Screen Captures and Recording of Games?

[Battle Rattle]

Two part question:
1) What is the best way to do screen captures during a game of Civ ( I run full screen)
2) Is there a way to record a game for playback and eval?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

It's not an easy thing to do, and there are lots of screen capture options out there.

I use cam studio with a divx codec...1 pass 12000 bitrate with 40 frames/second as of my let's play Japan and more recent...it works well enough. A lot of people recommend FRAPS too.

Eval is another thing entirely, although given how critical my viewers are of my videos, I'm sure you'll get some .

 

[Wardancing]

As was mentioned before me... Fraps would be a good candidate. Not sure how well Fraps video recording and civ5 (along with steam) will handle on your system, but a good rule of thumb would be to have the recorded files being saved to a seperate harddrive than the game (if its possible).

But i really like the way fraps handles screenshots. It will create them when you press the screenshot button and save them into a folder of your choosing, and iirc, it will name them by the date/time.

The harder manual way would be to, print screen, open MS paint, paste, save. But, this will have to be done per screenshot, as pressing printscreen overwrites the last one.

You could also check out xfire, i hear it has video/screenshot capabilities.

Good luck.

 

[Maniacal]

Fraps is good and lightweight (when I last used it), I use X-Fire now (though you have to be online) as it comes up after I exit (or minimize) my game with the shots I took, where I can delete or upload them, The free webhosting is awesome. Before that I used photobucket, imageshack just annoys me with all tis ads.

 

[MouseyPounds]

But i really like the way fraps handles screenshots. It will create them when you press the screenshot button and save them into a folder of your choosing, and iirc, it will name them by the date/time.

The harder manual way would be to, print screen, open MS paint, paste, save. But, this will have to be done per screenshot, as pressing printscreen overwrites the last one.

You don't have to use a 3rd party program or copy & paste to MSPaint for simple screenshots. If you hit the PrintScreen key while Civ5 is running the game saves the screenshot in .tga format to the civ documents folder. Path would be something like <Documents>/My Games/Sid Meier's Civilization 5/ScreenShots and they are named consecutively starting with Civ5Screen0000.tga. All you have to do is convert them to another format if you plan on posting online and lots of free/cheap image editors (e.g. Gimp) will handle that fine.

 

[Slynky333]

You don't have to use a 3rd party program or copy & paste to MSPaint for simple screenshots. If you hit the PrintScreen key while Civ5 is running the game saves the screenshot in .tga format to the civ documents folder. Path would be something like <Documents>/My Games/Sid Meier's Civilization 5/ScreenShots and they are named consecutively starting with Civ5Screen0000.tga. All you have to do is convert them to another format if you plan on posting online and lots of free/cheap image editors (e.g. Gimp) will handle that fine.

Thanks for the help! Never excited about adding (yet another) utility when I can get it done with the OS.

 

[hardcore_gamer]

I used FRAPS to record Civ 5 as you can see here. It works just fine, just make sure you record the videos with the recording setting set at "half size" and then process the videos with Windows Movie maker or some editing program, unless you mind your hard drive becoming full in an instant. Raw FRAPS recordings can be very large in size.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I used FRAPS to record Civ 5 as you can see here. It works just fine, just make sure you record the videos with the recording setting set at "half size" and then process the videos with Windows Movie maker or some editing program, unless you mind your hard drive becoming full in an instant. Raw FRAPS recordings can be very large in size.

Cam Studio Example

The link I'm pasting is my most recent video (at least as of upload), using the camstudio settings I highlighted in the second post of this thread. A couple things:

1. Cam studio is free, open source, and doesn't need to app-hook, you can literally (and simply) just record anything box-size or full screen.
2. On YouTube HD (if you bring up the box and switch it to 720p), the picture is actually *more* clear than your fraps example!
3. I am using a lossy codec, but balancing it with a high bitrate for the quality. This creates 15 minute videos ~500 mb. For me, that has the advantages of a) youtube will actually allow that file size as a standard upload (it converts them to mp4 post upload) and b) I retain quality and don't have to do any post-editing at all unless I run too long and split videos. For me, this represents a reasonably strong-quality compromise.

