Recording Source Engine In Game Footage

So I'm wondering, what's the best way for me to capture some ingame footage (both video and audio - insync) of say Half-Life 2 Deathmatch in an avi or mp4 format or something along those lines?

Is there any freeware software I can download to do the trick without any water marks or timelimits or quality restrictions?

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Aaron's Stuff

unless you've got a NASA network running your games don't use anything except the demo recording function in console. You can capture frames later during playback.

Here's a guide to producing a slick finished product ( this works very well ), I'm sure there are a lot of steps you can skip / eliminate to get you what you want:

http://www.hl2dm-university.com/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=917

It looks like he's assuming the use of Vegas or Premiere, but for sure there are knockoff freeware or shareware likenesses out there. I did a quick video using Fraps and Windows Moviemaker

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUtqwfXW5P8

you can see the watermark there but I didnt care

if you get fraps, there is a demo but it's pretty low quality capture, the full version captures quite well and it's easy to use

requires very little editing to create the finished product

Thanks for the advice guys. I tried fraps before but couldn't get it working, second time lucky maybe?

As for that guide, whoa, looks good but I don't think I could get through that in one sitting.

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Aaron's Stuff

Let's just say, I never even knew there was any other program than fraps for that, so trying to find anything better might be a futile adventure... Isn't it the standard? I'd give it a second try, there must be a ton of googleable tutorials.

HaHa, I like that word: "Googleable" -That's my new word of the Month!

/aside

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Please, avoid fraps unless you have a supercomputer, but it honestly depends on whether or not you want to showcase graphics, or gameplay.
(didn't bother reading the first post)
If graphics, then fraps is a big fat "No", as previously stated if you don't have a nasa computer.
If you just want gameplay, i still advice against fraps, i recommend gamecam, as unlike fraps, it does not use a gig of space for one second of footage, seeing as you use codec's to compress the video, it does not bring your fps down by 10, and overall IMO it has more options. (you can zoom while recording ect)

Should've posted a warning: Big wall of text.

I have not heard of this gamecam you speak of, I will have to look into this

Game Cam eh? I'll look into that!

"yodalman" said:
it honestly depends on whether or not you want to showcase graphics, or gameplay.

Well both really. I'd like to make documentaries of some of my projects in this fashion or similar for my website. It's something I've thought about for a while.

Nice to see you on Snarkpit yodalman!

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Aaron's Stuff

That video is probably recorded with a hardware recording device (AKA: send a video signal to a TV tuner card). Because as far as I know, halo 3 is only for Xbox 360 which, at most, can output in composite (HD).

I did have an idea about letting people upload videos of gameplay on their maps, but a bit unsure on what sort of quality levels would be decent and whether it would be worthwhile or not.

That video is probably recorded with a hardware recording device (AKA: send a video signal to a TV tuner card)

Or you can get a dvd recorder (hope this information is correct), hook it up to your tv and record it through that, but you know, that won't exactly apply to a pc, unless you can hook it up to the pc of course.

omegaslayer said:
That video is probably recorded with a hardware recording device (AKA: send a video signal to a TV tuner card). Because as far as I know, halo 3 is only for Xbox 360 which, at most, can output in composite (HD).

Yeah, they use a pc capture card I think.

"larchy" said:
I did have an idea about letting people upload videos of gameplay on their maps, but a bit unsure on what sort of quality levels would be decent and whether it would be worthwhile or not.

Ooo interesting, although I doubt many people would use it.

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Aaron's Stuff

Recorded some footage : Alright so sorry yodalman, I installed Game Cam but it wanted to install a bunch of codecs and a few other things so that was off putting.

I was looking into Fraps and I managed to get a registered copy off one of my school teachers. So I recorded some ingame footage with Fraps but the audio wasn't in sync with the video. At the start of the video it was ok, but as the video progresses furthur the audio lags behind the video more. After around 8 minutes of video the audio was behind probably about 10 seconds.

After a bit of research, it turns out that this is a very common problem. However, I came across a really great tool (YAAI) and that made it really easy to fix the audio sync problem, so easily It didn't bother me any more that the audio was out of sync, it's sort of satisfying I guess spending 30-40 seconds fixing it up!

Once I fixed the audio sync problem, I opened it up in Windows Movie Maker and saved it as a wmv because the avi that Fraps spat out was 1.5gb for a 640x480 video, 24 fps, with stereo audio and roughly 8 minutes long. Saving it in the wmv format resulted in a little visual quality loss but the video file ended up to be 80mb.

I would have used Virtual Dub for this last process but Windows Movie Maker allowed me to add fades at the beginning and end of the film!

So the steps:

1. Record game footage in Fraps.
2. Fix audio out of sync with YAAI.
3. Open raw avi in Windows Movie Maker and save as a "Large High Quality Video", add video effects and other editing here if needed.

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Aaron's Stuff