Best video recorder for UT?

[Feralidragon]

Hi all. I'm about to do a video soon regarding a preview of one of my mods (as requested by a few people in another communities).

The thing is, I don't know what's the best one regarding speed and quality.

I already tried Fraps and CamTasia (I guess that's its name?), and Fraps at 25/30 FPS with 1024x768 resolution is quite good and fast, but it has sometimes sudden brief stops or hiccups (about half a second or so, but that do make a huge diference).

I wanted to know if there's a better one or some optimal settings for Fraps to avoid the hiccups (random and unexpected, but not that frequently) and, if possible, record at 50 FPS (for certain features it would be best to record them at such framerate).

Thanks

[GreatEmerald]

Camtasia doesn't work very well for game since it's framebuffer-based. Fraps and ZDSoft Game/Screen recorder are renderer-based, so they perform better. Personally I've never had Fraps stuttering, but it eats your HDD for dinner. I've done quite a bit of testing in this field, and the optimal choice for me is ZDSoft Game Recorder with FFDShow codec set to MPEG-4 and FFDS or DX50 FOURCC setting. It has way smaller size, doesn't lag and the quality is only slightly lossy. I've used that for my UT3Style preview, you can see it here:

[Feralidragon]

The stutters only happen randomly, but not frequently (perhaps once in each 30 seconds to 1 minute of record, sometimes it just never happen). But I think that since Fraps save directly to the HDD the uncompressed video (lots of GBs lol), somewhat the buffering is not enough or so. But the problem might be the "record and save", and since it's not exactly a few Mb, but some Gb, it might stutter sometimes (mostly since they happen anyway, be it on idle or full action times). Just a theory though lol

I never used ZDSoft, but the name is somewhat familiar to me. I saw the whole preview (good video btw), and the quality is good enough for the kind of video I am going to make (also a preview from a mod showing somewhat the features and such), and perhaps since it's for UT, I won't have any sort of problems. Going to try it out

Thanks

[GreatEmerald]

I believe that the stutters might happen when Fraps switches from one file to another. It creates files up to 4 GB in size (for FAT file system compatibility), and starting a new file is more resource-intensive than normal file writing.

[Feralidragon]

I believe that the stutters might happen when Fraps switches from one file to another. It creates files up to 4 GB in size (for FAT file system compatibility), and starting a new file is more resource-intensive than normal file writing.

Hmm, I don't believe so. I never made any recording that surpassed 1Gb filesize, plus all my drives are formatted to NTFS.

But either ways, I tried ZDSoft, and I didn't like it (I mean, I didn't try those codecs, but the program itself is too laggy even when saving uncompressed for me).

So I ended up using Fraps, but now the ironic thing is: I never placed Fraps on max recording quality (fullscreen and 60fps), so I tried it, and it worked even better (I know, strange, in 30fps it stutters, at 60fps it doesn't, and UT runs at 85fps normally), as long I didn't have anything else besides firefox an UT running, and it never stuttered. I got full quality, no laggy video clips. But then to actually make the video was an headache: Movie Maker accepted the AVI files, made the entire video, then it wouldn't publish it properlly, then I tried VideoSpin, but it's useless, so then looked for a converter, and I found the most awsome converter of all: it doesn't take much time to convert, and you can keep most quality, so I ended up converting to WMV, using Movie Maker again. Then it wouldn't even publish... had to divide the entire project in 3 different parts, publish each one, rejoin the videos with movie maker again, aplly the music, and publish again.

Now what could be a video of at least 720p, is barelly 480p... :\

Either ways, my preview is done and launched. The quality isn't as good as I desired, but at least it shows somewhat what the pack is and has on it.

Thanks for the help

[GreatEmerald]

The best converter I know is the H.264 encoder. It compresses gigabytes of data to a few megabytes plus doesn't lose quality. The only downside is that if you need editing software, you'll have to use one that understands the H.264 (MP4) codec, something like Camtasia.

[Skw]

1. Record a video clip with Fraps
2. Download x264.exe from http://x264.nl/ and extract it somewhere
3. Open command prompt and navigate to x264.exe
4. Type "x264 -o .mkv .avi"
5. Will take some time
6. Mkv will be saved same place where is your x264.exe
7. But you notice that it doesn't have sound
8. Download Avi-Mux binaries from http://www.alexander-noe.com/video/amg/
9. Extract it somewhere
10. Start AVIMux_GUI.exe
11. Drag&Drop your original .avi and the new .mkv into the first white box
12. Unselect .avi's video stream from the another big white box
13. Click "start"
14. Will take some time
15. Then I don't remember what happens (maybe asks where to save muxed .mkv?)
16. Done!

Mkv can be played with VLC Media Player.

OT
1.1.2 VLC has hardware support for x264-decoding video card. AMD drivers version should be 10.7 to support VLC hardware support. Dunno about NVIDIA.

Also Flash 10.1 has hardware support so YouTube 1080p videos will play smoothly if your video card can decode x264.

Naturally if your video card does not support x264, CPU will do all the work. This means that if CPU is weak, 1080p videos will shutter alot.

x264 a.k.a. H.264 a.k.a. MPEG-4

[GreatEmerald]

Like I've said, there is a whole lot easier way.
1. Record a video clip with Fraps
2. Download H.264 Encoder from http://www.h264encoder.com/
3. Run it.

This will give you a MP4 file that you can play on any player with any graphics settings as long as you have the codec. Plus this is what YouTube expects.

[Skw]

Like I've said, there is a whole lot easier way.
1. Record a video clip with Fraps
2. Download H.264 Encoder from http://www.h264encoder.com/
3. Run it.

This will give you a MP4 file that you can play on any player with any graphics settings as long as you have the codec. Plus this is what YouTube expects.

How's quality versus x264.exe?

And I don't do MP4, I do MKV.

EDIT

Ohkay, I tested it. When I selected .mkv as output, it said this after clicking on "Encode"-button:

[img]http://i30.tinypic.com/2lmou8l.jpg[/img]

But when I select .mp4, it works, but I still like MKV, so this application isn't so good as x264.exe.

Tested some more and seems like nothing else works than .mp4. Also tested all Encoding Settings.

[GreatEmerald]

The quality is pretty much lossless. And I don't understand your fascination with MKV, which I haven't even heard before. The H.264 is a MPEG standard and they defined .mp4 as the official extension.

[Skw]

Thank you.

I like mkv because...
- All 1080p-movies I have downloaded are in mkv
- Mkv allows to integrate all DVD-menus inside video file
- Mkv allows to integrate subtitles inside video file
- Mkv supports more than AAC sound, lossless sound
- Mkv can be lossless
- Mkv is open-source

More about mkv: http://www.matroska.org/technical/whatis/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matroska

That application you suggested isn't working with mkv so I keep using x264.exe and Avi-Mux. They deliver the best quality.

[GreatEmerald]

Oh, it's Matroska, why didn't you say so Well yes, it's a good idea, and from what I know it should run on any player with Haali Media Splitter installed. But it's not that much with compatibility, and most people, including me, don't need those extra features.

[Feralidragon]

So basically is better to record with Fraps, convert to mp4 or mkv (using one of those applications) and then edit it to have almost no quality loss... I like it!

Thnaks

[GreatEmerald]

The only thing is that after editing, it's your editing program that is most likely to reduce the output quality.

[Feralidragon]

The only thing is that after editing, it's your editing program that is most likely to reduce the output quality.

Yes... That's why VideoSpin is useless, while Movie Maker is buggy as hell... :-/