Recording games in actual quality

[Mutley]

I use Fraps alot but still the video out come isn't good enough in comparision to what it actually looks like in the game.

I'm really wanting one that directly records what you see when playing, I don't know if this is possible because of film-motion or whatever but does anyone know a way to get really good quality? Other programs that might be able to achieve a better outcome?

 

[The Brick]

It's easily feasible for source games and games on the quake engine. You need to record demos and play them back, then use a couple of commands to screenshot every frame. Then you can put them all together in programs like VirtualDub or Videomach. I don't know about other games though.

 

[Mutley]

I only want to do it on HL2. So how do I do it your way? Can you explain?

 

[The Brick]

http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=54048

loads of tutorials in here
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=95654

 

[CyberPitz]

The screenshot way takes forever, which is the only reason I don't do it, sadly. If I had the time + Lots of extra HDD space, then I'd do it though.

 

[The Brick]

Much time? Not at all.. I agree on the hdd space problem.

 

[CyberPitz]

Much time? Not at all.. I agree on the hdd space problem.

Not much time, when I tried doing it a few years back..dear god, at 30 FPS from teh SS's, it was going to take..geez, around an hour, that was on my P4 2.8ghz with a gig of ram too. I was about to drool my face off.

 

[The Brick]

An hour? Woah I think you're doing something wrong. I have a sempron 2800+ and I manage just fine. I mostly record in 720x480.

 

[PvtRyan]

The demo way is by far the best way to record videos. And it's not slow, you can write a few frames per second but it does take a lot of HDD space. Then just load them into Virtualdub and you're set.

 

[ríomhaire]

How much HD space are we talking about?

 

[Sanada]

The JPEG filesize varies from around 60KB-300KB with the default compression so I'd say in the worst case scenerio, 18MB a secound, 1080MB (1.08GB) a minute.

 

[The Brick]

30 fps @ 720x480 = 1mb per frame. They are uncompressed TGA's.

It's a lot.

 

[-Psy-]

And it's a pain to delete them afterwards lol.

 

[The Brick]

No it isn't. Just sort the 'cstrike' folder by file type. Select the first, scroll down, hold shift and select the last one, delete. Don't forget to delete the .wav as well.

 

[-Psy-]

I know.

It's just that I kept accidently clicking off them =/

 

[ríomhaire]

30 fps @ 720x480 = 1mb per frame. They are uncompressed TGA's.

It's a lot.

How big would that be once converted to a a video file?

 

[Mutley]

Tiny in WMV, ahhh, the joys of compression.

 

[BirdMan]

I use Fraps alot but still the video out come isn't good enough in comparision to what it actually looks like in the game.

I'm really wanting one that directly records what you see when playing, I don't know if this is possible because of film-motion or whatever but does anyone know a way to get really good quality? Other programs that might be able to achieve a better outcome?

If you have a camcorder and a VIDEO IN video card you can plug your cam into your video card's tv-out, record everything in real time, 100% quality and then plug your camcorder into your VIDEO IN and import the video. Best way to save time and have best quality.

 

[theroadtonowhere]

S-video out to your tv, digital camera plugged into tv, take the recording from the digital camera, bam. No frame sacrifice.

 

[The Brick]

How big would that be once converted to a a video file?

You mean compressed? I can't say because there are quite a few codecs used. All of which I think wmv is the worst, then DivX, then Xvid mpeg layer 4 (love that one), x264 (best one IMO) and Huffyuv (no quality loss but filesize reduced by 50%).


It also depends on the compression settings you use. Just look at videos you see everywhere. Youtube has crappy quality but small filesizes (2mb per minute or something) and if you get a nice video from own-age.com they mostly are about 700mb for 20 minutes. Though some editors really know how to compress properly and can get 400mb for 17 minutes on 720p (1280x720).