot of free space to record to, HuffYUV is very fast and completely lossless, so you'll get everything at full quality to edit later. If you have a reasonably fast quad-core CPU, you can actually use the "ultrafast" preset with x264 and encode to H.264 in real-time, and that'll get better quality than XviD in a reasonable amount of disk space. I've recorded and encoded a game at full 1920x1200 in real time before without noticeably slowing it down. It's kind of awesome.

you think this would work for duo core at 2.93 ghz?

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

Taksi (screen recorder)
http://taksi.sourceforge.net/

Woo. I'm not the only one who uses Taksi. It can take a bit of fooling around with it and whatever codec(s) you decide to use to get it to work right and to get optimal results, but it's completely free and can be rather good once you have it all set up. What codec you use depends a lot on your hardware. XviD is not too bad, and you can crank the bitrate up to get decent quality out of it while turning the fancy compression options off to make it not use too much CPU. If you have a fast drive and a lot of free space to record to, HuffYUV is very fast and completely lossless, so you'll get everything at full quality to edit later. If you have a reasonably fast quad-core CPU, you can actually use the "ultrafast" preset with x264 and encode to H.264 in real-time, and that'll get better quality than XviD in a reasonable amount of disk space. I've recorded and encoded a game at full 1920x1200 in real time before without noticeably slowing it down. It's kind of awesome.

you think this would work for duo core at 2.93 ghz?

Sure, depending on what codec you use. Probably not going to want to use something like H.264 to record with that has higher CPU use, because you don't have extra cores to spare that aren't already being mostly used just to run the game, but a different one like XviD should be fine with the right settings.

 

[Noble_Lance]

Taksi (screen recorder)
http://taksi.sourceforge.net/

Woo. I'm not the only one who uses Taksi. It can take a bit of fooling around with it and whatever codec(s) you decide to use to get it to work right and to get optimal results, but it's completely free and can be rather good once you have it all set up. What codec you use depends a lot on your hardware. XviD is not too bad, and you can crank the bitrate up to get decent quality out of it while turning the fancy compression options off to make it not use too much CPU. If you have a fast drive and a lot of free space to record to, HuffYUV is very fast and completely lossless, so you'll get everything at full quality to edit later. If you have a reasonably fast quad-core CPU, you can actually use the "ultrafast" preset with x264 and encode to H.264 in real-time, and that'll get better quality than XviD in a reasonable amount of disk space. I've recorded and encoded a game at full 1920x1200 in real time before without noticeably slowing it down. It's kind of awesome.

you think this would work for duo core at 2.93 ghz?

Sure, depending on what codec you use. Probably not going to want to use something like H.264 to record with that has higher CPU use, because you don't have extra cores to spare that aren't already being mostly used just to run the game, but a different one like XviD should be fine with the right settings.

Just so I'm clear and letting my ignorance on the subject really show. I assume codec is the format that I'm recording in like .wmv for example