Getting good game footage, Video capture, what do you use?
mod
We need to get some good footage of our game, without using a framerate dropping app like fraps. Who has some good solutions?
We've got a DV camera here somewhere, would out-putting s-video to it provide quality results?
We've got a DV camera here somewhere, would out-putting s-video to it provide quality results?
Replies
hope it helps.
http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/
I think the fraps sound issue has something to do with vista, the beefy demo machine we wanted to use for recording is running it. All of our dev machines have slightly older dual-core cpus, and getting a decent framerate with a game that is still very much in development and not fully optimized on a non-uber system with fraps at the best possibly quality(FSAA,etc, decent resolution) is not really realistic for us. Nor is building another machine specificly for this purpose.
We are however going to be looking into that hdmi capture card that Jonathan linked to, that looks like the perfect solution, and we can just throw it into one of our exsisting machines. Best quality with no performance hit, and looks like its relatively easy to actually get uncompressed video out of it, with a cheap raid setup. This should be miles ahead of the double compression you'de get from editing fraps video, and then recompressing.
Oh yeah slum, that half speed idea actually sounds pretty good. We do have the ability to just switch up the timescale. Not entirely sure how the audio would work sped back up again, i'de imagine all sorts of wierd pitch-shifting would happen, i think we do some funky stuff with sound when we change the timescale. I think you'de also have to be very careful with how you played as to not get that sort of, super-hyper mouse movement from speeding it up. Maybe if the mouse speed was set real low it would be fine. Since we dont have any sort of recording and playback functions.
[edit] Oh yeah eric, you may be able to fix those tearing issues by forcing on v-sync? Or possibly just locking the framerate in your engine to what you're capturing at. Seems like there should be some sort of easy fix along those lines.
we used this, but not sure how good performance would be for "big/critical" stuff. Although mostly we just lock at 30 fps and dump screenshots per-frame (have a special record mode, no sound however).
YaaY! First post for me.
Either way, the Black Magic intensity card will work wonders, but ONLY if you run at TV resolutions, 1920X1080, 1280X720 and 720X486.
This is straight from BlackMagic's tech-people.
We are looking at a solution for doing game captures at the office, since Fraps and the like are not an option for us. And I'm having a VERY hard time finding something that will take and digitize a DVI source.
A second idea is, if you didn't want a RAID setup, is perhaps using a powerful enough machine to do real-time compression, so a single harddrive could write the data, or look into Nvidia's GPGPU solutions, and see if they have something to offer so you could compress on the fly.