screen recording KSP

[Captain Sierra]

What software is best for recording KSP? I want to do a proper video as an intro to some of my craft but I don't know what to use. Here is what I need(Or what I really would like for it to be ideal):

Low RAM usage (I do a lot of big projects in KSP and the less memory recording eats, the better)

Decent Quality (I'd like to run in 720p but HD is low priority; 480p is about the min I want)

Unlimited recording time(I don't know how long building something is gonna take or how long a mission to Vall could be)

$0 (I am not about to drop money on this so that rules out Fraps, which does not provide #3 in it's free state)

Must save as fairly common video format (AVI, WMV, MP4, something that a run-of-the-mill editing software can use)

Does anyone have any suggestions for me?

[Piggius_Max]

It's a tough one if you're gonna rule out fraps, you cant expect ANYTHING that's free to match up to your standards. I use fraps, most youtubers use Fraps, but as you say; it's a drain on ram... Something else worth noting is the software that'll cost is gonna be better optimised than those that are free, so even if you do find some software...

...Chances are you'll either be spending money on RAM or the software.

[ecat]

You could do worse than try MSI AfterBurner. It looks like it's only for MSI graphics cards but I understand it works with many others. It looks like a diagnostic/overclocking utility but there is a full video capture utility built in. The only issue I have using it with KSP is its inability to record the mouse pointer, apart from that it has been faultless and it's free.

I think this is the most recent version

http://www.guru3d.com/files_details/msi_afterburner_beta_download.html

The second video is old but i should give you a general feel for the app.

Edited July 28, 2013 by ecat

[Sardonyx]

I recommend Fraps to anyone who asks about screen recording as it's the best screen recording software for capturing 3D games, but you've ruled out spending money so that's a no go. In fact all the good screen recording software costs something

[Captain Sierra]

I ruled out money cuz I'm broke. I heard of this once but I don't know much about it. Aparrently there is software out there that is basically a cheat software that slows games down. It's great for cheating at FPS games but in a game like KSP, it is usable to slow down the game and reduce FPS lagging. It works to make the game playable on less RAM and still be smooth. If anyone knows about that, I could make some of the lousy software I found earlier work without inducing major lag.

[Mode7]

I'm using OBS to stream to twitch but it also has a record options. Not sure if it meets all of your needs but it is free so you could give it a shot and see if you like it. Totally open source.

[Captain Sierra]

Free is good and it's worth a look. What is the biggest craft you've put up while streaming and what was your hardware at the time?

Just for comparison, my hardware:

2.2 GHz i7 8 core processor

8 Gb RAM (I woulda swore I had 16, this could be my problem)

NVidia GeForce integrated GPU graphics card (Dunno if KSP autoruns this card, it might default to the crappy intel integrated card, also may be part of my problems)

[XaTriX]

I use fraps, and it's good.

For the ram problem erm...

XaT

[Darren9]

What GPU have you got? ShadowPlay is coming free to NVidia 7** series. Afterburner works best for me out of the current free ones, if you can record to a separate drive.

[blubbermonkeys]

I use "ACTION!" for recording. It works well.

[Joshington]

There's a program called Ezvid that works pretty good. The only problem is that it comes with it's own editing program and you have to use it, and I personally don't like it that much, but other than that it records great.

[Dortmunder]

Dxtory is probably the best I have ever used.

I generally just use Xsplit now to broadcast, and that in turn records to Twitch. After that I can highlight it etc. there.

[JiveMagillicudy]

I use Dxtory because it gives me more options in regards to what audio I am recording (ie, recording my voice with a separate audio interface than the game sound.) Fraps may do this too, but I haven't used it in awhile. MSI Afterburner works for some, but not others. I always got screen tearing when recording with it, which is a shame since it is free and looks good otherwise.

For a recorder with lots of features, Dxtory seems to be pretty good.

[kahlzun]

Slight necro here, but what editing software to use? I want to be able to selectively accelerate sections (like what scott manley does), and record post audio...

free is possible

[roosterr]

I am in the process of testing both Bandicam and Fraps. Now that I have seen this thread, I will give afterburner a try.

But here is the deal between the free versions of Bandicam and Fraps for me, so far.

Bandicam: 10 minutes of recording at a time. Uses low resources and very low HDD space. OTB video playback quality not very good, but with some tweaking it can probably be improved.

Fraps: Recording time is only about 30-45 SECONDS. It uses a LOT of HDD space; not a big deal when you have a 2 TB drive. BUT, the replay video quality is great OTB. It also seems to have a lower than expected resource load, given the good quality and large file sizes.

