Best way to record high quality video games?

[Acanthus]

Im trying to make a battlefield vietnam gameplay video, my rig is as follows:

Intel Pentium 4 2.6C @ 3.44ghz HT enabled
Asus P4C800-E
Asus Geforce FX5600 256MB with VIVO
1GB PC 4200 OCZ running at 266mhz (1:1 with fsb) 533mhz ddr
Single WD 1200JB 120GB Special Edition HD

Tried:
Fraps 2.3 - Using the video screen capture feature, for some reason my version of fraps doesnt work with battlefield vietnam 1.02 at all, cant even get the fps to display. On v1.00 the performance drop is so huge that its unplayable (4-15fps).

Using TVout to capture to another PC using S-Video in - The issue here is the FX5600 will not clone to TV and VGA as the same time, so i have to actually play watching the 2nd PCs screen, which flickers and is a small window while recording, again very hard to play.

Any suggestions on a better way to do this? I have 2 PCs with VIVO capabilities at my disposal, and i use a 3rd PC as a dedicated server to offload some of the work from the 2PCs rendering/recording.

 

[bamacre]

At what resolution are you trying to record?

Make sure you defrag your hard drive(s) first.

I have made quite a few GTA videos, and found recording at 800x600 worked fairly well, however at times the fps dropped to about 22-25. The game looks horrible at that resolution, but the resulting video turns out well. Recording sound will also cause a drastic drop in fram rate. For the best results, I'd imagine having a 10k rpm hard drive would be best. You have to understand that it takes a lot of power and speed for a system to concurrently render graphics and create and write 30 bitmaps per second to your hard drive.

I'm not sure why fraps wouldn't work for BF:V, I never liked the BF games for some reason, maybe because I got hooked on Call of Duty. Well, GTA was easier to record because you could save a replay, unfortunately no other good games have that feature.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: bamacre
At what resolution are you trying to record?

Make sure you defrag your hard drive(s) first.

I have made quite a few GTA videos, and found recording at 800x600 worked fairly well, however at times the fps dropped to about 22-25. The game looks horrible at that resolution, but the resulting video turns out well. Recording sound will also cause a drastic drop in fram rate. For the best results, I'd imagine having a 10k rpm hard drive would be best. You have to understand that it takes a lot of power and speed for a system to concurrently render graphics and create and write 30 bitmaps per second to your hard drive.

1024x768 is the gameplay res

Hoping to record at at least 640x480.

Fresh windows install so i shouldnt need a defrag.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: bamacre

I'm not sure why fraps wouldn't work for BF:V, I never liked the BF games for some reason, maybe because I got hooked on Call of Duty. Well, GTA was easier to record because you could save a replay, unfortunately no other good games have that feature.

How can you compare call of duty to BF1942 or Vietnam? They really arent similar in gameplay at all.

 

[bamacre]

I wasn't trying to compare them, I just couldn't get into the BF games, I dunno why.

 

[Acanthus]

Got fraps working with bfv, had to update to a newer version of fraps for it to work on 1.02.

The performance drop is still massive, from 50-60fps down into the teens while recording. Is there anything i can do to improve performance while recording?

Edit: I would guess the HD would be the bottleneck as i just noticed 8 minutes of recording 1024x768 @ half resolution is 2GB. I dont see how that would cause the performance skydive im seeing though.

 

[Acanthus]

Ok ive ruled out disk performance as the problem, the performance hit is the same when recording at the full resolution (1024x768) as it is at half res.

I figured if there was a drop at full res, the disk was the bottleneck, if there was increase, the cpu couldnt resize the video on the fly fast enough. Turns out its neither one. Im stumped.

Running the map Operation Irving for this project, normal fps is 60-105 on this map, i lose about 75% while recording.

 

[Acanthus]

morning bump

 

[THUGSROOK]

record it to VCR ~ then play it back for capture.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: THUGSROOK
record it to VCR ~ then play it back for capture.

I was thinking that as well, although i dont have a VCR so id have to run out and buy a walmart POS just to do this

Any ideas why im getting such a massive performance hit thugs? is that normal for fraps?

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
Im trying to make a battlefield vietnam gameplay video, my rig is as follows:
Using TVout to capture to another PC using S-Video in - The issue here is the FX5600 will not clone to TV and VGA as the same time, so i have to actually play watching the 2nd PCs screen, which flickers and is a small window while recording, again very hard to play.

Are you sure you have the correct video drivers installed? My FX5200 is able to display the same thing on the monitor and the TV without any problems at all. Right click on the nvidia thing in the taskbar; there should be something like "clone display analog + TV"

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: ShawnD1

Originally posted by: Acanthus
Im trying to make a battlefield vietnam gameplay video, my rig is as follows:
Using TVout to capture to another PC using S-Video in - The issue here is the FX5600 will not clone to TV and VGA as the same time, so i have to actually play watching the 2nd PCs screen, which flickers and is a small window while recording, again very hard to play.

Are you sure you have the correct video drivers installed? My FX5200 is able to display the same thing on the monitor and the TV without any problems at all. Right click on the nvidia thing in the taskbar; there should be something like "clone display analog + TV"

Yup, unless they fixed it in the most recent drivers and it was bugged in the other 7 i checked before

Ill go double check it now. It was one of my big disappointments moving from an Ti4200 to an FX5600, the Ti4200 would clone to TV, but neither of my FX5600s would (i have an asus 128MB, and an abit 256MB, neither will clone to TV)

 

[Acanthus]

Cloning is not an option on the newest drivers either, only lets me select single display, and the 2nd menu is monitor, or TV.

Edit: Woooo! The Abit WILL clone to TV on the newer drivers, however, Asus wont. I think it has something to do with the goofy ass dongle they decided to bundle the card with (it has a single connecter going into the card thats proprietary, then a dongle with 4 connectors on it, RCA out, SVid Out, RCA in, Svid in.

Next logical question: Whats good capture software to use for this? I have pinnacle studio 8 but im relatively uninformed how to use it.

 

[Acanthus]

Bump

 

[bamacre]

If you can't get Pinnacle Studio 8 to do the job, you can always snag a free copy of VirtualDub. I've used it to record TV, works pretty well, especially for the price.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: bamacre
If you can't get Pinnacle Studio 8 to do the job, you can always snag a free copy of VirtualDub. I've used it to record TV, works pretty well, especially for the price.

Ill definately look into it, playing with PS8 now.

Thanks

 

[Acanthus]

PS8 will not capture, i tried Asus Digi VCRII (the bundled recording software with the card) and PS8 doesnt like it, crashes during scene detection...