The frugal comrade's guide to video recording

Party-approved discussion of ArmA 3
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wolfenswan
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The frugal comrade's guide to video recording

Post by wolfenswan »

This guide is meant as an aid to setup a simple, working and most importantly free video recording solution. I'm no expert on the matter and do appreciate any feedback.

Comrade. We all know that the party's success is glorious and eternal. So called "proof" is a concept developed by the imperialist oppressors trying to silence our rightful celebrations. Cleverly they have barred us from the tools of proof-creation by putting a price-tag on them. But now, their time is over!

Read the guide comrade and learn how to record the party's progress in fantastic acceptable quality!

What you'll need
1. Windows Movie Maker/VirtualDub
I can hear the sneers of the media designers, but all we want to do is compress a recorded video into MP4 for Youtube. Thus, the free Windows Movie Maker it is. Technically inclined comrades can also use the free and more complex VirtualDub but as my comrade grandmother used to say: Why use a tractor if you can use a horse? Of course the horse died the same month and my comrade grandmother's family died due to famine but that's besides the point.

2. Open Broadcasting Software
OBS is a free and straightforward streaming tool, which can also be configured to save directly to your HDD. Even better, it supports up to two PTT keys, which is very useful given our communication structure. It's not gonna record your quadruple HD 52k video but it's perfectly fine for 1080p.

Configuring OBS
1. Broadcasting settings:
Not much to do here, besides setting it to file output and selecting a directory.
Image

2. Encoding configuration
Generally you want to record in your native resolution.
These are the settings I'm happy with, but you might want to experiment with the bit-rate to find a compromise between perfomance and quality that works best for you.
Image

3. Other configuration
Set up the hotkeys to your liking, I use the two PTT hotkeys for my group VON and TS3. I don't bother with the advanced configuration.

4. Selecting a source to record
While ARMA is running, right-click the sources box and select game-capture:
Image

Then select ARMA3 in the new window. Window or monitor capture might work just as well.

Editing the Video
Check with our video branding guidelines.

The basic steps to uploading/editing a video are:
1. Processing it in Movie Maker, then cutting out all the boring bits.
2. Adding one of the idents by drag&dropping the respective file into your project.
3. Add a title and other annotations using Movie Maker's text tool.

When saving a movie intended for Youtube, you usually want to compress it as either 1080p or 720p, with the best possible audio compression. There are plenty of guides online on how compression works and what's best for Youtube so I suggest the inclined comrade can resolve any further questions through Google.

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SuicideKing
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Re: The frugal comrade's guide to video recording

Post by SuicideKing »

Thanks for posting this! I was fiddling around with OBS just the other day.

May want to disable Aero as well, in case performance takes a hit.

I'm curious as to why you're using CPU encoding instead of NVENC, afaik that should be equivalent to what ShadowPlay does, and not impact your FPS beyond an FPS or two.

Everyone without newer Nvidia cards but with a modern Intel CPU with an IGP (and thus QuickSync support) may want to try using Lucid Logix virtu MVP to use the IGP independently of the primary discrete GPU for encoding. Do read up more about how to set it up, and note that the company seems to have stopped developing the software.
http://lucidlogix.com/support/download/ ... virtu-mvp/
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wolfenswan
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Re: The frugal comrade's guide to video recording

Post by wolfenswan »

I'm curious as to why you're using CPU encoding instead of NVENC, afaik that should be equivalent to what ShadowPlay does, and not impact your FPS beyond an FPS or two.
I was basing it mostly on the results from this thread.
As expected, NVIDIA NVENC releases all pressure off the CPU and does not use GPU neither since it's done on a hardware chip. However this comes at the cost the quality and requires you to use a very high bitrate to achieve decent quality. I wouldn't recommend using it unless you have an absolutely shitty CPU
I might experiment with it in the future when I want to tickle out a bit more performance.

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Sparks
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Re: The frugal comrade's guide to video recording

Post by Sparks »

Awesome. Even on a comrade's frugal four-year-old gaming rig, this works really quite well when just flying about on Stratis in the editor:



Didn't capture the audio, as the last minute demonstrates (and it was obviously all Harry's fault), but I think that was just a setup glitch, selecting the wrong microphone input or some such gaff.

Toddler willing, might give it a try tonight and if it works online as well as it does in the editor, make a video demonstrating to my fellow comrades some tips in the fine art of catching bullets with your face!
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wolfenswan
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Re: The frugal comrade's guide to video recording

Post by wolfenswan »

Toddler willing, might give it a try tonight and if it works online as well as it does in the editor, make a video demonstrating to my fellow comrades some tips in the fine art of catching bullets with your face!
If the CPU is taxed too much, then as suicideking has pointed out, the NVENC codec might be beneficial as it offloads the recording to a dedicated chip.

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Sparks
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Re: The frugal comrade's guide to video recording

Post by Sparks »

wolfenswan wrote:
Toddler willing, might give it a try tonight and if it works online as well as it does in the editor, make a video demonstrating to my fellow comrades some tips in the fine art of catching bullets with your face!
If the CPU is taxed too much, then as suicideking has pointed out, the NVENC codec might be beneficial as it offloads the recording to a dedicated chip.
Definitely worth trying; my CPU is an Athlon II x3. The ARMA 3 loading screen taxes it a bit
I was half convinced even trying this was going to cause the chip to catch fire or file an abuse complaint with the Gardai :D
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Sparks
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Re: The frugal comrade's guide to video recording

Post by Sparks »

Another surprise, even without the NVENC codec, my aging rig kept up through the evening and the recording was never the problem (VON on the other hand...)

Speaking of audio though, my mic seems to be hot throughout the recording even though my comms are PTT. Is there a way to fix that, or to - and this is probably too much - record the hot mic stuff in one channel and the PTT in another?
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Sparks
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Re: The frugal comrade's guide to video recording

Post by Sparks »

Small tip: if you're not using your native fullscreen resolution with ARMA (my framerate crashes if I go above 1200x800 for Reasons and I have the normal 1900x1080 monitor resolution), settings->video is only half what you have to tweak in OBS, you also have to right-click on the Arma 3 source and tick the "stretch to fit" box, or you get a 1900x1080 video with huge black bars around the 1152x720 picture and things look awful.

Little thing, but it annoyed me for an hour last week, so I thought I'd mention it.

Also, you can't have seperate audio tracks on OBS (eg. track one for Arma, track two for raw microphone, track three for teamspeak, etc) yet, but they're promising it for the next version release...
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SuicideKing
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Re: The frugal comrade's guide to video recording

Post by SuicideKing »

This is more of an editing thing than recording, but anyone who wishes to speed up some sections of the video may do it using:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/ ... lapseapps/

More technical info:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/ ... yperlapse/
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Re: The frugal comrade's guide to video recording

Post by Mabbott »

When trying to record ArmA with OBS it gives me a black screen. Any fixes?
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