6 replies to this topic

[Tonitrua]

This will be a beginners intro to easily and quickly producing video clips for bug reports and other posts here on the forum. My setup varies a bit from the standard software (most people will use programs such as Fraps to do screen recording) and while there's a bit of extra setup involved, I'll go into some of the benefits of this method later on in the guide.

 

The first thing you'll need is FFsplit, this is a totally free piece of software. Some of you may have heard of Xsplit before if you're into video game streaming, this is a free alternative version of that, without any of the trial limitations.

 

You can download FFsplit here:

http://www.ffsplit.com/download/

 

Once installed, you may also be prompted to install the ffmpeg encoder if you don't already have it, go ahead and click yes to that as well.

 

After you've got that installed there are only a few more steps to get into before you're ready to record, first you'll need to configure your default encoder profile (you can get there from Session -> Encoder, but it should pop up the first time you run FFsplit).

 

You can directly copy the settings I'm using, however if your computer hardware is not the latest and greatest you may want to lower some of the settings, Video Bitrate, Quality, and Resolution will have the biggest hit on performance and file size. For a more modest PC you might want to try 2000 kbps, 8, and 1280x720 respectively. Variable Bitrate mode is highly recommended. For smallest file size and less powerful PCs, you might want to lower the bitrate down to 1000 kbps and resolution of 640x480.

 

 

Next you'll want to go to the Output tab, and select Local Recording and File Format MP4 as well as the folder where you want your videos to go - and optionally the file naming scheme you want FFsplit to use.

 

 

 

Optional - at this stage you can also add one or more live streaming services as additional outputs, you can simultaneously stream and local record, or do just one or the other

 

Enter your Stream information as a new Output Profile

 

 

Then you can select which outputs you want to use

 

 

The next step once you reach this screen is to set up your canvas, I'll only go into basics for this guide, the rest should be pretty easy to figure out:

 

 

Underneath the Layer section you should press New, then select Capture Region (if you want to pick your entire screen, or a specific part of your screen) or Capture Window (if you just want to pick the RO2 window and let FFsplit figure out the rest)

 

 

Next, if you want to add any image overlays or block out your chat box, you can drag and drop an image file (I use a black rectangle to block my chat) directly into the Layer box, then you'll be able to position it on your canvas.

 

You're now ready to record, to begin all you need to do is press Start at the bottom right hand corner, and Stop when you're finished.

 

 

 

 

So what's the point of doing it this way?

 

The videos will be outputted to the folder you specified, ready to upload directly to youtube and already compressed down to a manageable size, you wont end up with unwieldy 200 mb files that take 30 minutes to upload, and you wont need to do any post-production to cover up your chatbox as FFsplit can do all of that for you. FFsplit will compress the video as it records, so a minute of video will only be a few megabytes in size, while programs like Fraps will generally save raw uncompressed video.

 

Some of the more advanced features of broadcasting software like FFsplit and Xsplit is the ability to do 'in camera' editing, or editing that is done live during the recording process. You can assign hotkeys to switch between images and live capture, assemble picture-in-picture recordings, add overlays and text to your video and more without actually needing to sit around and chop up your video in editing software - it's ready to upload as soon as you finish recording.

 

Here's an example of a bug report video I made featuring some of those techniques:

 

Waiting For Invite Bug

 

The purpose of all of this is so that you can easily and rapidly share relevant video clips during a discussion or in a bug report, with this process it can be a matter of seconds from the time you think of an idea to the time when you're pasting your video link into a ticket which makes for a very powerful way to communicate things that might otherwise be difficult to convey with just text.

Edited by Tonitrua, 04 October 2014 - 03:16 AM.

[SETSUNAf6w]

How to use OBS for recording and/or streaming

OBS, for Open Broadcasting Software, is a free software just like FFSplit that allows you to live stream, or simply record to hard drive for later uploading.

You can download it here.



1. First step is the boring configuration, hopefully you just need to do this once:











2. Scenes are for switching your recording from one window to the other. I suggest you create 1 scene for all games you plan on recording. you can switch from one scene to the other by clicking the scene name while you are streaming/recording without any interruptions.

3. Sources are for configuring the game window, add picture/text overlays... just right click the sources box to add a source. For RO2 I use the "window capture" source. "game capture" can also be used for fullscreen games, and will offer more performance in most FPS games.



4. Click "Preview streaming" to see what the result looks like. "Start recording" to record locally and upload to youtube later, and "Start steaming" to stream live in your configured account.

That should cover it. I think OBS might be a little more complicated than FFSplit. I'm not sure it has all the advanced features either. Use the tool you like to use, they both should be up to the task. I highly discourage using FRAPS because it does not encode the files, and doesn't have any options.

[Tonitrua]

Here's a quick tip I've recorded for improving framerate/performance while encoding/recording video during gameplay, this will work with all recording software but will mostly apply to newer multi-threaded/multi-core CPUs only. Most modern games cannot make good use of more than 1 or 2 cores, so we can greatly improve performance by offloading our video encoding to all cores except 0 and 1 - as encoding live video is much more demanding than a game like RO2. By splitting the processes up, we can give RO2 free reign over the first cores and let the remaining cores do all the heavy lifting without slowing RO2 down.

 

In the case of many higher end cpus, the cores listed here are ordered in pairs of hyperthreaded virtual cores, and not physical cores, so you'll see two times as many as your CPU actually has.

 

Edited by Tonitrua, 04 October 2014 - 01:23 AM.

[hxinen]

Sweet, thanks for your tutorials!

[5318130516144610857]

I only saw this thread today, thank you for these tutorials! It's really helpful for newbs like me. I'll look more deeply into the details later. :Thumbs up:

Edited by 5318130516144610857, 17 October 2014 - 09:29 AM.

[sunhelv01]

thanks for the guide!

[jenlove7]

thanks for the info