Video Tool

[Michael Betke]

I would like to record my screen to show of stuff and do some training videos.

But its very sluggish.

At the moment I use Camstudio. Formerly I used Camtasia.

 

Can someone please suggest good settings for steady 25fps without lagging or a good (free / lowcost) tool?

[Marleys Ghost]

Debut Video Capture Software

 

Which I used for this.

 

Or of course Fraps

 

Which I used for this.

[Mumbles]

Only warning about fraps is that a decent resoluton ends up recording with a 100 mbit data rate, so your hard drive fills up pretty rapidly. Once you've captured, you'd use ffmpeg or similar to change it into a different type, and with a much lower bitrate. But that's assuming you've captured the entire video without running out of space.

[Michael Betke]

Thanks. I'll try out Fraps this afternoon and compress with virtualdub afterwards.

[Rick]

I pretty much have found these all suck when recording anything that is graphics intensive like a game or the LE editor.

[Marleys Ghost]

I think Michael's looking for the "least" suckiest

[Josh]

The only way to get smooth video is to save the buffer each frame to an image file, and use a fixed time step.

[Niosop]

For my videos that require more than just the 3D window I use screentoaster.com. But you can see how those turned out, not the best quality but not horrible. For just the 3D window FRAPS is the best I've found. I can usually maintain 30FPS with FRAPS depending on the scene, but again, it only gets what's rendered in 3D so isn't good for tutorials usually.

[Mumbles]

I'd be all for extracting the graphics buffer out to a series of png files. But what about capturing the sound? If the engine provided a ..simple.. way to get access to the sound buffer, and save it out to the hard drive, then fraps would be obsolete where leadwerks titles are concerned. But as its a bit vague, it's not the most feasible request in the world...

[Josh]

But what about capturing the sound?

You can't, without a screen capture program, and the slow speed of the fixed-step method will result in sound that doesn't match the video.

 

If you use a screen capture program, record at a low resolution and turn on vertical syncing. And make sure you have a fast computer with a multicore CPU and a fast GPU.

[Michael Betke]

I'm sick at the moment and cought mayself a flue. So I got no chance to test it yesterday...

 

I'll record in 3dmax, editor and photoshop. So fraps will be ok I guess.

[Marleys Ghost]

I'm sick at the moment and cought mayself a flue. So I got no chance to test it yesterday...

 

I'll record in 3dmax, editor and photoshop. So fraps will be ok I guess.

 

 

 

Morning Michael, if you are using XP that might be problematic as Fraps cannot capture desktop applications under XP as it needs the program to be recorded to have DX or OGL as its core runtime system, XP's desktop does not but I think Vistas (Windows 7?) does. Although when using on the Editor on XP it does record the actual scene window.

 

 

Hope you feel better soon

[Mumbles]

the slow speed of the fixed-step method will result in sound that doesn't match the video.

 

I should have mentioned that my idea was 2-pass. First pass just extract the frames with no care for the audio, and pass 2, start from the beginning and capture only the sound. As most games already have the ability record demos into their own custom format. Anyone here could implement something similar into their own games. And then just add the ability for their game to convert the custom format into a series of images and sound files. It wouldn't matter if the conversion was real-time or not, as long as their custom capture format was real-time, it would be sufficient. And their custom format could be as crude as simply storing the: position, rotation, velocity and omega of every object in the scene at 100 ms intervals (or even every physics update).

 

At this stage though, it's still only an idea, no definite proposals for code yet.