Gaming session video capture problem (help!)

pingo76 wrote on 6/12/2003, 2:54 AM
Hello. I'm making a broadcast which needs video clips for game sessions. So far i made 12 shows but i'm tired of the lenghty process i used to produce those game sessions.
I need a faster and better way to do it. So far i found this solution.

On the other pc which have a VIVO geforce4 ti 4200 i capture in full 720x576 using huffyuv and virtualdub. The other pc which i use to play videogames uses a scan converter from corio model eclipse which enables me to resize the output (to get rid of the black borders) to the "video in" of the geforce. Then i load the huffy file into vegas 4.0 and use an/crop to stretch the video left/right to fill (again!!!) the entire screen. If i use mantain aspect ratio OFF my video looks flashy on tv and practicaly unusable. Then i rerender the video in DV which takes for a 4min huffyuv a nasty 30min or more...

Well this is the best solution i found so far if i want to get rid of the black borders.

Any suggestions? Pretty please...

P.S. I'm looking to get a ADVC-100 but does it help? Also i want to get rid of that scan converter and use radeon 9700 tv-out instead, which is way much clearer, sharper and not washed out.
Last thing: I don't really care for a true correct aspect ratio..

Thanks in advance.

Comments

farss wrote on 6/12/2003, 5:15 AM
You could try using Camtasia etc, I've got reasonable results however I wasn't updating the screen very quickly so with games that may be an issue. Beyond that I think its always going to be a tedious process. One other way its done is to use a camera that has 'clear scan' capability to shoot the screen.

I have heard of some guys making video of poker machine screens but they have a custom built set of hardware and even then it doesn't work at the highest screen res.

I don't quite know why the aspect ratio setting is making the video flashy though. What refresh rate is the screen that you are capturing running at?

I think the reason you're render times are so long is because you're not just resizing the frame but also doing a frame rate conversion, I know I've been doing this to .wmv files. 2 hours of video takes 15 hours to render.
Grazie wrote on 6/12/2003, 5:30 AM
. . . I'm embarrassed to suggest this, but how about filming a verrrry good flat screen with plenty of good white? - Sound silly? . ..

Grazie
pingo76 wrote on 6/12/2003, 11:07 AM
The frequency is 75Hz and i capture 25 fps pal. This shouldn't be an issue since the games i play are usualy vsynced to 75Hz also. If i deinterlace flashing's gone! But i don't want that. Basically im looking for a capture board which will allow analogue to digital conversion AND screen adjustment (a need plenty of overscan!). ADVC-100 will do the trick but can't do nothing about the screen size. On the other hand Radeon 9700 tv-out has almost no control at all when resizing the output. They claim that rad 9700 tv-out will fill a tv screen nicely. LIES! Big lies! That's why i'm having all this tedious job to do... Anyway thanks for trying to help me.

About that flat screen filming: no camcorder available atm. I also don't think is pratical enough...
pingo76 wrote on 6/12/2003, 11:12 AM
About that camtasia: I don't have enough power (would require a 20Ghz CPU :) ) to use this software when playing recent games. Also the game wil likely stutter or suffer due to high cpu utilisation required to write that much data on HDD.