Head movement capture

[HL117]

What is best way to capture head movements in video when using Track IR, I assume AH film viewer has no provisions for this.

PC is old so any live capture app preferably would use minimal resources.


Ty

[Skyyr]

What is best way to capture head movements in video when using Track IR, I assume AH film viewer has no provisions for this.

PC is old so any live capture app preferably would use minimal resources.

Ty

I've used Fraps, OBX, XSplit Gamecaster, and now I use Nvidia Shadowplay.

Fraps works great and records in AVI, but is a huge resource hog and drops your game performance a decent bit, at least for the average computer. File sizes are massive, typically 1-3GB per minute of film. Video quality will be the highest of most other recording options. You can find questionable older "free" versions, but the current version has a license cost of $37.

OBX has a much lighter system load and can record in H264 (a much smaller, compressed format). It's free as well. The downside is that it tends to produce "skipping"/freezing in recorded videos as your CPU load goes up or as your drive fills up (see example below). Even when the gameplay is perfectly smooth on your end, the recordings can skip. This was the only software out of the bunch that did this.

XSplit Gamecaster is a decent option and is lighter weight than OBX, as well as easier to set up (IMO). It's a free download. It records in MP4 H264. The downside is that the free version only records in 720p; you need to purchase a premium subscription ($5) a month for 1080p or higher. It also streams to Twitch.tv as well, though the same 720p cap is in place for non-premium users.

Nvidia Shadowplay is what I use now. It's free, but it requires an Nvidia GTX 600-series or later video card. It records in MP4 H264, and uses the GPU's memory as a recording buffer, so there's very little performance hit whatsoever. It's my favorite of all of the software options I've used yet.

Regardless of what software you end up using, you'll likely want dedicated storage for your videos. Even simple MP4 files will quickly fill up most drives.


Video Samples

Below are some samples are videos recorded with the software listed above. Some of the videos were rendered in Sony Vegas Pro (exported as MP4 H264), and YouTube goes a step further and re-encodes them to their own format regardless of what format you upload them in, so there will always be a reduction in quality. That said, you can still see a slight difference in quality with each one.

Objectively, I'd have to say that Fraps has the best video quality, and Shadowplay has the second; although, Shadowplay is much easier to work with. You be the judge.



Fraps (file size for the raw videos in this clip was almost 100GB) [Link]:





OBX

Here's what it looks like when it has freezing/skipping issues, typically due to system resources (note that my actual gameplay was smooth, this is just how it recorded) [Link]:



Here's OBX when it doesn't have freezing issues: [Link]:





XSplit (note the 720p resolution cap) [Link]:





Nvidia Shadowplay [Link]



Another Shadowplay recording [Link]

[mikev]

setting up shadow play ,  i use fraps now and have a 1t hard drive just for videos after i put them on you tube i delete them,. but i never used shadow play . what kind of video editor can you use?  can you set it up to record and broadcast? i use open broadcast now with fraps. do you need the stream key ?  are any of the functions able to be run  using the stick instead of the keyboard?

[Skyyr]

setting up shadow play ,  i use fraps now and have a 1t hard drive just for videos after i put them on you tube i delete them,. but i never used shadow play . what kind of video editor can you use?  can you set it up to record and broadcast? i use open broadcast now with fraps. do you need the stream key ?  are any of the functions able to be run  using the stick instead of the keyboard?

Shadowplay records MP4, so you can use any editor that works with MP4 formatted videos. I use Vegas Pro 13, but most mainstream editors should work, including Windows Movie Maker.

Shadowplay is always passively recording, so there's no need to map anything to a stick. If you had a great fight or sortie, hitting the "Save" command will save the last 5-20 minutes of gameplay (depending on how you have it configured).

You can also set it to actively record and it will record until you tell it to stop. It does work with streaming, but it's for gaming on your TV or other platforms, not internet broadcasting.

[HL117]

Excellent writeup, thanks for the help, have an old PC but injected it with Nvida GTX 750 , came with shadow play, have not messed with it though, would guess it would work best since card is Nvida.


Double kill in first Fraps video nice ............

[mikev]

Excellent writeup, thanks for the help, have an old PC but injected it with Nvida GTX 750 , came with shadow play, have not messed with it though, would guess it would work best since card is Nvida.


Double kill in first Fraps video nice ............

 use to have a gtx 750 not a bad card, big thing for you will be the cpu usage

[dogtag380]

You can also try bandicam. The free version comes with their website stamped across the top. If you don't mind that it's an easy to use free program. I also use Sony Vegas. Great program.  You can try it for free for 30 days. Then it costs money. I think I paid 70 bucks but I don't remember. 

[Skuzzy]

Shadowplay records MP4, so you can use any editor that works with MP4 formatted videos. I use Vegas Pro 13, but most mainstream editors should work, including Windows Movie Maker.<snip>

Just a clarification on this.  MP4's are just containers for data.  The data in the MP4 can be formatted using many different CODEC's.  For instance, Fraps uses its own CODEC to create MP4's.  Bandicam does as well.

Sony Vegas Pro can make use of any installed CODEC.  This is why you can edit virtually any MP4, as Vegas will make use of any installed CODEC.  Not all editors, nor players, will do that.

However, even Vegas Pro has limits.  I have run into MP4's Vegas could not parse the audio out of and had to use another application to extract the audio from the file and add it back into Vegas.