Game Video Recording Guide

The Game Video Guide explains how to record, edit and encode in game videos. This guide offers informations on some of the tools you can use to create ingame videos and how to prepare them for release on the net. Most of the tools mentioned in the article are freely legal downloadable on the net and I like to them where it's possible. The recording tools themselves are all shareware ($9,95-$25) but after that it's all free.If you got some nice videos, feel free to send us the links so we can watch them too.{mospagebreak title=Workflows}WorkflowsMy preferred way:

1. Record the ingame video with FRAPS, Gamescam or other tools you might want to use for it.
2. Use Virtual Dub to export the parts of your video material you actually want to use via direct stream copy (no quality losses)
3. Use a video editor like Window Movie Maker, Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere to add a title, transitions and music. Export the video/audio streams uncompressed.
4. Encode the video using Virtual dub. Also do resizing and filtering here.

The fastest way to make an video

1. Record the ingame video with FRAPS, Gamescam or other tools you might want to use for it.
2. Encode the video or a single segment using Virtual dub.

The way that costs the least HD space

1. Record the ingame video with FRAPS, Gamescam or other tools you might want to use for it. Lower resultions mean smaller files.
2. Use Virtual Dub to export the parts of your video material you actually want to use via direct stream copy (no quality losses) and delete the original recordings.
3. Use Virtual Dub to import all segments and encode the results. You can use a video editor too, if you use the built in functions for the encoding but a lot of applications write preview files onto the harddisc which increases HD space usage.

{mospagebreak heading=Game Video Guide&title=Recording Tools: FRAPS} FRAPSOne of the tools you can use to record in game videos is FRAPS which can be downloaded at fraps.com. The test version is free but restricted to a water mark and 30 seconds recording time. The full version costs $37 at the moment.Setting up FRAPS for recording videosAfter you installed FRAPS the way you want it, start it and go to the "Movies" tab. The following options are important.

• Folder to save movies in: Set this to a folder where you want to save you in game videos. If you leave the default value all recorded videos will be saved to the folder where you installed fraps.
• Half-Size / Full-Size: Set this to Full-Size. The internal resizing by half through FRAPS doesn't give as good results as using Virtual Dub or other tools to do this. Especially text usually is impossible to read when using the FRAPS resize function. Please keep in mind that the maximum size for a recorded video is 1152x864. If you go above that size FRAPS automatically reduces the image size by half.
• Record Sound: Activate it. You don't want to go through the pain of synchronizing audio recorded with another tool, I am sure (;
• FPS: I use 25fps for most of what i record, sometimes just 15 or 20 to reduce the load on the machine or to create smaller files. Other fps rates might be fitting if you're producing videos for other uses, eg for display on a NTSC-TV you'd likely use the 29.97fps option.
• Video Capture Hot key: Set this to something you don't accidentally hit but still have in good reach so you can always enable recording when there's something worth the hard disk space. I set it to the German character "ü" since it's not used in any of the games i play.
• No Cursor: Activate it if you don't want FRAPS to record the mouse pointer.
• No Sync: Fraps will not wait for the image to be full drawn before it's captured. Disable this.

Optimizing FRAPSOne of the biggest drawbacks with using FRAPS is the low frame rate most users get. For example on a Athlon XP+ 2500 w/ 1 GB RAM the typical frame rate for recording a Lineage 2 in game video was 2-4fps first - depending on the amount of objects. The following changes to my system helped:

• Second Hard Disk. My frame rate improved by about 40% when I added a fast 250GB HD on the second ide bus. Both the higher transfer rate caused by a bigger cache/faster access times and loading game/cache data from another HD then the one where the video data is saved to.
• RAM: Depends on your system. Replacing 1GB DDR 333 RAM with 2GB DDR 400 helped the frame rate to jump over 10fps constantly. But this might just be due to Lineage 2 being a big memory hog as well as containing various memory leaks causing the system to swap out space more and more over time. Other games might be a lot less affected.
• CPU: The more the merrier. FRAPS compresses the videos before it saves them to the HD and needs the CPU power that the game misses when recording
• Graphics card: With FRAPS braking out the CPU graphics cards are usually not a big problem but of course the frame rate is also directly affected. You can try to lower specific settings like isometric filtering etc to see if you fps rates improves but if you don't have a slow graphics card the CPU is usually the bottle neck.
• Recording Size: I use 1024x768 windows mode for all videos i can record. Try to use smaller resolutions like 800x600 if that still is too slow.
• HD De fragmentation: Defrag your hard disk every now and then. A slowly heavily fragmented hard disk will be a major brake for frame rates.

