Fafhrd on 7/6/2014 at 01:53

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I'm gonna say what I say in a lot of places when talking about how to record Let's Plays/general screen recording:

(https://obsproject.com/) Use OBS. It's free, it works great (though for Thief I seem to have to turn on force windowed in cam_ext for capture to work), you can set it to livestream or save locally and you can set whatever bitrate you want.

And then, for editing (if you need it), and this is going to sound crazy but stick with me: (http://www.blender.org/) Blender. You can use its video editor to do all your cutting and cross fades and wipes, drop in images for personal branding or to highlight things on screen or what have you, you can record your commentary as a separate file than the video and drop it on top and adjust the volumes independently, etc. And then you can use the Compositor to tweak your colour balance and brightness and stuff. It's not as powerful as After Effects or Premiere (though I've seen a lecture from a guy who used to work at Rhythm & Hues who worked Blender into his workflow there), but it's more than enough for putting together a Let's Play.

Dale_ on 7/6/2014 at 08:36

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OBS has been by far the best software I've used to capture video. Free, very quick and easy to use, super high quality and low size (about 40 mins per 1GB). As for editing, I use CyberLink PowerDirector 12 and it's been working really well too but I'm sure even some free editing software can do the job.

Neb on 7/6/2014 at 18:01

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I tried all of them (over multiple Blender versions) and most of them are broken or badly implemented. I found (http://aligorith.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/blender-ffmpeg-notes-on-getting-usable.html) this which pretty much describes my experience of trying to find decent settings and formats, but I didn't manage to get any results I was happy with.

Muzman on 7/6/2014 at 20:50

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Seems like agonised stumbling around in the dark, that page. Which happens a lot, to be fair.
I had to give it a try. It's not very intuitive I'll say that for it. Not sure I did much better. But I think I managed to get some predictable results.
It's problem is it just leaves every preset, codec and container choice available even when some are irrelevant or mutually exclusive. The relationship chart from all those different options would look like spaghetti.

Much depends on what one wants to do to with the resulting file, of course. Uploading to youtube is a matter of outputting the highest quality file you can stand to upload.

I wouldn't do what that guy did and pick MPEG for anything. Nor Windows Movie Maker.
Avoiding the horrid nested confusion and sticking with xvid->xvid or h264->h264 down the chain in blender seemed to work though. You gotta crank up that desired bitrate and maximium and minumum bitrate a bit (in xvid I force like 15000 desired and max) and drop the GOP count to 2 or 1 (it's not entirely clear what implementation they're using here. Post MP2 codecs are flexible on this so it shouldn't matter too much, but I'd like to know what zero means. Anyway...)
Compressing from giant UT or Lagarith files, I get the results I expect to from other programs, so it seems ok.
They might still be too large for some, so if you just incrementally down the max bitrate and increase the GOP size you should hit something you like.