Anything better than windows movie maker for games?

Yeh but when you select to upload it to youtube you only have small under 100mb or high 1000mb+, no idea why they have render for youtube but only two choices to upload to youtube with..
 
I record with Fraps then drop the recording into VirtualDub with the X-Vid plugin (Both free programs).

Set compression to max quality and leave it 10 mins. Boom - a 4-5 gig vid drops to 2-400MB and upload the resulting file direct to youtube. I get glorious 1080p in tiny file sizes :)

I have Vegas too, but I only use that if i want to edit the vid. If it's fine as it is I just upload and skip Vegas altogether!
 
Cheers guys for all the help, when im back home i'll take a looksie! seriously want to get into this gameplay video playthrough situation :)
 
gord said:
If you find movie maker easy to use to add the effects/text/clipping you want then just do that and save it as high quality. Then use Handbrake to re-encode it into a decent format for online video.

http://handbrake.fr/
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Basically this ;)

My recording process:

* Record game using Dxtory and Lagarith codec (Link)
* If I need to add transitions/captions then I use Windows Movie Maker and encode at extremely high bit rate - this gets the transition effects into your footage.
* If I used WMM, I'll then transcode using MediaCoder using x.264 codec to get the file down to a manageable size (Link)
* If I don't need to edit the video other than basic cutting, I'll just use VirtualDub to do this AND do the encoding.
* Upload to YouTube.

For those poo-pooing Windows Movie Maker, it's actually a really good tool (considering it's free). The new version (2012) has just been released and it's got some really good features in it like boosting audio on certain audio tracks, showing the audio wave form on the video and other stuff. It also can export videos in H.264/MP4 container format whereas previous versions only supported WMV. However, my only complaint about it is the built in H.264 encoder; you can't tweak the settings other than movie bitrate; the quality isn't as good as the videos x.264 can produce.
 
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kkbigal said:
Basically this ;)

My recording process:

* Record game using Dxtory and Lagarith codec (Link)
* If I need to add transitions/captions then I use Windows Movie Maker and encode at extremely high bit rate - this gets the transition effects into your footage.
* If I used WMM, I'll then transcode using MediaCoder using x.264 codec to get the file down to a manageable size (Link)
* If I don't need to edit the video other than basic cutting, I'll just use VirtualDub to do this AND do the encoding.
* Upload to YouTube.

For those poo-pooing Windows Movie Maker, it's actually a really good tool (considering it's free). The new version (2012) has just been released and it's got some really good features in it like boosting audio on certain audio tracks, showing the audio wave form on the video and other stuff. It also can export videos in H.264/MP4 container format whereas previous versions only supported WMV. However, my only complaint about it is the built in H.264 encoder; you can't tweak the settings other than movie bitrate; the quality isn't as good as the videos x.264 can produce.
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Interesting I will check out that Lagarith codec. I take it this is better then using MSi?
 
Unfortunately, you can't use custom codecs with MSI Afterburner, only the 2 it comes with, which is a real shame as it's the only recording software that's actually free :( I did a longplay of Syndicate (the 2012 remake) using Afterburner and it did a pretty good job, so it's definitely a capable program.

However, Dxtory equates to roughly £30 and a lot of people on the web prefer it to Fraps and I have to agree, it's a seriously excellent program.

As for Lagarith, you can get it here. It's a lossless codec so the capture quality is flawless and it's reputedly one of the fastest available making it ideal for capture; I've recorded several Battlefield 3 vids at 1080P on ultra in multiplayer and the codec is fast enough so my framerate doesn't drop below 60.

The only real negative is you need a big/relatively fast HDD to use it. An hour of footage at 1920 x 1080 is going to be several hundred gigabytes in size. To give you a rough idea I'm in the process of recording Black Mesa Source and 10 minutes of footage = 13.6gb

Hope this helps :)
 
kkbigal said:
Unfortunately, you can't use custom codecs with MSI Afterburner, only the 2 it comes with, which is a real shame as it's the only recording software that's actually free :( I did a longplay of Syndicate (the 2012 remake) using Afterburner and it did a pretty good job, so it's definitely a capable program.

However, Dxtory equates to roughly £30 and a lot of people on the web prefer it to Fraps and I have to agree, it's a seriously excellent program.

As for Lagarith, you can get it here. It's a lossless codec so the capture quality is flawless and it's reputedly one of the fastest available making it ideal for capture; I've recorded several Battlefield 3 vids at 1080P on ultra in multiplayer and the codec is fast enough so my framerate doesn't drop below 60.

