I'd like to, because most of the recorded stuff out there is full of inane crap. In twenty years, I want to see high quality and high resolution video that someone took the care to properly encode, of the real actual game experience. I don't want to see a bunch of shitty overlays and hear a bunch of squeaky voices babbling throughout the entire thing.
But, I don't -- because it's too much of a hassle. I think if you play much, just consider how much fucking storage you are going to need. Granted, you could go the route of something like an Elgato HD Game Capture that will encode it on the fly, but then you're stuck with a shitty quality video with no finely-tuned encoding. It takes a lot of work to figure out the right settings for a codec and those settings change with every game -- they are not universal, even though these encode-on-the-fly devices treat them that way. So you end up with a shitty looking product that takes (in the worst possible setting) 2gb/hr absolute minimum, when you could accomplish very good quality at around 2gb/hr if you encode it on your own. -- Except to do that, you have to deal with lossless video that will run around 60gb to 90gb per hour. You need a lot of storage (since you'll accumulate it faster than you can encode it -- even with a dedicated rendering system) and you need a lot of very fast storage on your recording system to keep up with it. If I were going to do it long-term, I guess I'd probably dedicated a machine to it, buy a Black Intensity Pro, and then build an 8 or 16 drive raid array to keep up the massive IO requirements of the card. But man, rendering is so . . . . slow. On a single high end machine, you'd probably be able to encode about 6-8hrs of video if you did it 24 hours straight. It can become more of a chore than a hobby. :)
So . . . I just don't bother. I just hope that there's someone out there who *is* bothering to do it without all the added bullshit. Just beautiful high quality archives that we can enjoy in the future (because the shitty commentary and the awful encode quality of youtube videos sure as hell isn't going to cut it).
That said, if I had to advise someone, I'd offer them the following (this is based on extensive research and testing):
1) Dxtory for the recording application, using the Lagarith lossless codec and PCM 48khz 16bit stereo recording.
2) Dump to a large fast drive. A pair of raided high-capacity SATA drives might do. A pair of higher-speed (not budget quality) SSDs raided would do, but you have a lot less overall storage then, so can't have long play sessions.
3) Edit in a decent program like Sony Movie Maker Pro 12 (assuming windows, here, even though there are better options on OSX overall). Of course, you probably don't need to edit, if you're trying to just record the whole experience.
4) Encode to H.264, using Constant Quality Rate instead of a constant bitrate or multi-pass or anything else. Constant bitrate is a waste of data. Multi-pass introduces far more time to encode for no gain. CQR produces a file that can vary in size, but maintains visual fidelity throughout. You'll never really need to set it lower than 17 (nearly perfect) and can usually produce beautiful results with 21 or 23. Doable quality (stuff you just want to show on youtube; not archive forever) will be fine at CQR 26. (Of course, raw lossless is the correct way to archive "forever", but let's be real -- we don't have the data infrastructure that NASA has!). If you don't like the command line, there are front-end GUIs like MEGui that you can try.
5) Use the MP4 container. Yeah, MKV is fantastic and has more capabilities, but it is a moving target as it is continually developed and it has poor support. In ten or fifteen years, MP4 will surely be more playable than MKV (though I wish that weren't the case).
6) Use AAC with the highest bitrate you can spare to encode the audio channel. In comparison to the video, even the highest bitrate you can afford isn't going to be huge. AAC, like MP4, has perhaps the most wide playability and offers fantastic quality compared to some of the other options. MP3, LAME, OGG, etc -- all nice, but you run into compatability concerns. When using AAC, use the LC (low complexity) settings and not HE (high efficiency). HE is for devices that use batteries and otherwise can't spare much processing power. Low complexity providers higher audio quality.
There are some other minor things to tweak around with, but this produces some of the highest quality output with reasonable file sizes and also maintains compatibility with what Google prescribes for Youtube videos (except that they advise just doing a constant bitrate -- and the reason for that is because they more data you send them, the more they can accomplish with it in the future. Youtube retains your uploaded file and if they improve their videos in the future -- say, they add a higher resolution or better encoding -- they will re-encode your video. If you provide a low-data shitty version to them today, they can't do much more with it tomorrow).
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