Making a video of your game for youtube.

[Jamie W]

Hi Guys,

I want to make a quick video (avi/mpg) of my game. I can run my game in windowed mode or full-screen. Any suggestions on what software to use to do this?

Cheers!

[FlySim]

I just did this - 250 youtube views in a couple of days - seems worth the effort.
A fan of our game created the video for me and he used fraps and windows movie maker.

[Jamie W]

I just did this - 250 youtube views in a couple of days - seems worth the effort.
A fan of our game created the video for me and he used fraps and windows movie maker.

Cool, good luck with that JR.

Anyone know if there are there any other apps, besided fraps, that can do this?

[Applewood]

I had this built into one of my engines once, and will do again when I feel the need on our new one.

There is a freeware toolkit for making quicktime movies you can get from apple. Works on PC and presumably Macs also, but I remember it took a fair bit of dicking around with.

However, the format is a bit lame imo and I'd like to get something integrated with DX for making AVI or WMA with on our next pass at this.

Worth doing though. Making/saving movies stops becoming a major event and becomes instead something you can bind to a keypress toggle. Artistic and directorial concerns notwithstanding of course!

EDIT: Another reason for building this into your game is of course that whereas users would almost never go to the effort of making their own, when it's on a button in the game, they will, and they'll post them around and you'll get more eyes on

[Dingo Games]

I recently did this for Tasty Planet. I tried a few different programs for the recording. FRAPS, GameCam, and Taksi (opensource). FRAPS was the only one that gave me acceptable results. Taksi gave me about 1 fps. GameCam seems pretty cool, albeit with a tricky user interface. However, it kept screwing up the colours on my videos.. couldn't figure out how to fix that. So I ended up going with FRAPS because it just works. Not too many features, but simple to use.

For editing the video together I used Windows Movie Maker.. it is pretty easy to use. My main problem with it was the EXTREMELY limited export options. Basically you have to export as a .wmv and you can't go above 640x480. Unless you use widescreen...

But it got the job done. The quality would have been a bit better if the export options were better. YouTube compresses it anyways, but it would be better to upload a higher quality original (you will always lose quality when compressing-decompressing-recompressing-etc.).

[DrWilloughby]

I use GameCam (registered) and I like it. Haven't tried the others out there so I can't give you a comparison.

[AnthemAudio]

I have both Fraps and Gamecam because some apps like one over the other. Having both covers most bases. I like the interface in Gamecam just fine, it's extremely customizable and overall I'd say I've had the best luck with gamecam over fraps. Every once in a while FRAPS does it's thing way better than the other.

In other words, find the one that best works with the app you're trying to capture. And register fraps so people don't see the fraps url in all of your videos...I kinda think that's cheap.

[PoV]

I had to use "Mr. Captor" to get video of some of my old Allegro games. Fraps does me great for everything current.

[Drake]

Another vote for FRAPS. I tried GameCam, but it wouldn't do the resolution I needed (800x600). FRAPS seems to be much more resource efficient, allowing it to support higher resolutions and frame rates reliably.

[AnthemAudio]

GameCam (lite) caps out at 800x600. The normal version goes above that. Maybe you just had the demo or something?

It would be awesome if most games had an in-game capture ability, not only is it great for testing and production, but if the community made films whether just gameplay, music videos, or machinima is fantastic exposure.

[Drake]

Yeah, I tried the GameCam demo. I can't remember if 800x600 wasn't available in the demo version, or if the performance was just too poor. I was using it on a 3 GHz Dual P4, 1 GB RAM, PCI-Ex Nvidia 6800 GT, writing files to a clean HD partition, so I don't think the hardware was at fault.

[vjvj]

Fraps is the best I've used and gets my vote.

I believe it only works in OpenGL/D3D however. Not sure about 2D DirectX (does someone know?).

[PoV]

Yeah, that's why I had to use Mr. Captor, since it only worked with D3D/GL games. Mr. Captor lets you capture any portion of your screen, so just run your game in a window and set up a capture box for you to fit it in.