I’m looking for some reliable, hopefully inexpensive options for recording his gaming sessions (with audio commentary) offline, then uploading them to YouTube…
A friend recommended Fraps…which hasn’t been updated in 4 years, with no new news. I emailed their support address and got a replay indicating that they are working on a newer release to support Win8 and Win10 (moot for me, since I’m running Win7).
I have an nVidia card, but it’s not compatible with the GeForce Experience recording software.
He’s looking at doing recordings of Terraria, Undertale, and Minecraft.
OBS can be annoying to use, but it works fine, and has been consistent on the rare occasions I’ve needed to use it.
It can cover audio, but… If he’s looking to be a YouTuber, he’s going to want a quality microphone. Might be a good birthday/Christmas gift to go with. Nobody wants to watch a YouTube video with scratchy, unintelligible audio over it.
He’s 10, so simple would probably be better as far as the software goes. For the time being he’ll be using my gaming headset (Sennheiser’s w/mic). To start, it’s really just for him to post some videos for his friends to watch. The entire account/channel is private at this time.
OBS has tons of guides to help you with the settings, and since you are just recording, you do not need to worry about bitrate issues.Then, win7 should still have windows movie maker, which can be used to edit the videos. iirc, it even uploads the final vid to yt.
I use OBS for streaming and occasional videos for youtube. It works well, but can take some time setting it up.
You can set different “scenes”. This will enable you to create an intro and outro scene. With simple hot keys you can then switch to them. Will add a bit extra too his video’s and reduces the need to edit afterwards. So you can upload it straight away without hassle.
For intro/outro screen a photo editing program is helpful. There are free alternatives like GIMP photoediting with features close to Photoshop from adobe. Better too try and create something yourself. Or use Stock / Copyright free images from the internet. If you don’t…and your son happens to make it big…he can get copyright strikes.
My advice is too always look into the pictures and background music your using for those legal issues.
A good PC is of course needed. the processor will need to encode the recording and the hard drive has to store it. Meaning that the game should not be played from the same hard drive that you’ll be recording too. And you need to make sure that the processor is strong enough to run the game and still have 25-30% resources left for the encoding. I always have taskmanager open to keep an eye on CPU usage to make adjustments where needed. It is a different matter to have a stream output at 1280x720 30frames per second or record locally at full screen 60fps. The second is much more taxing.
And of course the microphone. As starters a lot will do. I’m still using the build in mic from a logitech HD webcam. As long as it picks up the voice clear enough you can use the OBS sound mixer to add filters and noise gates to reduce background noise. In the future you can always invest in better microphone and soundboards if applicable.
Fraps is horrible for recording footage. Used it in the past. It encodes 5minutes into 4gb segments. OBS records 1 hour in less then 600mb. Fraps has artifacting while OBS does not when setup properly. Frap isn’t even the go to program for taking screenshots anymore either. Lots better alternatives for that.
Might be, but considering silverhand’s desire for something simple and cheap, it seems to fit. It’s not a bad thing if “you don’t know any better”, if it works, it works.
If they really get into it, then they’ll go looking for better.
in options you setup the resolution and fps you want to stream/record in.
give it a location where too store the recording and in which format.
add a scene.
add game capture or desktop capture
add audio capture device for the microphone
play a little with the volume mixer slider to get the game sound and voice sound in the balance you want
press start and go
its not that difficult. you don’t have to worry about kilobytes and such as with streaming.
Thanks for all the replies, folks. Much appreciated. I’ll spend some time looking into what you’ve provided. Hopefully I’ll have a plan in place by the weekend.
if you need more help / advice don’t hesitate to ask
@ibugsy
I don’t mind options. just not a fan when those options are inferior. i don’t dismiss them. i just mentioned why they’re inferior. as i did with fraps. bandicam is fairly similar with the annoyances.
is not that. This is someone expressing their disdain for an application and those that use it. Nice.
When I used FRAPs, I was able to install it and use it. I didn’t have to use a tutorial at all. I was up and running in 5 - 10 minutes. That was downloading and installing it.
If I was going to be a professional YouTuber, then I’d need to look at other options, but for what I was/am doing with it, FRAPs works just fine. Sometimes you just need an easy to use, out of the box tool.
Could OBS do that? I guess so, I haven’t used it. Did I denigrate the software or those using it? No.
Having played with OBS Studio, I would recommend using it. It has a lot of options, but you can get by with just the basics and learn as you need or want to learn about the other options.
The default installation and the settings wizard worked great, even though the settings wizard is in beta (you get notified).
For just capturing game play for later rendering and uploading to YouTube, it seems the best option unless you aren’t technology patient.
I just had to change the output format because my video editing software didn’t support the one chosen.
I didn’t see an option to split the output file after a set size. You can do that in Fraps.
