Capturing Advice

M

Mousey333

Spaceman
Hi there fellow WC Fans. I'm currently working on making my own versions of WC3, WC4, Prophecy, and Privateer 2 movies, however I'm wondering the best way to capture gameplay footage. I know AD is using FRAPS, but everytime I try that, my framerate goes to about 4. Alteratively I can take it out iof my video card into my DV camera and back to my editing Program (Premiere Pro 2), but I fear some quality loss there. Any suggestions would be a great help.

Thanks,
Mousey
 
Mousey333 said:
Hi there fellow WC Fans. I'm currently working on making my own versions of WC3, WC4, Prophecy, and Privateer 2 movies, however I'm wondering the best way to capture gameplay footage. I know AD is using FRAPS, but everytime I try that, my framerate goes to about 4. Alteratively I can take it out iof my video card into my DV camera and back to my editing Program (Premiere Pro 2), but I fear some quality loss there. Any suggestions would be a great help.

Thanks,
Mousey
Click to expand...

If you have the dos versions of the games, try the video capture built into dosbox 0.65
 
Thanks

I actually have both, I only got the dvd since i was making the movie, but i also think the visuals are better in the dvd b/c of direct x. Is that correct? or does it really not matter?

Thanks again for the suggestion and btw, I'm looking forward to your WC4 movie!
 
Mousey333 said:
I actually have both, I only got the dvd since i was making the movie, but i also think the visuals are better in the dvd b/c of direct x. Is that correct? or does it really not matter?

Thanks again for the suggestion and btw, I'm looking forward to your WC4 movie!
Click to expand...

The space flight graphics are pretty much the same in both versions. The Windows version doesn't improve them because it doesn't use Direct3d acceleration. Also note that the the CD version can be patched to the windows version, which is basically what the DVD is, except that it has DVD quality FMV.
 
Yeah. Well I got it running smooth is doxbox and have some great captures, but can't get them inot premiere without a lot of blockiness. I can't figure out why, since I know they look fine playing in WMP. Not sure if you can help with that.

Also wondered why fraps would make my system run so slow. I'm using the DVD version, running on an athlon x2 2.0 GHz with 2 gigs of ram. Any suggestions there?
 
Fraps and DOSBox work differently. Fraps works around DirectX and is capable of capturing more stuff, and it requires more horsepower to do so. If your computer isn't fast enough, this'll translate into choppy captures.
 
Mousey333 said:
Yeah. Well I got it running smooth is doxbox and have some great captures, but can't get them inot premiere without a lot of blockiness. I can't figure out why, since I know they look fine playing in WMP. Not sure if you can help with that.

Also wondered why fraps would make my system run so slow. I'm using the DVD version, running on an athlon x2 2.0 GHz with 2 gigs of ram. Any suggestions there?
Click to expand...

Premiere probably doesn't support the ZMBV codec, which is pretty new. As far as I know, the only things that work with it are Dosbox, the decoder that comes with Dosbox (although I'm surprised Premiere doesn't try to use it), and FFMPEG, which you could use to convert into another format. Although if you convert it to another format, you will either lose quality or wind up with gigantic files, as ZMBV is amazing for this kind of thing and lossless.
 
Thanks

Thansk for youir advice guys. Go check out the preview I posted. What I ended up doing was installing the zbmv codec and converting the files to xvid with virtual dub. That seem to yield the best quality. Suprising, since premiere normally likes dv avi, but the difference between it and xvid were hardly noticeable, and xvid is much smaller :D

As for my machine being slow, I didn't realize 2.0 dualcore was that slow, but maybe I need to update ~~~. Could it be my video card? it's an older 6600 nvidia model....

Thanks again for all the help and suggestions.
 
No, the processor should be much more important than the video card for encoding. Encoding is a particularly processor intensive activity, and a some of the newer processors are actually a bunch faster than the initial 2.0 GHz dual core processors (you didn't say which you had, and that makes a big difference).
 
Mousey333 said:
Processor is AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ I didn't think it was that old, but maybe it is...
Click to expand...

are you sure it was choppy? What I experienced was that in windows while recording with FRAPS, the game would seem choppy, but the actual video would play smoothly.
 
I'll have to check that again AD, I don't remember. I just know the framerate overlay said something like 9.

Maybe it is working ok. And that would be great, because that's the only way I can think of for me to capture prophecy well....
 
I was able to capture some movie from WC3(Kilrathi Saga Version) using fraps..
famerate went to 15ish..

Im on a 2.2 GHZ Intel core 2 duo,3gigs of DDR2 800s RAM,2 10,000RPM SATA3 Harddrives

I dont know what it is about WC3 and fraps though it tries to kill the computer because I can convert a 2hour movie HD audio/video in about 30min with this comp at 10%cpu load,no problem..it would be better to do it through DOS methinks..
 
I agree BES, but I can't think of anything except FRAPS to capture footage for my Prophecy movie.

Any other suggestions on software guys?
 
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