Capturing game footage
An overview of the different methods available for recording Oni footage on Windows and on Macs.
Ctrl+Shift+L
This Dev Mode hotkey dumps every frame rendered by Oni to the Oni folder, in BMP format. Some frames may be skipped due to lag in normal conditions, but with draw_every_frame=1 you effectively record perfectly lag-free ingame footage at 60fps, regardless of the apparent lag (draw_every_frame_multiple=2 gives you 30 fps, draw_every_frame_multiple=3 gives you 20 fps, etc). You can tell Oni to reduce the size of screenshots by 2, 4, etc, by setting gs_screen_shot_reduce to 1, 2, etc. Authoring a video from individual frames can be more or less troublesome depending on the tools at your disposal, but it's definitely possible and you won't run into any codec problem that way.
- Pros
- Straightforward, lossless, and universally portable. BMPs can be zipped, PNG-compressed or GIF-animated prior to sharing.
- Cons
- Requires a lot of space in the Oni folder, about 1 MB per frame at 640x480x32bit. Just do the math before you record...
On Windows
Codecs
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 antialiasing for titles, but for raw ingame 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.
FRAPS
- Pros
- The main limitations for writing uncompressed video at large resolutions are CPU and HDD usage, and FRAPS somehow manages to get fast enough HDD access and doesn't steal much CPU time from Oni either (of course this depends on your CPU and HDD).
- Cons
- FRAPS is shareware: the demo version displays a watermark and stops recording after 30 seconds.
- The FRAPS codec is proprietary and Windows-only, so one can't play back the video in Mac OS without having installed Perian. (This codec extension is still buggy in its ability to handle FRAPS video due to a glitch in the underlying libraries, but it may be fixed soon.)
Taksi
A freeware, open-source counterpart to FRAPS
- Pros
- Freeware: no watermark, unlimited recording length, compatibility with every video codec installed
- Cons
- Doesn't record sound (but this isn't all that relevant for elaborate music videos anyway)
- May create "empty" ranges at the start of the video, if the recording is not the first in the Taksi session.
- Doesn't reliably detect Oni as an application window. This is fixed by using Rossy's OniUSB.
CamStudio
This is actually a tool intended for capturing video tutorials, not specifically tailored for video games, but it can yield decent results (depending on the codec, HDD and CPU of course). Like Taksi, is can use pretty much every video codec available system-wide. Unlike Taksi or FRAPS, it can't hook a specific application, and instead records a specific portion of the desktop. Unlike Taksi, it can record sound.
On the Mac
Snapz Pro
Snapz Pro comes in two flavors, still-screenshots-only and video-recording-capable. Of course, a basic -Shift-3 would take a screenshot without Snapz Pro, so odds are you need the video version of Snapz Pro ($69) or nothing at all. Up until recently a buggy app on Intel OS X machines, but recently improved. This is the OG of screen captures on the Mac.
ScreenRecord
This boringly-named product is simple but performs well on modern Macs ($25).
iShowU
This pervertedly-named program also handles screen captures, but it's a lesser-known app ($20).