Capturing in game video?

jordan.kocon

Hey all I have been pulling my hair out at what should be a very simple process (or so I think). I want to know the best way, or one way, to capture in game game-play. I have a level with animated rain and lightning and I wish to capture the level in action as it is due for my class tomorrow and I have had no luck so far

Thanks in advance, Jordan

Edit: Here is the level, just cause...

Cap

I would recommended fraps, its the only video capture program I've ever used and it works pretty well for everything I've needed it to do. Ive never used it, but I would assume Camtasia would work just as well.

knak47

jordan
You could try starting here
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/CapturingCinematicsAndGameplay.html

Fraps does work great. I know Unreal Engine 3 has the ability to render each frame of a cinematic sequence to individual image files that can be composited into a single movie file. Does anyone know if its possible to get frames like that rendered out from just playing a level and not setting up a cinematic with cameras. I ask because I too want to record my level but don't want to by Fraps and no nothing about animating, Matinee or Kismet.

jordan.kocon

Thanks for the responses, I'll try fraps. I tried using it already, but do you have to have the actual game loaded or can fraps capture video while just in the editor? If not how do I load the game so it is fraps-able?

knak47

Just make sure your level is saved with DM- as the prefix and then just open it in the game not the editor. You might also want to look into adding some things in kismet so that the HUD doesn't appear. You can also remove the gun as well if you don't want that in your video.

Lamont

You can set up the cinematic and still have player control, and still capture frames.

knak47

Lamont wrote: »

You can set up the cinematic and still have player control, and still capture frames.

So is the "cinematic" required to get the frames rendered out? And if so thats all that is needed, just set up a "cinematic" in Kismet?

ubu

Here are tutorials on the dumping of video form matinee

The first 4 vids are about setting mutiple cams up and a director so i have ignored them however

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYRxZKFAODk&feature=channel_video_title[/ame]

this is a link to vid 04 which is setting the matinee seq to trigger a cam sequence and switch off all the extras you dont want. after this the vids show how you can setup all the settings for full res and full quality ( it will not run at realtime though so will not capture gameplay) as well as getting the frame dump into after effects and turned into a vid sequence.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Owkxax3cA&feature=channel_video_title"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Owkxax3cA&feature=channel_video_title[/ame]

You can can also use the Unreal frontend instead for the flags as opposed to putting them into a custon exe file.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACTJmcb6e1Q&feature=relmfu[/ame]

Hope this helps though it is not helpful if you want gameplay.

jordan.kocon

ubu: Thanks a ton! I don't need to capture gameplay, I just want to grab in game video, so this is perfect

LoboHotPants

You could also use dumpmovie which will give you a lossless series of images. That's only if you don't want sounds.