How to record gameplay videos

Discussion in 'Suggestions and Feedback Archive' started by nineko, Feb 9, 2014.

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  1. nineko

    nineko I am the Holy Cat Member

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    So, since this question pops up every other day, let's gather all the relevant information in a single place.


    After the issue with my suggestions concerning screenshots and PNG files, let me start with something important.

    DISCLAIMER: THE CONTENTS OF THIS TUTORIAL ARE SUGGESTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ONLY. THERE ARE NINE THOUSANDS AND ONE OTHER WAYS TO DO THE SAME THINGS, WHICH ARE PROBABLY BETTER. PLEASE READ THIS TOPIC AND FEEL FREE TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT AFTERWARDS.


    Now, let's get started.


    First of all, get Gens ReRecording. What is it? It's a particular branch of the regular Gens emulator, developed by fellow Sonic fan Upthorn and other people from the TASvideos community; in fact, the primary goal of Gens ReRecording is to provide Tool-Assist capabilities, but that's not the main thing we're interested into right now. What matters most is that Gens ReRecording has a built-in AVI dumper, which (unlike Kega's) can output to any video codec you have installed (as long as it is supported by the AVI container).


    The ReRecording capabilities, however, can still be handy even if you're not going to record a TAS. While it's entirely possible to use a generic screen recorder program (e.g. Camtasia Studio) and record a gameplay video with that, there is a number of problems with that solution; in particular, on slow computers, the frame rate will be everything but constant, to the point that simply playing the game will become impossible. Not to mention that some people like to keep their emulator window maximised (ugh), even on 16:9 monitors (please kill me now). But hey, remember, you're free to do that, your computer, your rules, no warnings, I'll just turn in the other direction to vomit while nobody can see me.


    So, as I was saying, ReRecording capabilities. They allow you to record an "input file" which merely contains your keypresses frame by frame, in this way you can normally play with no additional lag whatsoever (if your computer slows down while creating the input file, well, it's time for you to throw away your 80286 and consider to upgrade it a bit), and replay said input file afterwards, while dumping to AVI; in this way, even if your computer takes 10 minutes to dump a single AVI frame, it won't concern your gaming abilities as the input file will be processed regularly and the AVI file will be fine.


    Step 0: load a ROM of your choice :U


    Also, make sure that the Sound options are like these:

    [​IMG]


    Despite what I said before, keeping "PSG High Quality" enabled will make me want to permaban you, so disable that.


    Also not seen in the image but I cba to take a screenshot of that, the rate should be 44100.


    Step 1: Tools > Movie > Record New Movie

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]


    Remember, you're not recording the actual AVI yet. In this case, "movie" refers to the input file. You can give it a meaningful filename (in case you want to record more than one gameplay session or keep them for reference or something). You can also record "from now", this is opposed to the default behaviour which records from the beginning (not checking that checkbox will result into a game reset before Gens starts recording your input). That's not useful for TASvideos since 99% of their videos start from the beginning, but you can use that to skip the early levels or the level select sequence in case you want to go straight to a later level.


    Step 2: play. Yes, just play. You can play like you always do, and forget that it's recording your input. You can, however, take advantage of the TASing features. Explaining you how to create a full blown TAS is beyond the scope of this tutorial, but let me just say this: you know how you can use savestates with the F5/F6/F7/F8 keys in both Gens and Fusion? Well, you can do that here, too, with the additional bonus that your input file will automatically follow the latest "revision" of what you're doing. Let me explain. Say you're playing, and you die. Luckily you made a savestate (with F5) at the beginning of the level, so you can press F8 and play it again. In a normal emulator, nothing else happens; in Gens ReRecording, your input file will ignore the gameplay which led you to the death, resuming from the place where you made the savestate (hence the ReRecording name). In this way you can play and replay a level or even a single section until you make sure it turns out like you want. Don't even get me started on the slow motion and frame advance features, if you want to know more about TASes, go to TASvideos and document yourselves (warning: that place is hell on Earth, they can ban you just because you said "hello", I strongly advise you not to go on their forums, under any circumstance whatsoever).


    Anyway. Once you're done with your gameplay, just select Tools > Movie > Stop Movie.


    Step 3: dump the AVI. Ok so your input file turned out well. It's time to make an AVI out of it.


    First of all, make sure all the options are enabled:

    [​IMG]


    Press the "pause" key on your keyboard. This will stop emulation. In this way you won't lose any frame at the beginning of the movie.


    Tools > Movie > Play Movie


    Select the filename you want to replay, and click on "Play Movie".


    Tools > AVI > Start AVI Dump...


    Now, if your only goal is to upload a video to Youtube, and your connection's upload is fast enough, I recommend you to use a lossless video codec here (audio will always use the WAV codec instead). The resulting AVI will be huge, but it will survive Youtube's transcoding much better.


