MAKE A VIDEO OF YOUR GAME!

Yeah, i've been thinking of doing some videos showing some of the CBS i have been developing. My games page has just about everything except for videos.

... Fraps isn't free. There's always a watermark and there are some other restrictions unless you play the $37 or something like that registration fee to get the full version. No thanks.

The only other ones I can think of for recording off the top of my head are Camstudio (which is COMPLETELY free, with no gimmicks, but only works without lag on high-end computers and/or with small recording resolutions) and HyperCam (which needs to be bought, but there are ways...). Camtasia is also very nice, but it's $300, so...

I'm still looking for a nice free Mac one so I can at least do ONE of my LPs without having to get my laptop and Win XP (since that's not happening for a while).

I use Camstudio for video capture, Audacity for audio (sine Camstudio doesn't seem to want to), and VirtualDub for encoding (and editing if required). Its all free, can give great results, but can be a pain to set up.

Extremely Basic Tutorial on how to make Gameplay Videos!

This is an extremely basic tutorial on how to make a gameplay video! It doesn't have any fancy editing, tips, alternatives, or even screenshots. Some of those may come later.

What you need:
- Camstudio - Used to capture video and audio from the screen. Completely free.
- VitualDub - Used to edit and encode your video. Completely free.
- x264 vfw Codec - The video codec that we will be encoding with. Completely free.
- Radium MP3 Codec - What we'll be encoding the audio with. I couldn't find a download for it anywhere else besides the linked tutorial. Link includes a tutorial of some fancier features that aren't included here. And pictures.
- Free Space - Amount needed varies depending on length of video. Rule of thumb: More = better. Having 20+ gigs free is good. Is not completely free.

Capturing Video
This is where we need Camstudio. Open it up.

First thing to do is to set up its capturing options. Go to Options->Video Options. For the compressor select "Camstudio Lossless Codec" which should've been installed with Camstudio. Under Configure make sure LZO is selected and not GZIP.

Below Video Options is Cursor Options. If for some reason you want to leave the cursor on the game window make sure to go here and set it to Hide Cursor. Nobody wants to see your cursor in a video.

Next up is to record from your speakers, or "What you hear". Select Options->Record audio from speakers. It might give you an error which might mean Camstudio can't capture the audio. I have no idea how to fix it or what causes it. Hope that it is working if you get the message.

Now we have to set up the capture area. Go to Region->Fixed Region. This gives the option to select the area that it will capture and where the upper-left corner of the capture area is. Set Width/Height to the resolution of the game (generally 640x480, RMXP/VX run at that resolution and RM2k(3) in windowed mode scales up to that resolution). For Left/Top you want the upper-left corner of the game area. RPG Maker whatever opens the game at the center of the screen so you can use MATH to find the left/top corners.

Left: (Horizontal resolution - capture width) / 2
Top: (Vertical resolution - capture height) / 2 - ?

You have to take the top bar into account when getting the top. For Vista subtract 20. For XP subtract ???.

Open up the game that is going to be recorded and get a quick text video. Push the Big Red Button in Camstudio to start recording and switch to the game and play it a bit. Stop recording, specify a place to save the video, and when Camstudio is done encoding the video it'll open it up in some Camstudio player. Here's where you make sure everything is set up correctly. Make sure that the capture area is correct (capturing the entire game area, no out-of-game-window borders around) and that the video looks exactly like what you were doing with no signs of compression and that the audio was captured. If anything went wrong, go back and try to fix it (unless it was audio, that's beyond an Extremely Basic Tutorial).

Once the vidoe is ready to be captured and everything (including the game) is set up appropriately, push the Big Red Button, switch to the game, and let Camstudio do its thing while the game does its. Once you're done capturing, push the Big Blue Button to stop recording. Specify the save file and wait for it to encode.

Congrats! You now have a huge video file on your computer that would consume all your bandwith if you tried to upload it anywhere.


Editing the Video
Open up VirtualDub and select File->Open Video File. Open the newly made huge video file. The next job is to get rid of the redundant bits from the video. You can use the progress bar on the button, the Left and Right keys, and Page Up/Down keys to move frame to frame. Once you find the starting/ending frame of a selection to delete, push the Home/End key (Home for starting frame, End for ending frame). Once you have a block of video to delete, push the Delete key. Repeat until all unnessesary bits of the video are gone.


Encoding the Video
The last job is to make the video into a tiny version of itself. Tiny as in doesn't use a lot of disk space.

The pictures is what makes the video huge. There's a lot of them and they aren't compressed at all, so they'll be the first to be dealt with. Camstudio records at the fastest available FPS possible, which tends to be much more than the eye can see and that means there's a lot of redundant data. Select Video->Frame Rate (or push Ctrl-R). In the middle there's a bunch of options under "Frame Rate Convertion". Select the "Convert to FPS" option and convert it to 30 FPS. Its enough that it'll still look smooth but not have a mess of extra frames.

Next is selecting how to compress the frames in the video. Select Video-Compression (or push Ctrl-P). If it isn't avilable, make sure under Video->Full Stream Processing is selected. In the list on the left select "x264vfw - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec" and select configure. In the new window on the pull-down menu select "Multipass - 1st Pass". Below it there's the "Target birate (kbits/s)". Put 200 in the box; you can always reencode it at a highber bitrate if you don't like the result. Push OK, OK to go back to the main VirtualDub screen. Go to File->Save as AVI and save it as a different file than the original video. This will take a while depending on your computer.

The video isn't done yet, don't try to open it yet. Go back to Video->Compression->Configure to go back to where you selected "Multipass - 1st Pass". Change the option to "Multipass - Nth Pass". Push OK, OK. Now go to Audio->Full Processing Mode to turn it on. Now you can encode the audio so it doesn't take up a lot of space either. Go to Audio->Compression and select "MPEG Layer-3" from the left hand menu. If there's two select the one with a lot of options. Select one of the bitrates from the right hand menu that has the same frequency as what was captured (Camstudio usually captures at 22KHz, select one of those) and select a decent bitrate. Once done select File->Save as AVI again, and save over the last video you made on the 1st Pass. Wait again.

Once its done the video encoding is completed! Open up the video in your favorite vidoe playing program and enjoy, knowing that when its uploaded to Youtube the quality will turn into complete ass!

Protip: Upload to a non-shitty video playback site like Viddler instead.

Sample video: Video Link.