Using these optimization methods I was able to record at 20-30FPS during most situations. Sieges with many players ran in the 10-20fps area.Testing your FRAPS installationStart a game, set it to the resolution you want to record with. Now hit the recording hot key. If you have FPS display active you'll see it changes its color to red and the results of your optimization work. Press the key again to end the recording. An AVI file should just have been saved to the folder you defined.{mospagebreak title=Recording Tools: Gamescam} GamescamAnother tool to record in game video. It can be download at planetgamecam.com. There're several versions of that tool with different functions depending if you registered/unlocked them or not. To be able to decide what version is best suitable for you check the comparison table. Prices start at $0 and go up to $25 for the top version.Setting up Gamescam to record in game videosTo set Gamescam up start it and right click the Gamescam icon inside the tray. Select preferences first:The most important setting is "Videos". Define the path where the in game videos are saved to. The other settings are not relevant for in game video recording and can be left the way they are.Right click the Gamescam tray icon again, this time select Profiles Manager: Gamescam works with profiles. You define different settings for each Application you want to record. Click on "New Profile" to define one now: Select the executable of the game installation to use it for the newly created profile.Application specific settings are configured using the "Advanced" button in the profiles manager:Cached Video is a nice option that records the currently running video clip all the time but doesn't save it before the user selects to. That way a user doesn't record from the moment the recording key is hit but the new movie starts 30 seconds (or whatever cache size is defined) before that point. This makes it really hard to miss those moments that come without warning.Video Smart Capture makes Gamescam try to find optimal settings on itself.Video Frame Size: Set this to the size you want the game to run at. Resizing is better done with external tools.Optimizing GamescamSee Optimizing FRAPS. Most points apply here, too.Testing your Gamescam installationStart a game, set it to the resolution you want to record with. Hit the recording hot key. Check if the AVI was created at the directory you defined and make sure it runs in your local machines media player.{mospagebreak title=Recording Tools: Others}More ToolsTechSmith (website ) is producer of two other capturing applications named SnagIt and Camtasia. I never tried them but I heard some people use them for in game video even though most claim the products are unusable for in game recordings.When I bought my Asus EN7800GT graphics card it was advertised with ingame recording ablities with Mp4 export (named Asus Replay). I didn't find the tool on the CDs nor on the web. As soon as I know more, I'll be sure to add more detailed infos on it.{mospagebreak title=Editing: General} General Info on EditingThis section of the guide is an introduction on editing tools and some of the possible uses:

• Add scene transitions
• Add an intro and/or eye candy to your videos
• Add a sound track to your video

The net is flooded with video editing tools at the moment. Some well known applications are:

• Windows Movie Maker: it's free, requires sp2/windows genuine check and is aimed at video editing starters
• Sony Vegas: medium price ranged commercial pay to use software aiming at new and semi professional users.
• Adobe Premiere Pro: professional video editing solution, aimed at semi professional and professional users.

If you don't have one of those tools and don't plan to become professional video editor just grab yourself the Windows Movie Maker. It's free, runs surprisingly smooth and does all the things you likely need.{mospagebreak title=Editing: Movie Maker 2.0}Editing with Windows Movie Maker 2.0+Note: Windows Movie Maker is currently at version 2.1. If you're living in a country where microsoft allows you to download the latest version use that one. It's said to solve a lot of crashes and problems i have run into when trying to make the guide for it. Germany is not one of those countries so all screenshots are from version 2.0.Open Movie Maker 2.0 and an (file) explorer. Drag and Drop the movie clips you want in your movie to the collections area. They will be added under the Collections tree root.Now drag and drop and the imported video segments onto the big boxes on the time linein the order you want them to display.Now select Tools -> Video Transitions and select a transiltion you like. Be carefull with what transitions you use and make sure they don't annoy the visitor. I mostly use fading since itallows the watcher to seethat the movie is cut at that point. It's not uncommon to use hard cuts if you edit video professional but I found out it's not that great of an idea if you are recording a longer movie in the same area since it often looks like the player warped around or there was a lag spike.Now select File -> Save Movie File. An assistant pops up:

1. Select "My computer". Press "Next"
2. Enter a name for the movie (eg. 20060201_Giran_Siege) and make sure you select a drive with enough HD space. Press "Next".
3. Click on "Show more Choices" for a full list of profiles. Select the profile if your choice and hit next to start the encoding

WARNING: Windows Movie Makeronly offers predefined export profiles that are mosty aimed at display on TV or other external devices. There are no predefined profiles that would allow you to export your movie to typical game resolutions like 1024x768 or 800x600. To use those you need to create yourown profiles. You can do so in 2 ways:

1. Download Windows Media Encoder. Use the built in profiles (PRX) editor to create a profile for use at Movie Maker export.
2. Download a random profile (.PRX). Open it with a text editor like notepad or ultraedit and replace the predefined values with the values you want/need.