    Press the "pause" key again to resume emulation, and let it dump the AVI file. Since you checked "Sync AVI with movie" before, the AVI dump will automatically stop at the end of the movie.


    So, this is the simplest thing you can do, it won't require any external tools and it will work fine, so I'm pretty sure you're not going to be happy with it.

    YOU CAN STOP READING HERE.


    Step 4: well, there is no mandatory step 4, but if you really want you can take your lossless / uncompressed video and work some magic on it, but you'll need some tools. Youtube's transcoder will always affect the quality of your video a lot, so whatever you do please keep in mind that, if your connection allows you for that, you should always upload the videos as uncompressed as possible. Otherwise, you can use popular codes such as H264 for the video stream and OGG for the audio stream, of course not using an AVI container anymore but a much more efficient MKV. There's another thing you can do to reduce the filesize almost by half: you just dumped a 60fps video (assuming you were using NTSC mode, and I see no reason not to do that unless you're playing an obscure PAL-only game), but Youtube has a 30fps limit, so you can instruct your encoder program to discard (not blend! Please, not blend! It makes everything blurry and unwatchable) every other frame. The 30fps limit is also why shields and other flashing animations look so wrong on Youtube (even if you upload a 60fps video, since Youtube will discard every other frame by itself anyway), so there's also the option to instruct your encoder program to output a 24fps video; while more choppy, animations will look better.


    Please note that you WILL need an external program to merge a multi-part AVI if you recorded a very long video: since Gens ReRecording can't write AVI files bigger than 2 gigabytes, bigger files will automatically be split into more parts (and, unless they fixed it recently, there's a bug with that so a frame is always lost between any two parts).


    Well, that's all I can suggest. Waiting for someone to disagree in 3, 2, ...
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 9, 2014
  2. Shockwave

    Shockwave 3 Time Stones Member

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    You know what? I'm actually glad I didn't know shit about recording just so someone could actually make this. I hope more people will look at this and find use for it as opposed to disagree and completely disregard it, but we'll see I guess.

    Nonetheless, thanks for putting this up.
     
  3. nineko

    nineko I am the Holy Cat Member

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    Yeah, sorry about the sarcastic comments here and there, but I once tried to tell people how to take good screenshots in an easy way, but it didn't end well, so now I always think twice before I post anything useful, because apparently (1) people don't like good quality and (2) people like to do more complex procedures for no reason.


    I hope you can find this useful, at least.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 9, 2014
  4. M.N.K.

    M.N.K. In the River of Darkness... Member

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    Hey I like good quality! no but seriously I see what you mean though. On topic now, nice that someone finally made a tutorial on doing this. Probably won't be as many people now asking how to record their gameplays. Though I will say that I learned one thing I actually didn't know about on the 4th step.
     
  5. nineko

    nineko I am the Holy Cat Member

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    If you want to know more about video processing, feel free to ask, and I'll be glad to give you more detailed informations. Still, the bottom line is: Youtube heavily transcodes, so you should compress as little as possible according to your connection speed. If you're not planning to share the AVI (or MKV) file itself you can usually not bother with fancy video compressions such as extreme H264 settings, since you might end up wasting more time encoding the video rather than actually uploading it. Even on TASvideos, they usually make two separate encodes: an extremely optimised one which is then shared "as-is" if people want to download it, and an "everything goes" one which is then uploaded to Youtube (with a special tag which enforces a 4:3 aspect ratio; while technically more accurate, it makes most all videos look horrible because of the pixel deformations).


    Personally, I uploaded all my recent videos in an MKV container, with video encoded at 24fps in the TSCC (TechSmith Camtasia) lossless codec and uncompressed WAV audio (or 500kbps OGG). In older videos I used a variety of other codecs, different frame rates, I experimented quite a lot with H264 and even XviD sometimes (for some Game Boy videos since XviD natively support grayscale while H264 doesn't), but I later settled with what I described above.
     
  6. SonicVaan

    SonicVaan I'm a cyberpunk with a taste for guns Member

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    With Fusion it's even easier. Open the video codec folder, right-click the .INI file and click "Install...". Now open a ROM with Fusion and at the desired spot to start recording, click the Video tab and then "Log AVI File".

    Tadaa. And once you want to stop recording, go to the video tab and click on "Log AVI File" again. And it's even ready to be uploaded on YouTube.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Feb 11, 2014
  7. nineko

    nineko I am the Holy Cat Member

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    Oh. I wasn't aware that Youtube supported Kega's codec. It must be something recent, because I remember many people couldn't upload their videos in the past. Well, as I said in the first post, the more options the better. I'll still go with Gens ReRecording so I can easily delete bad things from my playthroughs :p


    (not that I TAS everything I upload, on the contrary, I usually just delete deaths and very bad things)
     
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