The Game Video Recording/Editing Topic (programs, settings)

[PZ]

That is a funny video - I like the part where there are three of the guards in a row and a each fell with sequential single swings.  They sure have slow reflexes. 

I was able to load the video in 1080p, and it looked really good.

[Art Blade]

hehe, it's not the typical type of Hitman vid And yes, I'm very pleased with the result. Crisp, smooth, and small.

Almost sounds as if I was selling peanuts.

[PZ]

 

[BinnZ]

I think the idea of. Creatief a knowledge base is a good idea. I'm nog very into this video creating stuff yet, but it sure is nice to be able to find the right settings (and tutorials) without having to search the net or ask every time.

Maybe we (you, sorry I can't contribute much myself atm ) could create 2 or 3 locked topics with the main tutorial thingy plus settings presets that are proven to be good, for each program, which a moderator can update with the feed in a dynamic discussion topic like this one?

[Art Blade]

I think the reactions to this topic have been positive but apart from everyone liking the idea there isn't much substance so I don't think separate locked topics are needed right now, let alone a dedicated board.

This topic is still small and the important parts are within the first few posts. You'll find the D3DGear main setting screenshot which about covers everything needed and for OBS there are two screenshots along with texts that cover the important parts of that program. I just edited the first post so the OpenShot video editor tutorial recommended by fragger is right on top. That tutorial helped me a lot and covers an important aspect of that program, the rest is quite simple.

If there are any questions we can keep them in this topic and in case it really grows big we can still think about software-specific topics and even lock them if needed.

[BinnZ]

Correct

[Art Blade]

I edited my OBS post by adding this:

Massive Bitrate setting:
Bitrate 8192 Kbps
Max Bitrate 24576 Kbps

..which works wonders for really heavy graphics like Kingdom Come Deliverance and certain maps of Hitman 2.
Now those videos are "HD" indeed, and smooth. No lags during gaming while recording.. excellent.

I realised that the Max Bitrate is way lower than in my original post so I'm glad to report that 163840 definitely isn't necessary. 24576 has worked so smoothly that I did not even realise how much smaller it is (I suppose I wanted 10 times the number, forgetting to add the last zero.. which was a lucky mistake) so obviously the first number for regular Bitrate makes a whole lot of a difference when increased to 8192 and obviously the second not so much. Video files are obviously larger but if that's necessary for covering intense graphics, so be it. I'm very critical of my own recordings regarding "smoothness" and quality and I am absolutely content with the results.

[LowPolyOWG]

Good to hear I had to install the latest version of OBS (ver. 23) to get the same menu as yours. 1+ matey

[Art Blade]

thank you, G

[fragger]

I think D3DGear may be a bit temperamental about when it is launched. A couple of times now I've fired it up when I already have a game running and the "record" and "frame rate" hotkeys won't respond. Another time I recorded a four-minute video but no audio was recorded, even though nothing had been turned off in D3DGear's "Audio" menu (to test, I quit both D3DGear and the game, then rebooted, loaded D3DGear first, then the game, and it recorded the audio fine. I changed nothing in D3DGear's settings at any point).

That sucked actually because it was quite a funny clip otherwise, but without the audio is was nothing

I haven't struck any problems when D3DGear is launched before any games are.

[Art Blade]

maybe it's time to give the free OBS software a shot, then?

[Art Blade]

Cheers I don't know why the video quality on You Tube came out so rubbish, it looks pretty terrible. Maybe after a while it will come good, dunno.

What video editor do you use again, Art? I'm finding OpenShot to be very, very slow to respond when playing/editing clips sometimes. I click on a point in a video to skip to and it will sometimes take well over a minute before it starts, with no indication that it's doing anything - no twirly pointer thing, nothing. It's pretty annoying - I never know whether it's thinking, gone to sleep, or hung

fragger, YouTube does some heavy "post-processing" to crunch and compress the living daylights out of at least gaming videos. If you watch any real life recordings in high quality, they're really crisp and HD but game recordings tend to pixelate and blur a lot especially with lots of foliage in view or fast movements like a race. Even if the raw vid you uploaded was crisp. What you described typically happens if you watch a vid immediately after uploading, but typically if the vid is both high-res and long, it's not normal for short videos like yours. That can happen, however, if the YouTube servers doing the rendering are under heavy load. After a while, which can be minutes or even hours, the video will be "normal." When I watched your vid, it was just fine.