The only real negative is you need a big/relatively fast HDD to use it. An hour of footage at 1920 x 1080 is going to be several hundred gigabytes in size. To give you a rough idea I'm in the process of recording Black Mesa Source and 10 minutes of footage = 13.6gb

Hope this helps :)
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Jesus christ @ sizes :) not the HD size that bothers me, I have an issue with only 8.5meg down and 512k up. Is there anyway to get xvid sizes? I don't need it for playthroughs like some of you guys do but I do record random boss fights or funny stuff to share with mates but my upload is a killer. If a movie can be done in roughly 700meg can game recordings do the same? Xvid quality is not to bad and plenty for what I need. I have tried to convert the huge outputs but as they are huge to begin with they don't shrink down to a decent size with the codec.
 
voorhees1979 said:
Is there anyway to get xvid sizes? I don't need it for playthroughs like some of you guys do but I do record random boss fights or funny stuff to share with mates but my upload is a killer. If a movie can be done in roughly 700meg can game recordings do the same? Xvid quality is not to bad and plenty for what I need. I have tried to convert the huge outputs but as they are huge to begin with they don't shrink down to a decent size with the codec.
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Just transcode the Lagarith footage to XviD/H.264 etc - problem solved :)

I don't upload the Lagarith encoded file straight to YouTube; I transcode it to H.264. This brings the file size down from 100gb to 1.5gb for approx. 1 hour of footage and it still looks decent blown up full screen on YouTube at 1080P.

You can easily transcode Lagarith encoded videos to almost any other format/quality you fancy using VirtualDub, MediaCoder (and I assume Handbrake) and they're all free tools :)

The reason to use something like Lagarith to capture your source footage is that it looks perfect - identical to when you're playing it. It means that when you transcode to XviD or whatever, it doesn't already have artefacts in the video to spoil the quality :)

The only down-side to transcoding is the time it takes.

Bootnote:
Another reason why I prefer both MSI Afterburner and Dxtory over Fraps is that you don't have to lock your game frame rate to the same rate that you're capturing at, e.g. you can play at 60 fps and record at 30. In the versions of Fraps that I used, your capture speed automatically limits your in-game frame rate to the same value; at least this was the case the last time I used Fraps. They may have changed this in a more recent version though; perhaps someone knows if this is true?
 
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kkbigal said:
Just transcode the Lagarith footage to XviD/H.264 etc - problem solved :)

I don't upload the Lagarith encoded file straight to YouTube; I transcode it to H.264. This brings the file size down from 100gb to 1.5gb for approx. 1 hour of footage and it still looks decent blown up full screen on YouTube at 1080P.

You can easily transcode Lagarith encoded videos to almost any other format/quality you fancy using VirtualDub, MediaCoder (and I assume Handbrake) and they're all free tools :)

The reason to use something like Lagarith to capture your source footage is that it looks perfect - identical to when you're playing it. It means that when you transcode to XviD or whatever, it doesn't already have artefacts in the video to spoil the quality :)

The only down-side to transcoding is the time it takes.

Bootnote:
Another reason why I prefer both MSI Afterburner and Dxtory over Fraps is that you don't have to lock your game frame rate to the same rate that you're capturing at, e.g. you can play at 60 fps and record at 30. In the versions of Fraps that I used, your capture speed automatically limits your in-game frame rate to the same value; at least this was the case the last time I used Fraps. They may have changed this in a more recent version though; perhaps someone knows if this is true?
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Thanks very much for all the information, exactly what would be handy for me. May I be cheeky and ask what your settings are for that? Also what audio codec you are using?

Quick screenshot of my standard video capture setup, not tried it since getting the new codec.



Thanks again for all your help on the matter, really appreciate it :) Does dxtory allow you to lock the game framerate like MSi?
 
Nothing special but this was a 2.5gb 720p recording encoded with mediacoder down to a setting I am ok with at 12meg :)

Now for 12meg this is good quality. Well good enough for my needs

 
My settings are the same as yours :)

Other things to check:

1) Click on the configure codec button next to where you have Lagarith selected and then make sure you have "multithreading" selected for better performance. You could also probably change the colourspace to YV12.

2) Click on the "Advanced" Tab (CPU icon) at the top. Personally, I enable "Enabled Synchronous Surface Lock" and "Wait for Available Buffer" to reduce the amount of stutter in the video (more consistent frame rate capture).

You could experiment with the "Force CPU Processing" option to see if this improves your capture performance or not. If it's checked, the CPU is responsible for handling the capture process rather than the GPU. Shift the load on to whatever offers you the best performance :)

As for audio, I just stick it on MP3 @ 320kbps; more than adequate for YouTube. If you do transcode your vids, just set audio to be a straight copy; it means you won't waste CPU cycles re-encoding the audio (unless you want to down-sample to get the file size even lower).

If you want to lock your frame rate to a specific value, just set the value of the "Limit Video FPS" option :)

Another quick tip - Dxtory will create a profile for each game you run with it's own independent settings. Make sure to double check everything is set as you want it prior to recording, especially where capturing sound is concerned. I told it to capture my soundcard and headset earphone output for voice comms, but I forgot to select my headset mic input...so I ended up with 2 hours of footage with my friend talking to himself :D
 
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