You should be using the MJPEG encoder, not raw footage. 85-90% quality at 20 megabit should be sufficient, and with 2-4 encoding threads should not seriously harm performance unless you've disabled HT for some reason. Raw footage has a minimal performance impact, if you have a disk with high enough sequential write performance to handle it. Mostly true. Raw 1080p 30fps video needs just over 237MiB/s of bandwidth. FRAPS will typically record at far higher than 20 megabit, and is nearly lossless quality (lossless RGB not selected) or actually lossless (lossless RGB selected). Plenty of programs make smaller files than FRAPS. Plenty of programs are less demanding on both CPU and disk that FRAPS. Plenty of programs look almost as good at lower bit rates. However, almost nothing actually looks as good as FRAPS at the same bitrate, and lossless FRAPS should look exactly like what you recorded. You can measure bit rate however you like. I converted to Mibibytes per second above, as this is how hard drive performance are typically measured. 1080p video is not single digit Mb/s, unless it's heavily compressed, in a lossy format. Raw 1080p 30fps video is over 1.99 gigabit (1920*1080*32*30 bits) per second. Most of these programs are not designed to produce video for upload. You should transcode everything to an appropriate format. Audio is generally a direct/lossless copy (prior to encode); there is little reason for less as the audio bit rate is trivial relative to the video.
Exactly what sort of storage is required for smooth recording at high bitrate / lossless? Would a single current generation 3TB drive at 7200 RPM or even 5900 RPM suffice? Is there any advantage to RAID, for instance? The drives I've looked at: Seagate ST3000DM001 (2 yr warranty but cheap), WD Black WD3003FZEX (5 yr warranty but expensive)
You know the game has built in video capture right? Edit your UserOptions.ini file to this: [VideoCapture] Resolution=3 Quality=100 Doing this it will output in 1024 x 576 and eat 850MB of HDD space per minute. Then throw it through Vegas or something and upscale it to 720p for youtube. You end up with video that looks like this: Sure some videos look better, but this ain't to shabby for an in game video capture. FRAPS is awesome but it will decimate your framerate. I can't FRAPS with ps2, it locks me at 30fps..
Biggest reason why Fraps record almost lossless is because compressing videos takes lots and lots of CPU(or GPU, depends altho CPU is way more accurate)power.
No single mechanical HDD is fast enough to record raw 1080p video at 30 fps (or more). I have four Scorpio Blacks (500GB, 7200rpm, laptop HDDs) in RAID 0 for a dedicated recording array and while this is solid for 1080p 30fps, I'd need at least two more to comfortably manage 60 fps video. Three recent desktop drives (rpm is less relevant than other factors, like areal density) is about the minimum you are looking at for raw video. Two very vast drives may also suffice, but would probably be slower and more expensive than three budget drives. I'd also recommend not using SSDs. They are faster, and you can find single SSDs that will be of more than sufficient speed, but writing huge amounts of data to an SSD frequently can degrade it far faster than normal use. You also need a very large SSD to record any significant amount of video. FRAPS video isn't raw video. FRAPS is always compressed, just at extremely high quality. Lossless FRAPS generally has about half the bitrate of raw video, but it's much more CPU dependent than just dumping raw captures to disk, as you've noted.
What kind of bandwidth you seeing with that setup? Right now I am running 2 WD 640GB AALS drives in RAID-0...
I tried FRAPS, but it dropped my fps to about 15. Now I use Dxtory with Lagarith Lossless Codec. Even when recording I still have about 40-50 FPS. I edit the videos with Sony Vegas. Also, to note, I have a separate 1TB HDD that I use only for recording videos. Here is a video I recently uploaded to youtube.
Looks pretty nice. Does this mean Lagarith Lossless, while not being particularly intensive on the CPU, is also not too intensive on the HDD? Because you have just one regular hard disk. Is the difference between Lagarith and true raw video so huge that raw video needs a RAID0 setup while Lagarith doesn't?
Switched from FRAPS to DxTory for performance reasons. The thing that makes it hard to switch to anything else after getting used to it, is however the multiple audio device recording. If you use VAC to define 3 or more audio devices (and use the "listen to this device" setting in the audio input device configuration to forward the sound from all virtual devices to your speakers/headphones) you can select what you want to include (multiple mic channels with/without different PTT keys, game audio, Team Speak, In game voice com) when editing your videos later on. Currently I record with 30FPS, low quality an compression disabled. File size gets kind of huge doing this so I batch encode all .avi files in the capture folder over night using ffmpeg. To make it easy to analyze the videos when out and about using mobile devices and such, I also add an additional track with merged audio of all separate channels during the automatic over night compression pass.
i tryed a lot of apps for doing so and yet the only one that doesnt kill my fps is coming from the Razer Game Booster. here is a little video i did some days ago while trying TR side (that have easy gun to use compared to the NC, but not as easy as the Vanu which are the easiest to control recoil)
this come from Jahshaka (my video editing tool) this is the first time i use this and im not a pro at editing video, i guess its from rendenring this to a 4/3 ratio from a 16/10 video. cause sadly i cant (or didnt find how to) keep the original ration of my video.
I actually have two 1TB, 7200 RPM HDDs. The second one I use just for raw game footage. A 30 second raw video, recorded with Dxtory, is about 970 MB. After rendering with Sony Vegas, the same 30 second video is about 45 MB, and is 1080p HD. I have a 25 minute raw footage video from PS2, and that is 50GB! I believe Lagarith has better compression, so when the video is rendered it still looks good. But I am far from an expert. I do know that trying to record videos to the same HDD that runs your Windows, or whatever, doesn't work well at all.
What is your processor ? If you have an Intel Ivy bridge or Haswell processor use mentioned earlier OBS https://obsproject.com than set in you bios iGFX enabled, install Intel GFX drivers and still use your dedicated GFX. This allows you to use Intel Quick Sync in OBS. IQS is something similar to NV Shadowplay - it allow to use integrated h264 codec in Intel processors. Using OBS in my example drops frame for about 1-2% while recording in 1080p@60fps high quality h264 profile
Thanks, i never actually thought of doing it like that. Although I don't have Vegas, I can probably do the same thing in Windows Moviemaker, maybe. You didn't mention the resolution you were playing in so I presume it was 1080p?
