Video Game Recording

crianp

Hi everyone, I have a question about recording games via one of those screen recorders. I have tried wizardsoft auto screenrecorder and river past screen recorder pro. Only had a little bit of luck recently with river past screen recorder but the 2 min of video I managed to record with windows media 9 codec was 120 megs in size and the video was laggy eventhough during the game there was no lag. Here are my system specs:

Core 2 Duo E6300 (not overclocked)
Gigabyte GA-945p S3
1024 mb DDR2 - 667
EVGA Gefore 7600GT KO Edition
Main OS drive is a 74GB WD Raptor 10,000 RPM
Screen resolution is 1440 x 900 (19inch Acer AL1916W)

The game is Act of War: Direct Action, usually play with my brothers against the computer and save the replays. During the experimentation, I go into act of war, load up the replay and start recording. My main problem is it something that I am doing wrong? Do I need a better GFX card? or should I record in another codec besides WM9?

the_syco

Use Fraps. You may need more RAM, though. 1024MB is sometimes ok, but you may get lag playing the game.

Stephen

The best way to do this assuming you have lots of disk space is to capture the video uncompressed and then compress it using the codec of your choice afterwards.

tman

And maybe try lowering the resolution of the game to 800x600 when recording.
Fraps limits the recording to the framerate of your choice as well, which is pretty handy.

I also used AutoGK to compress any videos I take, using the xvid codec

crianp

You know as I was writing this post, I was thinking about Fraps, I also forgot I should have mentioned that I play Act of War at 1280 x 1024 and it runs great with all details on high and no lag. Syco you mentioned something about more ram, I don't think the game needs but would my recording need it?

Another tidbit of info I forgot to mention is that my Acer autoscales the resolution to fit my 19 inch, so even though my windows desktop is set at 1440 x 900, when it loads act of war, a few seconds elapse where the monitor says something along the lines of "auto scaling" and than the 1280 x 1024 resolution fits my 19inch exactly.

This brings a question to Tman, if I set the game at a lower resolution, and my monitor adapts to the lowered resolution. When I set Fraps to record at 800 x 600, will that still record the entire screen?

Another note is that when I did encode with wm9, the bitrate was 8500kps, sounds kind of high?

the_syco

crianp wrote:

You know as I was writing this post, I was thinking about Fraps, I also forgot I should have mentioned that I play Act of War at 1280 x 1024 and it runs great with all details on high and no lag. Syco you mentioned something about more ram, I don't think the game needs but would my recording need it?

It helps. For example, my if I made GTA videos using Fraps on 1GB of RAM, it was laggy, nearly unplayable. With 3GB's, I'm recording 30 minute videos with ease. Best option: record the game at 800*600, with crap, or no sound, or half decent mono sound.

crianp

Syco, that clears things up alot, I will drop the settings and see how things go, might also order another 1 gig of OCZ ram. Thanks for all your help

Creamy Goodness

it will always help too if you can record the game like a demo in halflife 1/2 then you can record it using fraps and then you don't need to get it right first time as you can always go back and re-record.