screenshot/vid capture question

[KINGDarkyDizzle]

What is everybody using for BF3? FRAPS the best way to go? Anything else out there better?

[jimykx]

Re: screenshot/vid capture question

From my massive research, between freewares like playclaw, xfire etc.. and paying ones like fraps, i came to the conclusion that the best software to record is Dxtory, though it is also kind of expensive :/ . Fraps is simple to use but old and in my opinion overvalued. Dxtory is awesome, it has way more features than fraps does and it's impact on the game fps is way lower

[Shawn Zipay]

Re: screenshot/vid capture question

I tried Dxtory a couple of months back and either something was messed up on my end or the software just wasn't that great. The test recordings I made ended up being low quality messes and the framerate hit was worse than when I use FRAPS.

Granted this was BEFORE my new system but even still, it was on a Q6600 CPU and 6GB of RAM. The hit should not have been as massive as it was for the crap quality it produced. So far I'm sticking with FRAPS.

[KINGDarkyDizzle]

Re: screenshot/vid capture question

hmmmm never heard of Dxtory. I will have to try it just because now. lol I have used FRAPS and had a legit copy on my old rig. No longer have it so I dl'd a copy and it wont work or some reason now.


**edit**

Ok so I dl'd Dxtory but nothing seems to be working. I hit F10,F11,F12 for high speed screen,screen,movie and nothing ever happens. Now i'm trying this with just this window open. The game shouldnt have to be running for a 3rd party capture program to work correct? This is the same issue I had with FRAPS earlier.

[Anarchy1]

Re: screenshot/vid capture question

I had the exact same experience Zips. FRAPS doesn't make me lag too bad to be honest (recording full screen 1920x1200 30 FPS), but the file sizes are just massive. The small amount of video I recorded to make that Frostbite features video took up 58 GB, and that's not including the video that I trashed. But the file size is understandable - you get uncompressed full resolution video.

I've been reading a lot recently about how much better Dxtory is than FRAPS and how it causes almost no FPS drop and the file sizes are small. Obviously, I was very interested and obtained the software. I found a few guides that talked about the optimal video settings and I set it up as such. What really interested me was all the settings I could use to make the video recording better, such as the multicore processing and the multi-GPU boost. I set it up to record 30 FPS, 1920x1200 with the Dxtory codec on high quality. When in game and tried to record. My FPS dropped to about 3, the video was recording at about 10 FPS, and when I went to play it, the file size was quite a few GB in size (the video was about 20 seconds). I tried then to adjust some of the settings to see if I was asking too much. I dropped the resolution to 1280x720 and changed the Dxtory codec to low quality. Tried again. The exact same results. I dropped the resolution even more and changed the codec to the Divx compressor. I got smaller file sizes (25 MB/min about), but again, the FPS hit was terrible. Plus the program got unresponsive and Dxtory would not stop recording and I had to forcefully shut down BF3.

And all these videos? Decent quality when standing still, but everything got extremely blurry when I started moving. Not as good as FRAPS.

So jimy, I'm obviously doing something wrong. What are your settings?

[Shawn Zipay]

Re: screenshot/vid capture question

hmmmm never heard of Dxtory. I will have to try it just because now. lol I have used FRAPS and had a legit copy on my old rig. No longer have it so I dl'd a copy and it wont work or some reason now.


**edit**

Ok so I dl'd Dxtory but nothing seems to be working. I hit F10,F11,F12 for high speed screen,screen,movie and nothing ever happens. Now i'm trying this with just this window open. The game shouldnt have to be running for a 3rd party capture program to work correct? This is the same issue I had with FRAPS earlier.

If I recall correctly you have to let the program discover the app or something. It doesn't "just work" like FRAPS, you have to set up a profile on the game/app you have open.

Anarchy: That's essentially the same thing I ran into. The blur was just horrendous. I'm willing to try it again but I'm not holding out much hope.

[Anarchy1]

Re: screenshot/vid capture question

Yeah, I had to load BF3 for it to detect it. After that I could change the settings specifically for BF3, or I think you can leave them alone and let them be the same as default.

Dxtory only records OpenGL or DirectX sources, so you aren't going to be able to record your desktop or anything other than basically games.

[KINGDarkyDizzle]

Re: screenshot/vid capture question

Yeah, I had to load BF3 for it to detect it. After that I could change the settings specifically for BF3, or I think you can leave them alone and let them be the same as default.

Dxtory only records OpenGL or DirectX sources, so you aren't going to be able to record your desktop or anything other than basically games.

ah ok makes sense then. Guess I will give it a go now then. Thanks guys.

[KINGDarkyDizzle]

Re: screenshot/vid capture question

Well screenshots work perfect. While taking video in game, for some odd reason my FPS increases lol. But watching the playback its choppy as hell. So i'm gonna have to tweak the settings a bit.

[signa]

Re: screenshot/vid capture question

I'm using MSI Afterburner. It's similar to fraps but no lag. works great. It also has a lot of video card overclock stuff in the menu, but you can ignore that and just use the recording features.