F1 2010 [PC] Video Capture - MSI Afterburner

[Brendon Boss]

Forget Fraps and Playclaw.

First impressions of this FREE software is, wow superb.
I get zero fps loss when capturing.

MSI Afterburner 2.2.0 Beta 2
It's beta as they are still finalising the sound stuff, so keep an eye out for updates.

 

[Paul Lock]

Looks interesting Brendon - will check it out at some point.

Whats the deal with the audio, does it capture something?

 

[Brendon Boss]

Yeah audio is captured, and is sync'd pretty good with the video.
Earlier versions, when they were introducing video capture feature did not capture audio.

 

[Roman5]

I get zero fps loss when capturing.

That's a huge bonus! When I press record on fraps, the framerate goes down a lot and makes it hard to drive. I'll give this a try, thanks.

 

[Scott L. Harrison]

Its a graphics card overclocking utility not for video capture, i think you may have wires crossed here.

[NVM found the feature in settings, they hid that pretty well why not put that on the main UI. confusing ]

 

[Deane Cockerill]

Lol, havent tried it yet, but isnt Fraps a graphics card benchmarking utility?

Edit. OK I just tried it, only a quick test. I will be using this. It seems I can set video quality, & get nice results, still need to play around with it...

I have been using Xfire for video capture, but to do so I have to drop all my game settings to low, & reduce the screen res to 1280x720. Xfire set to record half size video. If I dont reduce my normal game settings I get massive FPS drop, making the game almost unplayable, like it's in slow motion, especially for start & 1st corner. By dropping the game settings it is ok to play
This produces big video files which I then have to run thru Windows Movie Maker, to get a senisble file size to upload to Youtube. Obviously this results in poor quality videos.
An example of which can be found (10 mins of poor video, just watch a few seconds of it to see what I mean).

I normally run the game (without video capture) with everything on high, screen res 1680x1050, Post processing off.

I just did a test with Xfire (without changing my game settings) got the slow-mo effect that I expected (massive FPS drop), & it produced a video file (.avi) of 475Mb for just 1 min 13 sec of video.

I then did the same again with this MSI Afterburner (on it's default settings inc video half size). My game settings still the same, & got a very slight FPS drop, not really noticeable, & it a produced a video file (.avi) of 63 Mb for just 1 min 02 sec of video.

With MSI Afterburner the game was perfectly playable, with Xfire it wasnt. I then uploaded the 63Mb avi to youtube without doing anything to it.

480p

Edit. The 63 Mb avi that MSI Afterburner produced was good qulaity. Youtubes proccessing obviously didnt like it. (Edit again, ok maybe it did, Youtubes proccessing again... that can now be seen at 480p)
For the record when that clip was filmed the video format MJPG compression was selected. ^^

So I have played around. I changed the video format to uncompressed & selected 100% quality. 25 fps. Still 1/2 size video.

The slight fps drop I had before, dissappeared.
This produced a big file, 5 Gb for 3 laps (which obviously I have no intention of trying to upload to Youtube, that would cost me £50 on my crappy internet

)

Anyway I then converted the vid to mp4 giving me a 12Mb file for 22 secs & uploaded that to youtube. Sacle that up & you get 36Mb file for the same amunt of time as the vid above... smaller file supposedly higher quality.

Here is the result HD 720p

Edit. For the record I also tried capturing at full size, but I couldnt, pc isnt quite good enough, it slowed it down

 

[Paul Lock]

Lol, havent tried it yet, but isnt Fraps a graphics card benchmarking utility?

Fraps not only monitors FPS and can benchmark during real time gameplay, but the full version also allows you to capture video and screens.

Sounds promising that Deane. My Fraps recordings work out around 45gb for a 50% race, recording half size @ 30fps. I upped it to 40fps as I figured half the problem with the gameplay slowing slightly was due to Fraps capping it, normally im in the 60 to 70 FPS wise when im not recording, and thats running everything max, V-synch on, AA full at 1920x1080. The tests recording at 40fps were better smoother gameplay, but resulted in bigger file size. Not a problem as Vegas seems to make pretty small encoded files, even at 720p, but im all for reducing the raw file size if it doesnt ruin the quality of the video - I normally leave that job to Youtube!

Will try and check out Afterburner over the weekend.

 

[Stefan Woudenberg]

Works great. I will use this from now on. Although only will capture 1/3 size else my fps will decrease a bit.

Other thing, I am sure one of you guys know how to fix it.

I got two 3870 (yes they are old ) in crossfire, but f1 2010 seems to use only one. How can i make this work? In other games both cards are used. Searched the forum but couldn't quickly find an answer.
Thanx in advance!

 

[Christian Schoeler]

Interesting informations...

This MSI Afterburner certainly is an alternative for people with no high spec systems, but I will still stick to fraps because I have had no problems with my system recording with fraps during online play...

 

[Paul Lock]

I gave Afterburner beta a go at the 2 races this afternoon. Recording half size, 40fps @ 85% quality. Each 30% race came in a about 5gb in size, so im shocked as this is so much smaller than Fraps.
Quality still seems pretty good. I still need to experiment, I think setting the FPS to 40 may have been slowing my actual gameplay, as it seemed a little bit jumpy. Maybe I need to up the settings to not bottleneck my gameplay.

Looks really promising, cheers again to Brendon for the heads up.