[Tactical Jerky]

In another topic there was a short discussion about different types of video capture software to use for capturing game videos. I toyed around with the unlicensed version of Fraps and really liked the results it gave. But before making the decision to purchase the full version I wanted to know if there were better alternatives for around the same price, or free.

I found out that Xfire since a while also has the option to capture ingame footage. The single game I tested it on gave pretty good results, but a drawback is that you can only capture certain supported games.

The other program I tried is Camstudio. Camstudio is completely free and the fun thing with this program is that it can capture everything. This means it can also capture your desktop and every single thing you are doing at the time, including your cursor. The past days I spent hours fiddling around with all kinds of codecs and different settings to see if I could obtain the same quality results as Fraps produces. With the ffdshow Video codec in Uncompressed, and every other setting maxed out I obtained quite decent results, but still not as good compared to what Fraps produces (frame rate is not as smooth as I want it to be). Nevertheless I can recommend everyone interested in video capturing to check it out as it's a nice free nifty program that next to game capturing has plenty of other potentially good uses.

Any other good recommendations? If not I think I'm going for Fraps.

[Snowfella]

I've always had good results using Camtasia but that is really more than just a capture program as it also has editing tools built in.

Camtasia Studio 6

[jwp1223]

Thanks Tactical Jerky....Fraps would bog down my system...glad you found this!

[Cpl Ledanek]

thanks TJ, anything free is good...I'll give it a go and see if my movie editing skillz makes a tremendous leap....
If not I always have my sig to remind me

[Cpl Ledanek]

a listing of machinima tools

[Nemesis]

Dang....anyone recommend a FREE editing package!
I have a 3.9GB .avi file that runs for 39 mins.. I want to split it into 10 min chunks then compress each one down.
I play with movies once in a blue moon so am reluctant to purchase anything. Thx in advance for any help

[Tactical Jerky]

Nemesis, on Jun 29 2010, 10:50 PM, said:

Dang....anyone recommend a FREE editing package!
I have a 3.9GB .avi file that runs for 39 mins.. I want to split it into 10 min chunks then compress each one down.
I play with movies once in a blue moon so am reluctant to purchase anything. Thx in advance for any help

I believe I used VirtualDub in the past for some clips I had to edit.

[Nemesis]

Tactical Jerky, on Jun 29 2010, 10:57 PM, said:

I believe I used VirtualDub in the past for some clips I had to edit.

Many Thanks TJ...it looks like it will do what I need!

[galzohar]

Have you tried playclaw? It had a free 30 day trial last time I checked. It succeeded at properly recording game sound, where FRAPS failed for me.

Edited by galzohar, 20 July 2010 - 06:37 PM.