Welcome to The Few Good Men

Thanks for visiting our club and having a look around, there is a lot to see. Why not consider becoming a member?
Register

Noob needs audio visual advice - for AAR's

Concord

Concord

FGM Major
FGM MEMBER
Joined
Apr 20, 2014
Messages
3,953
Reaction score
3,975
Location
Western Australia
I'm making my first steps into recording in-game video footage.
I'm starting from scratch with my knowledge of this area,
and don't have time for a steep tech learning curve.

I'm using Fraps to record. Uploading to Youtube.

Fraps is simple, but wasn't easy to research the best settings.
I've got it set to 30 fps at half size. No benchmark settings ticked.
Does this sound okay?

The avi files that result are huge. 600mb for one minute.
Takes quite a while to upload to Youtube!
Do I need some kind of compression software or something?

What should I use for editing?
Windows Movie Maker sounds appealing to me only for its simplicity.
But maybe there's something just as easy, with a few more features?

Thanks in advance for any tips.
 
Movie Studio 13 Platinum has some mixed reviews, but mostly positive for the premium version. What I like about it is the simple edit mode. Lots of reviews say it's easy to use. I'm going to shortlist this one for sure.

In regards to file size, I just asked one of my sons, and he says movie file type h.264 is the best to export to, because it massively compresses the file size.
 
I just found a great alternative to Fraps. It's Nvidia Shadowplay, built into 'Nvidia GeForce Experience', which is part of the Nvidia graphics card software. Shadowplay only works with Nvidia 600 series (GTX650 or later) or above graphics cards though.

Very low impact to performance while playing games, and renders down to an h.264 type of file (which Youtube likes). Apparently it is high quality (better than Fraps by all accounts), and file sizes are smaller.

One minute of recording using Shadowplay's H.264 file type is 375mb, as compared to 600mb for Fraps avi file type.


EDIT: Oops, just realised that this only works for Nvidia Experience supported games, of which the Combat Mission series is not a part. Back to the drawing board.
 
Another West Aussie?

Anyway been doing it for a while. :p

Sorry big files are something you are going to have to get used to but you only work with these large files on your end, you certainly don't try to upload this raw footage. :) My 40 min raw footage recordings for my channel usually come out at over 100gb, however I have a 2 terabyte hard drive installed only for recordings and general storage.

Recording only at half-size will scale down the resolution which is really bad for something with lots of little pixeltruppen and details on Youtube. Record at full size and if you have multiple hard drives in your PC, try to save the recording to a separate drive to the location of your Combat Mission Installation. Otherwise it puts a alot of strain on the one hard drive as you a forcing it to read and write data on a constant basis for multiple applications.

Take the raw footage to enter it into a video editor. I still only use Movie Maker which comes with Windows 7 (unsure of lter Windows versions). Experiment inside the video editing software to edit it down and ensure sound balance etc. Play and explore, you can't destroy the raw recordings at this point. Once you are happy convert to h.264 / MP4 format. Having a decent computer with a good processor and a good amount of RAM really helps here. If your computer is really old or is a 'weekend special' from the electronics store it may get a touch tough. For example my old PC which only had 6GB of RAM really struggles rendering videos but my current rig with 16GB of RAM does it while also planning global takeovers. :) This new file which should be your final product is what you upload to youtube which will likely be around 2 - 3 gb for a half an hour or so of footage.

Uploading - depends on your connection but sometimes I do leave mine uploading overnight. What can I say, Kangaroo Internet connection and waiting for NBN while wishing the old NBN was still a reality. :rolleyes:
 
Hi Ithikial, thanks for the tips. Yep, west coast. G'day! :cheers:
I'm pretty sure I've seen some of your footage. I'll search out your channel again and have another look.
When the NBN arrives (sometime next century I assume!) it will only be a poor-man's version I think, but better than nothing.

I've got a decent computer. It has a workhorse tera drive, and a solid state drive, but only 223 gb. Maybe I should consider getting another drive...or even an external one. I don't want to put pressure on my standard drive! Although so far I have only been doing small recordings from Combat Mission games.

I have been recording at half size, and the result has been a bit blurry. I will try it full size.

Glad to hear you use Windows Movie Maker. Some of the programs available for editing look quite complex. One day I'd like to learn more about audio visual, but just don't have the time right now. Blender looks very good. I've just downloaded WMM. It wasn't automatically included with my Windows 7.

Any basic tips regarding settings within WMM? From memory it's not a very complex program to use.
 
I have a pre-saved template now that does save some editing time. But it's a case of experimenting and seeing what comes of it. It's simple enough you can't really break anything.

It's very simple to use but there are some horrible limitations you run into very quickly like you can't really do much in terms of audio tracks. The program is also why my videos haven't really 'evolved' over the last few years. Been looking at a number of other programs but very poor at the moment. :)
 
Yeah, there were a few programs I researched that looked pretty good.
There were some simple ones that had more features than WMM, and some that looked like a steep learning curve.

Ithikial, if you can show me your basic settings for export it would be of use...if it is an easy thing to share.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top