[Specialist290]

For those of us who might actually be willing to spend money in the near future, is there any significant differenct between Bandicam and Fraps? I'm mostly looking at the former because of the compression issues the latter has, but is the quality loss as pronounced between the two in the full versions as it is in the free demos?

[lincourtl]

For those of us who might actually be willing to spend money in the near future, is there any significant differenct between Bandicam and Fraps? I'm mostly looking at the former because of the compression issues the latter has, but is the quality loss as pronounced between the two in the full versions as it is in the free demos?

As someone with an older, memory-starved machine, Bandicam's on-the-fly compression inflected a very high performance penalty. Fraps works beautifully though, and hardly affects my game performance. I have it configured to toggle recording with the Scroll Lock key so every fifteen minutes or so, during a screen change or something where I'd normally edit it out, I toggle recording on and off so it starts a new file.

The big caveat though is I have access to Vegas Pro so editing together vids is really easy for me. I do pay for it in render time though.

[katateochi]

I use FRAPS to record and sony movie studio platinum to edit. FRAPS is great, I can't fault it, it rarely fails and because it does full frames uncompressed it doesn't waste power or quality trying to compress on the fly. Only drawback is you will EAT throu hard drive space, around about a GB per minute if there is a lot going on (deep space and lots of black cuts that down a bit).

Movie studio platinum is ok, not as good as I hoped it would be, but you can do some really nifty things with it and I feel there is much more I need to learn to actually master it. The main drawback of it is that it only can speed up or slow down footage 4 times (at least as far as I know). Whereas the (horrible) windows live movie maker that I used to use could do 8. But that's my only gripe with it. It prefers to work with uncompressed footage too, trying to edit compressed media lags it out a bit. Everything else about it is very nice thou. No more rendering to yucky wmv format!

[MBlazerGuy]

What GPU have you got? ShadowPlay is coming free to NVidia 7** series. Afterburner works best for me out of the current free ones, if you can record to a separate drive.

I have 2 Nvidia GTX 780's in SLI, and I tried the new Shadowplay recording and it worked fantastic for one week! I was capturing at 1920x1080 at 60 FPS and was getting no frame skips. After reducing it to 1280x720 at 30 FPS with frame smoothing in Premiere, it looked absolutely amazing.

Then, one week after I bought the cards, Nvidia released a driver update (GeForce Experience 1.8.0.0), and it hasn't worked since.

Capturing at 1920x1080 now only captures a squashed picture at 1920x540 in size. It's only capturing every 2nd scan line.

I've tried everything I can think of to fix it, without any luck. (Changed number of screens, tried with and without SLI, etc)

If NVidia ever fixes this problem, Shadowplay is definitely the best method of capturing. You can have it on all the time, and there is no performance hit. By having it on all the time, you can select when you want to just save out the last 10 minutes of footage, if "something wonderful" occurs during game play that you think is just an awesome "must show to the world" type of event.

[Tank Buddy]

I use Open Broadcaser Software. Seems to work nice for me. I believe it records into an MP4. Free. Don't know about your other concerns. You just have to turn the "max bitrate" to above 6000. Records in the local resolution.

http://obsproject.com/

[OniNaito]

I have 2 Nvidia GTX 780's in SLI, and I tried the new Shadowplay recording and it worked fantastic for one week! I was capturing at 1920x1080 at 60 FPS and was getting no frame skips. After reducing it to 1280x720 at 30 FPS with frame smoothing in Premiere, it looked absolutely amazing.

Then, one week after I bought the cards, Nvidia released a driver update (GeForce Experience 1.8.0.0), and it hasn't worked since.

Capturing at 1920x1080 now only captures a squashed picture at 1920x540 in size. It's only capturing every 2nd scan line.

I've tried everything I can think of to fix it, without any luck. (Changed number of screens, tried with and without SLI, etc)

If NVidia ever fixes this problem, Shadowplay is definitely the best method of capturing. You can have it on all the time, and there is no performance hit. By having it on all the time, you can select when you want to just save out the last 10 minutes of footage, if "something wonderful" occurs during game play that you think is just an awesome "must show to the world" type of event.

I had the same symptoms you described MBlazerGuy. If you're still having issues, try messing with the Anti-aliasing settings on KSP. I have found that both 2x and 8x cause the 1920x540 issue whereas ShadowPlay records correctly after turning off Anti-aliasing or using 4x.

ShadowPlay has such huge potential. I just need to keep reminding myself that it's a beta and while there are still bugs, it can only get better from here. Good luck with your setup!

[crazyginger]

I have modded ksp file and tried recording it using OBS, but every time I start recording ksp crashes.

Is there any way of fixing this?