{mospagebreak title=Encoding: General} General Info on Encoding(Re-) compression is required since the fraps or gamescam saved movies are encoded with a fast (to only slowdown the game as far as necessary) but size wise inefficient codec. While there are many tools/GUI's to assist encoding I never really used anything but Gordian Knot or Virtual Dub , with Virtual Dub being my favorite. You will need Virtual Dub for this of the guide if you don't use the editors export function for space reasons (see note). Download.Most codecs allow to select in between single pass and two/multiple pass encoding. While single pass is usually enough for personal backups, the two pass system has advantages when it comes to file size and quality control.You need to encode the video stream as well as the audio steam. If you are unsure about what the best solution for you is, chose Audio: Mp3 and Video: XViD or DiVX.Note: Many videos editing tools also offer built in encoding but I prefer exporting the video and audio uncompressed to encode in Virtual dub. Virtual Dubs filter come in handy often and the resizing function is fast and gives good results. Being able to compress a full batch of files overnight or just to add both passes to the batch make it even more usefull. The drawback: saving uncompressed video takes a lot of hard disc space but makes sure no recompression losses happens. If you don't have the space on your hard disc it might be better to use the built in functions. The codec settings should be similar to the ones on the virtual dub explanations.{mospagebreak title=Encoding: Audio (Mp3)}Encoding audio with MP3In Virtual Dub go to the audio menu. Make sure it's not set to direct stream copy since all compression options are disabled then. If it's not set correctly, change it to full processing.Now open Audio->Compression :Select MP3, set it to the rate you want. I am using the maximum rate offered since I often use music inside my videos. For just ingame sounds you might also use a lower quality setting. Press OK to finish the audo configuration.Note: Virtual Dubs uses CBR (Constant Bit Rate). As some said, Variable Bit Rate (VBR) would result in better quality but needs the use of several tools to encode the mp3s to VBR and then mux (multiplex/embed) the video and the audio streams into an a stream container like AVI. Various reasons make the AVI a bad choice for this though which could be solved with another container format but that's a topic on it's own and clearly a too big one for this guide.{mospagebreak title=Encoding: Video (XViD)} Encoding video with the XVID codecI assume you already downloaded and installed Virtual Dub. If not, click the link above to get the latest version. Furthermore you need to have the XViD codec installed. To get the latest version of the XViD codec you can for example visit kepi.org - a XViD developers website that offers the latest binaries/executables of the codec. Download and install it.To setup the video encoding selection open the Video menu from the top menu bar. Make sure it's set to either "Normal re-compress" or "Full processing mode". Otherwise you can't select the "Compression" entry and the video steam will be kept then.1. Select the XViD MPEG-4 Codec from the codec listing2. Click Configure3. Select Two pass, First Pass to prepare the final encoding. The profile AS@L5 is default and should be kept.4. Press OK and the first video encoding pass starts. 5. Set Encoding Type to Two pass - Second pass. Then set the target bit rate to the value where you find the video quality acceptable. The start values I usually use for the first second pass encode:

1. 1024kbps on a 800x600 movie running at 25 frames per second (fps)
2. 1492kbps on a 1024x768 movie running at 25 frames per second (fps)

6. Hit OK to start the second encoding pass.After the second encoding pass finished you should be able to watch you self encoded video now using your normal video player. If you like the quality, you're finished now. If you think the quality is still to low, you can repeat the second step with different quality settings until you like the results. The first pass does not need to be repeated after it was done once.{mospagebreak title=Misc: Hosting} Hosting your videosHosting ingame videos usually requires special providers sice they get big sized fast. There are several free hosting providers you can use to upload your video for public or private download. Here the most important:

• filefront.com: The premium provider for big and game related files. You can upload files of any size for free as long as the upload doesn't take more then 12 hours. The major drawback of this service are long waiting times (lately) as well as slow download speeds. Use this service if you have files > 100MB. You need to register an account there with a valid mail adress but basic services are free.
• rapidshare.de: Even though the service has partly german text this is one of the best sites to upload videos up to 100mb. Fast upload/downloads, usually waiting times below 30 seconds. You are allowed to split a big file into smaller ones and upload them. The biggest drawback are per user restrictions on downloads. If you for example download a 100mb file there and immediatly want to try a second file of that size you might get an error message that asks you to buy a day ticket or to wait for eg 30 minutes. No registration is required.
• putfile.com: This filespace provider only allows you to upload 25MB but is fast and accessible.

More hosters:

• savefile.com: Files up to 60GB, will be deleted after 14 days of no download. Free service with no registration required.
• content-type.com: Files up to 100GB. Servers were full on several occasions when I tried to download files from this service. No registration is required.
• d.turboupload.com: Hosting service for files up to 70GB. Download speed on a first test was 40-60kb/s.