gkkiller on 2/4/2014 at 09:23
Before you say "omg fraps is teh best!!1!", take a moment to listen, please.
I'm interested in making Let's Plays / walkthrough style videos for games. I used FRAPS for recording and Windows Movie Maker for minor edits earlier, but I don't have the disk space to spare for FRAPS' gigantic videos.
Now I'm looking to revisit this activity because I'll be having a fair bit of free time over the next few months. I need help with this, and I'm coming here because why not. First of all, I need recommendations for a good FRAPS alternative. I've heard good things about Bandicam but apparently the free version puts a massive watermark or something, and I can't buy it for reasons. Shadowplay sounds like exactly what I need, but I have a Radeon card :/ I also need someone to tell me exactly what the hell 'editing gameplay' means. If it's just stitching together cuts and adding minor transitions and the like, good, I can do that myself, but apparently there's stuff like 'colour correction' and 'saturation' involved and I know next to nothing about that. Preferably I should be able to do this stuff in WMM or VirtualDub (I have both).
So yeah, that's it. Help me out here, TTLG. Thanks.
june gloom on 2/4/2014 at 10:54
Give Hypercam a try.
Also, for the love of god...
Don't fucking talk over the video. Please. Please. Please. 99% of LPs are ruined because the asshole always has to talk.
Muzman on 2/4/2014 at 11:01
fraps isn't that great these days. It's a bit slow and heavy and doesn't do hyperthreading very well (or something. Someone told me it was slow for some reason like that). Dxtory is better, but a bit complicated if you don't know what you're doing (and not free).
There's a few free ones. I thought I heard camtasia or some offshoot was doing overlay recording now. I don't know. I've only ever used it for desktop recording.
Open Broadcaster Software sounds promising, but Ive never used it.
There was another one starting with X, I found once that looked promising, but I can't find it now, so that's no help.
Large files are unavoidable and even desirable if you're going to edit. Editing already compressed files is a difficult proposition at times and destructive to the image. fraps or anything else can compress as it records, but that's another processor drain. If you're trying to record whatever game at decent quality (ie the quality you usually play at) and it's fairly recent, you're not going to have a lot of processor cycles to spare to do that kind of thing on the fly.
There's some colour and format considerations in recording games, but usually it's not something you have to worry about very often. It's pretty wysiwyg. (not like regular video. hoo boy)
Neb on 2/4/2014 at 11:13
I've been using Bandicam for the same reasons (file size). You should try the demo version anyway, along with the demo of dxtory (heard good things about it too), even if just to get your feet wet.
A great thing about games is, they already come at presentation quality. Worry more about how the footage looks at the recorded framerate/resolution than fancy-pants saturation, and read the best practise guides for uploading to Youtube so that when they process it it won't come out horribly compressed.
'Editing' mostly means cuts, yeah. Just give it a go and bang something out.
WingedKagouti on 2/4/2014 at 11:30
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Give Hypercam a try.
Also, for the love of god...
Don't fucking talk over the video. Please. Please. Please. 99% of LPs are ruined because the asshole always has to
talk.
I'd say that depends on when, how and why he talks.
Random chatter about how your day went, political opinions, opinions about gaming in general etc. No one wants to hear about that duing a LP unless they're there for your personality in the first place. And since you're not known, no one is there for your personality (yet).
Specific talk about why you make certain choices, how to approach a situation in the game you're playing, or something along those lines can be worthwhile subjects. Just don't talk during ingame dialogue. And if you do talk, make sure what you're saying is intelligible ie. no mumbling or background noise drowning you out (you may also have to invest in a good mic if you don't have one already).
icemann on 2/4/2014 at 14:14
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Give Hypercam a try.
Also, for the love of god...
Don't fucking talk over the video. Please. Please. Please. 99% of LPs are ruined because the asshole always has to
talk.
I wouldn't say 99%, though it would be a large percentage. Maybe 75%. It all depends on the voice of the person firstly (majority of LP's I've watched had guys that sounded like they were 12 or never went through puberty which gets ANNOYING fast), and secondly depends on the personality of the person. Some are funny, or talk about stuff about the game itself (ie its development, the design etc). Many of the System Shock 2 LP's I've watched were quite good. Others though talk about REALLY boring stuff. Meh. Zzzzzzzz :bored:.
Majority of the time though, where I watched a LP it was due to getting stuck in a game and having no idea where in the hell I'm supposed to go, strategy to use against a boss, or what to do at a given point. So turning the sound off and skipping to the bit I was up to tended to be the order of the day. But I've watched a couple purely for the sake of watching a LP, and in those cases I only went with the ones where points 1 and 2 were met. I'm not a big fan of the LP's where the person doesn't talk at all. Good balance is key.
Of note: Many of the Dark Souls and Demon Souls LP's are hilarious. Or the one's I've seen anyway. Lot's and lot's of swearing.
Neb on 2/4/2014 at 16:04
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Don't fucking talk over the video. Please. Please. Please. 99% of LPs are ruined because the asshole always has to
talk.
If no one talked then we'd never have (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8rt69ztDjA) this.
(It's the exception, I realise.)
Fafhrd on 2/4/2014 at 17:29
Quote Posted by Muzman
Open Broadcaster Software sounds promising, but Ive never used it.
I've been using OBS. It's pretty great. You can use it for livestreams or direct recording, set your own bitrate, does desktop or individual application recording, webcam windows, etc. The biggest problem is that iit only appears to do AVI recordings, and if a recording goes over 2 hours, VLC can't seem to play it back. Though the latter was only a problem until I discovered that Blender is much better for video editing than VLC is.
IndieInIndy on 2/4/2014 at 19:54
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Don't fucking talk over the video. Please. Please. Please. 99% of LPs are ruined because the asshole always has to
talk.
More useful sound advice:
Don't talk over dialog (FMVs, cutscenes, NPC conversations, etc.).
Wear headphones to hear game audio, record your voice with a separate mic to a separate file. This keeps your voice and the game audio completely separate. You'll have to manually sync up the audio when mixing (there may be modern apps that help with this, I've no idea what they might be), but this allows you to adjust the levels on the game audio and your voice so neither drowns out the other, and you're able to adjust things when the game gets too quite or too loud (especially when any voice acting is going on in the game -- most viewers want to hear what's going on, it's your job to keep voice acting easy to hear, especially when the game is being uncooperative).
Be yourself. Don't try to affect an accent or weird style of speech. You'll only come across as fake and annoying, which drives viewers away.