The reason your video quality is lower than mine despite you using what most consider superior software is your settings. I'd imagine you're using a codec unique to FRAPS - probably a lossless one for max quality but big filesizes. However, by selecting "half-size" you are compromising on quality significantly - far more than I am via using a lossy (but advanced) codec like divx (there are alternatives, but divx seems to work nicely for me with camstudio). IMO you should record segments in full-size then convert the files to a more reasonable size (that is what I did when I ran with xfire for a bit). As it stands right now, youtube isn't letting you put videos above 480p and that makes your screen considerably less crisp!

 

[hardcore_gamer]

1. Cam studio is free, open source, and doesn't need to app-hook, you can literally (and simply) just record anything box-size or full screen.
2. On YouTube HD (if you bring up the box and switch it to 720p), the picture is actually *more* clear than your fraps example!
3. I am using a lossy codec, but balancing it with a high bitrate for the quality. This creates 15 minute videos ~500 mb. For me, that has the advantages of a) youtube will actually allow that file size as a standard upload (it converts them to mp4 post upload) and b) I retain quality and don't have to do any post-editing at all unless I run too long and split videos. For me, this represents a reasonably strong-quality compromise.

The reason your video quality is lower than mine despite you using what most consider superior software is your settings. I'd imagine you're using a codec unique to FRAPS - probably a lossless one for max quality but big filesizes. However, by selecting "half-size" you are compromising on quality significantly - far more than I am via using a lossy (but advanced) codec like divx (there are alternatives, but divx seems to work nicely for me with camstudio). IMO you should record segments in full-size then convert the files to a more reasonable size (that is what I did when I ran with xfire for a bit). As it stands right now, youtube isn't letting you put videos above 480p and that makes your screen considerably less crisp!

No, the video is of lower quality because I decreased it on purpose after saving it in windows movie maker to make the file size smaller. Fraps records videos in high quality. And how is 500 MB a "reasonable" file size for a 15 min clip?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

No, the video is of lower quality because I decreased it on purpose after saving it in windows movie maker to make the file size smaller. Fraps records videos in high quality. And how is 500 MB a "reasonable" file size for a 15 min clip?

Lossless codecs like xfire's or ANY screencap software would be quite a few gigs @ 15 min. I've seen a 10 minute file be close to 10 GB. 500 MB is a LOT less than that! If the end filesize is smaller than numerous gigs, it is *not* a lossless codec.

The reason I don't mind 500 mb is that youtube accepts it and it uploads with OK speed...generally 30-40 min with my connection. The files don't plug up my hard drive and easily upload overnight, even if I have a TON of them.

Anyway, no matter what you say, you *are* taking a quality hit when you record @ "half screen". This is because you are taking a smaller resolution image and blowing it back up to screen size for formats like youtube. Even if the original picture is QUITE good in quality, it is hard for the end-file to look good that way. What's the point of recording high-quality video if you just drop that quality pre-upload?

There's no reason you can't pick an HD profile in moviemaker to still get filesizes around/under 100 MB or so, either. If you compare the end product in our links, the results are pretty obvious. People might prefer the hex grid/yields off as in your video, but there is no denying that at 720p, the text in my uploads is 100% legible, while with yours @480p that is not always the case. Lossy codecs are not always a bad thing if the settings are tuned properly.

If you pick a better arrangement in FRAPS and/OR a better moviemaker conversion you should be able to get a more crisp picture...but none of that is my point. My point is to OP, which is that he can get videos of pretty good quality with cam studio (I can easily bump the quality on my videos too, especially if I had a 16:9 monitor with a better resolution). If he's not sure he wants to do screen capture very often, cam studio s probably a superior option for him, even if FRAPS is the better overall option for game recording.