Need help recording in-game footage

2xslick

Well, up until this point Fraps has done a fair job recording footage for my dumb game reviews, but more modern games like Crysis or Hellgate simply suck up too many resources to both play and record. Even a few decade old games that rely mostly on the cpu have sapped my computer. To make matters worse, the latest version of Fraps seems to have a bug where it only records the first second of sound.

I would really like to know if it's possible to somehow play a game on one computer and record onto another through a lan connection. That sounds pretty outlandish to me though, so I'd settle for suggestions for other programs besides fraps. Any tips or comments would help greatly.

bombardier

If you're recording with fraps for a review, what resolution are you running the games at? You should be able to get away with a really low resolution like 640x480 even.

Recoil42

Do you have a video card with any other form of video-out than the main DVI connection? And a digital camcorder with firewire/usb?

Bam, solution.

Even better, if you have a card or device that does video capture from an external source, you can just jury-rig your secondary video out to a TIVO (and then back in at a later time), or straight from one PC to another.

2xslick

Unfortunately I don't have a digital camera. I record my videos in low resolutions but some games, like Fallout or Jagged Alliance 2 REALLY slow things down since they are much more cpu intensive than graphically. If there was a recording program out there that made use of dual core cpus, I wouldn't have a problem. But when I can run Crysis at a resonable pace with most of the pretties turned on, I get a little disheartened with the amount of slowdown when recording fifteen year old games.

rvcontre78

Hey, 2X, I was wondering if you could do a fellow YouTuber a small favor? I'm trying to do a game review in a similar vein as you. Since you know the pain of putting these things together do you think you could give me some feedback on mine? I've only got parts 1 and 2 up right now but have the rest of the first episode just in unedited form and am unsure if I should continue in the same style. I can tell from your videos that you're quite detail oriented so I'd just like to get your opinion. Thanks for any advice! Oh, and forgive the quality it's really the first time I've tried anything like this.

EDIT: Actually anyone is free to give advice. I'm just doing this for fun and because I have some extra time but if it's something people would like to see continue I'd certainly at least finish the Wing Commander episode off.

2xslick

I'd be happy to take a look tomorrow after work.

rvcontre78

Cool thanks, if I could just pick your brain sometime on how you build one of your reviews that would be awesome.