Capturing game footage: Difference between revisions

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.

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.

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, if you want to have passthrough audio, so that you can actually hear the game while playing and recording it, you need to go an extra mile. First, plug in some headphones. Then, open OS X's Audio MIDI Setup app (which can be reached by choosing Soundflowerbed's "Audio Setup…" menu item), click the "+" button at the lower-left, and create a new "Multi-Output Device", then check the "Use" box for both "Built-in Output" and "Soundflower (2ch)". Then, expand the Multi-Output Device item in the left-hand list of the window and select the Built-in Output sub-item. You'll want to turn the volume for channels 1 and 2 down to -33dB or lower in order not to blow your ears out (OS X doesn't automatically dampen the volume for headphones when they are part of a multi-output device). Note that once you get started, you won't simply be able to adjust the headphones' volume from the speaker icon in your menu bar, because OS X is not comfortable setting the volume for multiple devices at once. Finally, go back into System Preferences>Sound, under the Output tab, and choose "Multi-Output Device" instead of "Soundflower (2ch)".