Capturing game footage: Difference between revisions

The most popular by far remains the so-called MPEG-4 and DivX/XviD/3ivX/whatever series. There are also a few decent Microsoft codecs, either preinstalled or coming with Windows Media Player updates (also using the AVI wrapper). WMV is produced by Windows Movie Maker: the "superior quality" setting can have lousy anti-aliasing for titles, but for raw in-game footage it's mostly OK, and it has a very convenient compression ratio. Apart from those, there is a "countable infinity" of 3rd-party codecs, more or less compatible with cross-platform editing of the recorded footage.

These programs will automatically record Oni's sound and video at the same time. Just make sure to close any other applications that play sounds before you record Oni, unless you're using Audio Hijack (below). If you don't want to pay for an A/V capture solution, the free alternative is OBS Studio under the "video-only" section used alongside an "audio-only" option, but it's much more difficult to get working.

OBS allows you to record video directly from Oni's OpenGL output, so you don't have to try to select the exact region of the game window. OBS is a bit tricky to set up, and requires Soundflower (below) to capture audio separately. The resulting recording is a compact FLV file, which might be inconvenient for editing purposes, but if you make sure that you record only what you want the user to see (chronologically and spatially), then you can simply feed the FLV directly into YouTube in order to publish it.

To capture Oni's video output directly, open Oni in windowed mode, then open OBS and remove any default entry in the Sources list. Click the '+' button and choose a Syphon source. In the Syphon source's properties, check the Inject box and click the Launch SyphonInject button. Choose Oni from the list of open applications and click Inject. Close the Syphon properties window and you should see Oni's game window at the top-left of the screen preview in the OBS window. Now click the Settings button, go to the Video section, and in the Base Resolution field type in the size of the Oni window. If you don't trim the video dimensions to Oni's resolution in this way, the final video will show Oni's gameplay footage as part of a larger blank region.

Simply choose File>New Screen Recording. You will be prompted to select a region of the screen to record, which still leaves you the challenge of precisely capturing the window's region (you may find OS X's Zoom feature, under the Accessibility preferences, helpful for making a precise selection). Like OBS, QT Player also will not record system sound without additional help; see below. If you use one of those methods to direct the game's sound output back into the computer, then make sure you also select this input source in QT Player's window by bringing up the pop-up menu using the arrow next to the Record button and choosing the right "Microphone" setting. You must also make sure that the volume slider is set properly, since it controls the volume of the <u>input</u> that it will record.

These programs will either record system sound separately, to be recombined with the captured video in your video editor of choice, or will divert system sound to a program that normally wouldn't record it (as seen under "Mac video-only recording" above). You will still have to make sure that your video capture program, if it supports audio input, has Soundflower selected as its source.

 

 

Note that you may not hear sound output from the game unless you have passthrough turned on. You can enable this by going to OS X's Audio MIDI Setup app. Here, you can choose the audio source you're going to use and check the "Thru" box on the "M" (or "Master") channel's line. Depending on the specific method you're using to get audio, if the output volume on your speakers is too high, you might get an echo that is captured in the audio recording. You should use headphones to prevent this.

The basic issue with most programs that record your system sound is that they record <u>all</u> the sound, including various sound effects from your mail client, instant messenger, etc. This program allows you to specifically record the audio from just Oni.

This app (actually called Soundflowerbed) lets you loop the audio from your system output to your system input. Once it's installed, open it and you will get a flower icon in your menu bar. From it, select "Built-in Output" under the "Soundflower (2ch)" section (the 64ch part doesn't matter). Then go to System Preferences>Sound, and under both the Input and Output tabs, choose "Soundflower (2ch)". This is the software equivalent of the audio cable loop method described below.

 

Now, passthrough is not available for Soundflower, so normally this means that you won't be able to hear Oni while recording, but you can jury-rig it using OS X's Audio MIDI Setup app by clicking the "+" button at the lower-left and creating a new "Multi-Output Device", then turning on both "Built-in Output" and "Soundflower (2ch)".

If your Mac has a [[wikipedia:Phone_connector_%28audio%29|minijack]] audio in port, just plug one end of an audio cable into the headphones jack and the other end into the microphone jack to loop your sound output around. Then, in System Preferences>Sound, select "Headphones" under the Output tab and "Line In" under the Input tab. Make sure you also select line-in as your audio source when recording video in a program that also records audio.