Video Capture Software

[Aebleskiver Thibedeau]

It's time to upgrade from FRAPS, and I wondered what people were using these days for video capture software.  And recommendations or bad reviews?  Does anybody use Movavi?

[Lillith Hapmouche]

Very handy and completely free: both AMD and Nvidia provide video capturing capabilities as part of their display drivers.

If you want more advanced features, take a look at OBS or any other software used by streamers.

[Aebleskiver Thibedeau]

Mmm, yeah, but the video capture in with my Nvidia card (it used to be Shadowplay?) won't let me record only a section of the screen, something I need to hang all the facial animation HUDS I use off-screen.  

And OBS has only marginal graphics quality. It's light on your disk space, it's free, but it doesn't give you good video.  I'm using OBS now and I'd like something better.

 

 

[Codex Alpha]

OBS is more than adequate, and you should spend some time exploring the OBS Options and Settings, where you can record at different resolutions, fps and even a variety of formats to encode to, including MKV. Although it is mainly used to stream online, I have used it to record videos of all sorts for my projects and can record to a local drive with it.

[Jackson Redstar]

Why upgrade from FRAPS? it is light weight, easy to use, and captures avi files. what more could you need?

[Aebleskiver Thibedeau]

It eats fps. 

[Lillith Hapmouche]

56 minutes ago, Jackson Redstar said:

Why upgrade from FRAPS? it is light weight, easy to use, and captures avi files. what more could you need?

While opinions vary on the level of quality that FRAPS manages to put out these days, after its last update in 2013, what would make you say that it has ever been remotely "light weight" in hardware load? 
I used it as FPS counter / screenshot tool / video evidence tool back in my ArmA 3 days and could always say a significant drop when it was running. 

Just quickly googling let to a Reddit thread, for example, with a lot of folks recommending OBS. But it also mentions other options to explore.

[SodaGnome]

I'm still using FRAPs! 

I tried OSB and liked fraps better. The nvidea one has no way to change output folder so gave up on that too. I like ease and no hassles and I kept getting glitches with OSB. One problem with fraps is it doesn't capture desk top in windows 10. 

[Jackson Redstar]

I would not say it eats FPS if you are at say 80fps on a sim and set fraps to record at 30 fps it will record at 30 fps. and most movies are 24 fps. I might use 60fps if the sim isnt laggy so i can do good slow mo, but honestly anything over about 15fps i can get smooth footage unless I am moving the cam really fast through a scene. You can set whatever FPS you want and it should capture it fine. Least been my experience with it. And I like having the avi file

[Chic Aeon]

I still use FRAPS for machinima and am happy with it. For tutorials where framerates aren't important I use Flashback which has a fairly weird interface but works well and is free. You need to be able to convert the format but I do that in my editing software. 

 

 

[Pryda Parx]

I use the Windows 10 built in xbox video capture. My laptop is reasonably powerful so I get a good frame rate and image quality with no additional tools beyond standard OS stuff.