As to recording software, I use OpenShot, too. I know what you mean, I had that on my old rig. With my new rig which is pretty powerful (AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor with 24 logical processors, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti with 11GB VRAM, 32GB RAM) the program hasn't stopped yet but as soon as I create transitions and watch them in the preview, it tends to lag and stutter like crazy. Also it doesn't seem to make full use of my RAM nor of the many cores available. Rendering a 5-minutes vid at 1080p60 takes more than 5 minutes while my on-board CPU/RAM monitor shows just only 1/4 and 1/3 load which is obviously WAY under its capacity.

But. It's free, works, and the results are good. What I don't want is a paid-for program that typically can only be acquired involving online registration, download, and of course money transfer/payment. And "renting" rather than buying a license is also out of the question for me. So I think I'm stuck with OpenShot.

What you can do to solve the issues with OS: save the project as it is, quit, restart, load the project. That's probably not the ideal solution when the program is currently not responding, though but if it's just stuttering and lagging, then it helps. From my experience, the program typically hasn't crashed if you can't do anything, it's indeed "thinking" (for whatever reason) and will come back to life after some time. If it crashes, you should see an error message but I hardly remember because it rarely crashed.

One more thing that I found out: if you record clips that are longer than 30 minutes then the actual preview (for clips in your drag-and-drop area, not the project preview) you can only preview up and until the 30-minutes mark but it cannot preview anything beyond those 30 minutes. You can, however, drag those clips into the editing area and view/edit the 30+ minutes stuff from there.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I'm currently using a program called MovAvi which is of course, a paid-for program. I needed something that could interface with my ancient video capture device to record from old VHS tapes. The free options out there worked, but had limiting factors in video type, compression, etc. So a google for my capture device came up with MovAvi which is a full suite of video editing tools. It might not be Adobe Audition or Sony Vegas level of features, but it does what I need. Though it has some limitations that Open Shot doesn't, like how overlays are handled, Open Shot allows you to independently do fade in / fade out on the overlay separate from the main video overlay, but MovAvi doesn't at least not that I could find. But aside from that, I used it to edit together an hour long "clip show" of old home movies transferred from VHS that was pretty easy to do and turned out decent. I don't know how OS would have done with that complex of a project, but knowing it's limitations with long clips, as Art mentioned, I don't think it would have been as pleasant an experience as it was.

I think I ended up paying $69 plus tax for it online, which had some discounts built in, not sure what the list price was, well over a hundred I think, and as I was in the shopping cart section of the site I had another tab open for something and went to check that and it must have detected the mouse moving out of the window to maybe close it and a message popped up offering another discount if I didn't leave, so I got it even cheaper, just for moving the mouse outside the window! It was worth it for what I needed to do at the time as it worked flawlessly with my capture device (which the free options definitely did not, without much tinkering on my part) so just the savings in frustration was worth it.

The other consideration for editing video, and the time it takes to view while editing, is the hard drive it's stored on, and the amount of memory in the system. A fast drive can seek and locate the spot you want to view much faster than a slow one and if the entire chunk can be loaded into memory, even better.

[LowPolyOWG]

Some time ago, I sent AB this video. At the 3:18 mark, Richard Leadbetter mentions VirtualDub2 that they use for their capturing and editing needs. They customized the look and layout (so don't get shocked if the stock UI doesn't match theirs). It seems Digital Foundry added an extra info tab for nerds on the right

[Art Blade]

ah goodness, thank you for bringing up that program again, LowPoly. Nice I definitely need to check it out soon.

Dweller, I got my vids on an SSD (1 TB ADATA M.2 PCI-E NVMe XPG S50) so that shouldn't be a problem, yet still it's stuttering when watching transitions.