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A lot of people asked for a trailer for my game, because screenshots do not do it justice. I have tested PlayClaw, Fraps, CamStudio, VirtualDub, and some other minor tools; none have produced a viable result. My game uses vector graphics and is designed to run at 60fps, so lossy compression of a regular screen capture video destroys the graphical appeal.
How can I record gameplay without blurring my graphics and slowing down the framerate?
Make your game framerate independent, so you can set it to play with a fixed timestep. Play your game, record the input. Replay with fixed timestep, recorded input and write every frame to a file - since you replay with fixed timestep it doesn't matter how long writing out a frame takes. That way your source footage is uncompressed and you can decide on quality later without having to sacrifice speed, or having glitches because of a capture program. After that things like After Effects come in - at least you'll have crisp source material.
Edited to add: yeah, I know, making it framerate independent to play back at a fixed timestep is silly. Duh. Well, if it's framerate independent fraps might be less of a problem as well ;o) Games should be framerate independent anyhow!
This article on Pixel Prospector may be what you need:
How To Record And Edit Gameplay Videos
The game used in the video is NeonPlat 2, which also uses vector graphics.
The article covers everything, from capturing to editing.
For recording your game footage, you could try CamStudio, which is free. I find that it doesn't work with games in full screen mode though, so you'll want to run your game in a window.
As for making the actual trailer, you'll want some video editing software. There are several expensive commercial options, but if you're looking for something free, your choice is more limited. You could try Windows Movie Maker, or iMovie if you have a Mac, but the best free video editor I've found is Blender, more widely known as a 3D modeling and animation tool. The UI isn't intuitive, but if you spend some time to learn it, you'll also get your hands on a pretty good video editing tool.
My best experience is with Fraps but I used the full version (it seemed like a small one-time prize to pay for a great utility) which has no limits or logo. You can set the framerate beforehand, as David Young suggested in his comment. Like many video capturing tools, Fraps uses a low-cost compression during while it's recording which then can be converted to a higher compression format of your choice. For this i usually use VirtualDub.
I had no problem running Fraps behind my game at full speed (50fps in my case) getting high quality captures.
The key issue here is that capturing requires some performance, and you should always try to to it on the best computer available. More specifically, the capturing tool makes substantial and continual disk writes so choosing to store the file on a fast hard drive is key. Laptops often come with slower-access hard drives so this may affect performance a lot. Using a smaller frame size during the capture gives the hard drive an easier time and could keep your framerate up. Fraps allows you to set half-size frames.
In the case of Fraps, the quality of the final movie is greatly affected by what compression you use when converting the FPS1-encoded capture AVI to a distributable format. If you don't consider lossiness here it will of course not matter how well the capture tool performed.
I seriously don't think that the programs you mention are generally that bad, but need some configuring before they perform optimally together with you specific game.
Saving every individual frame in PNG is probably not a good idea if you already have problems with speed. It would likely eat more CPU and disk time because it would need every frame to be stored with all its information. When encoding and storing a movie many encoders use a number of key-frames which are complete and let successive frames after them be defined as the difference between one frame an the next. This can be a huge reduction in size but it does not let you take out one frame and read it without the key-frame.
Not only will the size of each frame be larger if you try to dump them to separate files, but you will also get an overhead from the file access itself. This is because you must open a new file handle for every frame instead of holding on to and streaming to one file like in the movie case.
Your best bet is still with recording a lossless movie and extracting the frames from it, OR to capture a finite number of frames like screen-shots during play.
Devices like these are super cheap, and I bet you can get a hold of a second computer to run it on (it doesn't need anything special) so you can capture your game from your game running machine (be sure to have a computer with S-Video out for this cheap version). There is also something like this for higher quality capture - http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/ but requires USB 3 and is more expensive, but you can capture HDMI and higher resolution. I really see no better option than either of these two.
I've used Windows Media Encoder a couple of times to record videos of my games and tools - it's free and produdes good quality videos.
Although, I've wondered the same question too, because recording a video is only half the process (if that). The other half is editing it, adding effects, etc. Windows Movie Maker kinda works but it's fairly simplistic... and crashy.
because recording a video is only half the process Good point i am aswell wondering that as stated on the comment of the initial question...
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Basically, the issues were:
Quality on a vector-based game. CPU amount taken. I/O bottleneck.
What software to use for editing.
To solve quality, I needed a lossless codec, or no compression. The lesser the compression, the more I would have I/O problems, but the more CPU I took, the more I would have CPU problems (doh).
The solution, was use a RamDrive to solve the I/O bottleneck, thus now I was left mostly with how much CPU I wanted to take (ie: the smallest as possible). Thus theoretically the best would be no compression at all, but no compression at all on a ramdrive hit space available problems...
So I researched, and found that the fastest lossless codec (don't matter how much it actually compress), and it was CamStudio Lossless
The software I used, was VirtualDub (CamStudio itself cannot capture the window contents, it capture the entire window, thus wasting space).
Now editing software: Well, noone here gave a good awnser, and neither I will do, but other lists can be found in other places.
You might want to try vnc2flv, but it won't do audio itself (you can add in an audio track later though). Not sure if your CPU will hate you trying to do realtime FLV encoding alongside a running game though.
It probably sounds obvious, but... Don't full-screen your game while you're recording the video otherwise it will 'obviously' be incredibly slow because it captures your screen resolution. I'm guessing this is what you're being bit by.
FRAPS will take care of this just fine. So will many others but I found FRAPS the most convenient and easiest to use.
I used FRAPS to record and Windows Movie Maker to put together some maps I made in Starcraft II -- example.
Here's what I've done in the past to make video-only trailers:
the best way is make your game self recordable. Easy way is just save every frame with fixed framerate. With SSD it takes "no" time. Harder way is to make your own "fraps". If You do it. You can directly communicate with your game.
I've made a trailer recently for my game. I was somewhat helped by the engine, that allows for screenshots fast enough to actually animate. What I did:
Actually capturing the images directly meant that I could not get the sounds from the game, but got a much better quality of images. Adding some music more than made up for it.
If you have two PCs use skype's screen sharing feature. Play the game in one PC then use the other to capture the video. This way you won't affect your game and resources won't be scarce for the video capture program.
Conversely you can buy a video capture card for your PC.
