What software to use for video?

[lewisd]

I'm trying to put together a video of a mission I did, but I'm having problems with various bits of software. I bought Bandicam to use for recording video, which seems to work ok, but when I import the videos into the trial version of Sony Movie Studio Platinum, any time I try to crossfade them, I get horrible MPEG compression corruption artifacts all over the screen.

What do you folks use for making videos?

[Superfluous J]

It is possible that Bandicam is not up to snuff. Did you try watching the videos you recorded in Mplayer or some other video playing software? I abandoned Bandicam because it could not record and encode on the fly while playing KSP (even though it had no problems with Minecraft, FTL, and Cities XL) and I ended up with horrible quality (watch the 2nd half of my second video in my signature, it was recorded in Bandicam. Quality degraded over time so I didn't notice it in the first video or the first half of the second video). The 3rd video was recorded in Fraps, which I now use exclusively.

There are caveats to Fraps, though. It eats hard drive space for lunch. You need about a hundred gigs to safely record an hour. Also, you need to compress it yourself before editing. I use Vdub and a Divx encoder to do that and it usually takes longer than the video took to record (which is why Bandicam can't keep up). I also record my voice separately in Audacity and do noise removal so it sounds nice, and import the whole shebang into VideoPad.

It takes more work than "hit play, hit stop, upload to YouTube" but I'm a little bit of a quality freak.

[RogueMason]

There is a program called 'Action', by Mirillis. I've used the trial version and, for the very few times I used it, it worked very well. I think you need to have a fair amount of hard drive space free, just to be on the safe side, but the recordings are usually good quality.

Fortunately, there is, like I said, the Trail version. Lasts 30 days. Give it a spin and see what you think of it.

[AntonDV]

I'm a little bit of a quality freak.

me too! Fraps all the way! That's why I have local net storage, just dump all my stuff there at the end of the day. I'm getting a new computer in December so the old one is going to become a server to automatically manage all my files, including compression.

[lewisd]

It is possible that Bandicam is not up to snuff. Did you try watching the videos you recorded in Mplayer or some other video playing software? I abandoned Bandicam because it could not record and encode on the fly while playing KSP (even though it had no problems with Minecraft, FTL, and Cities XL) and I ended up with horrible quality (watch the 2nd half of my second video in my signature, it was recorded in Bandicam. Quality degraded over time so I didn't notice it in the first video or the first half of the second video). The 3rd video was recorded in Fraps, which I now use exclusively.

There are caveats to Fraps, though. It eats hard drive space for lunch. You need about a hundred gigs to safely record an hour. Also, you need to compress it yourself before editing. I use Vdub and a Divx encoder to do that and it usually takes longer than the video took to record (which is why Bandicam can't keep up). I also record my voice separately in Audacity and do noise removal so it sounds nice, and import the whole shebang into VideoPad.

It takes more work than "hit play, hit stop, upload to YouTube" but I'm a little bit of a quality freak.

I did try with fraps, and reencoded everything before doing any editing. That's actually what I tried first, but the incredible amount of disk space really turned me off. Bandicam is able to encode in real time no problem on my computer, so I was hopeful for it. The videos from it play fine on their own, and play fine in the Sony video editing software, until I try to overlap videos to do a crossfade. I haven't tried any other editor software yet.

The other thing I liked about Bandicam was the ability to hide the mouse cursor. I didn't realize at the time that fraps has the same option. I'd really like to be able to use Bandicam though, because of the live encoding. The frams videos I had, taking up 80GB, encoded down to around 700MB.

Does anyone have good luck using other video editing software with Bandicam?

[Superfluous J]

Does anyone have good luck using other video editing software with Bandicam?

Before Kerbal Space Program, I made over 100 videos with Bandicam and VideoPad. It works great. And it even worked great with the videos that Bandicam made from Kerbal Space Program; my problem was that Bandicam recording KSP made crappy videos. If you're not having that problem, I will happily recommend you give VideoPad a try. If I recall, it has a generous trial period and is only like $30-$40.

[Docterchese]

Fraps all the way for the recording side of things. Haven't used it much with KSP yet but I swear by it for all other games. As for editing software, you can't go wrong with Sony Vegas and Audacity (free.) I use Photoshop for any graphics I need too.

I also have a spare computer that isn't very powerful but is plenty to just leave to compress, edit and render videos with. Means more time playing games on the main PC :3 makes for a brilliant use for my old gaming desktop.

[lewisd]

Thanks for the tip on VideoPad! It's working great. I just finished my first KSP video, for an Apollo Style challenge.