FreeGameDev

Something that I've wanted to do for a while is to be able to record videos of my game in action and upload them on youtube. Particularly, in the near future I'd like to begin making development status update videos every month or two. In these videos I want to I discuss what we've been working on, what's been added/changed and why, and what we are doing next all while showing a video of the game being played. So I looked into different applications that would allow me to record a window running on my desktop, but none of them seemed to do the job well (this was over a year ago that I analyzed different tools, so things may have been changed). I'm running Ubuntu Linux and I need to do all of my video recording, audio recording, and editing on there.


Having said that, what tools do you use that you would recommend? I'm particularly curious what qubodup uses as all the videos I've seen him produce are of high quality, so I hope he stops by (and that he uses Linux to record his videos...).

I recommend old-fashioned ffmpeg for recording and kdenlive for editing.

I do use Linux and I second Arthur's suggestions.

With my last mainboard, I used pulseaudio and the following procedure: http://qubodup.wordpress.com/2012/01/03 ... -on-linux/

To compress the result before uploading to youtube, I use this script: http://codepad.org/r5DWqqWp

Right now, I use ALSA only but haven't tried recording yet. I will probably have to set up a loopback device to be able to capture audio.

For editing I also recommend Kdenlive. Most of my videos are not edited but when I get back to recording, I will probably add homepage URL text overlays and possibly annoying promotional screens for some of the general open source gamedev websites.

Thanks, that's a huge help. I'm going to play around with this setup today.

For simple edits PiTiVi is good too.

Trust me, stay away from PiTiVi. It's about as stable as a house made of straw.

I remember Arthur spoiled a lot of bytes of video due to PiTiVi that's why he is against Pitivi

I used openshot for simple video editing.

Arthur {l Wrote}:Trust me, stay away from PiTiVi. It's about as stable as a house made of straw.

Actually straw houses are pretty stable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw-bale_construction

Not when wolves are lurking nearby.

I liked Kdenlive (the only thing on Linux that IS better than Windows Movie Maker), but I didn't like how its output desynced the audio and the strict framerate requirements. Have they changed any of that since 2007?

No idea; I didn't record any sound. They're currently rewriting a lot, so at least things are likely to get better even though I don't know if they are right now.

leilei {l Wrote}:I liked Kdenlive (the only thing on Linux that IS better than Windows Movie Maker), but I didn't like how its output desynced the audio and the strict frame rate requirements. Have they changed any of that since 2007?

I have not had any frame rate issues.

I did have audio-desynch once, a long time ago. I avoided the problem by either changing the output format of the audio or by exporting the video's audio to .wav importing it on a separate track.

EDIT: Another problem I have from time to time is that frame-precise placement of effects and cutting of clips can lead to the last frame of such being incorrect.

Avidemux has been doing everything I need it to..
It's probably not the 'best' but it works quite well for me

Well I finally got around to recording a video. Unfortunately, it was a lot more difficult to figure this all out than I thought it would be. I ended up doing the recording on my laptop as my desktop graphics card decided to die on me last week. Here's what I did:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

avconv -f alsa -i pulse -f x11grab -s 1920x1080 -i :0.0 -s 1920x1080 -r 30 -vcodec libx264 -preset ultrafast -crf 0 out.mkv


That recorded my entire screen. I'm not sure why I needed to specify -s twice, but I did. All that I needed was a 1024x768 window to be recorded, but I gave up trying to figure out the magic series of options to do that. After fiddling with pulse audio controls for a while, I got it to record the application sound as well. What I was not able to record was my microphone (as this video I'm making includes audio commentary). After failing to get it to record from the microphone on a separate track, I gave up and used Audacity to record the commentary separately, and that worked out well.

So now I'm to the editing phase. I have a .mkv video and a .wav (or .ogg, or .whatever I want) audio track to add to it. I need to do the following:
1) Crop the video from 1920x1080 to the 1024x768 section of the screen I need
2) Trim the beginning and the end of the video (and audio)
3) Add the commentary audio track to it
4) Trim the audio commentary and align it correctly to the video

I tried out kdenlive and after 10 minutes, the only thing I was able to figure out was how to add the audio commentary and nothing else. I wasn't impressed that even a google search for "kdenlive video crop" turned up nothing useful. So I gave avidemux a try and it has been much more productive. I still have some issues with it though, such as trimming the video clip doesn't seem to adjust the audio accordingly (so the video and audio are completely out of sync). And to crop the video I have to specify the format to save it as first, and I'm not sure what to select (I'm guessing one of the MPEG4 options). I tried cropping and saving the video as a test, but then it wouldn't play back the cropped video.

Just thought I'd comment on what I've been doing. Hopefully by the end of the day I'll finish my video editing, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll share the final product when I upload it.

Please, try FDesktopRecorder.

... which I'm pretty sure is the only fully-featured ffmpeg GUI! Bloody good as well.

Nevermind, kdenlive is awesome. It just needs to make it easier to find documentation. Once I figured out that I had to add clips to the timeline, everything else pretty much came naturally as I had hoped it would. Although the rendered video shows some minor glitches (the screen shakes just a tiny bit), so I'll have to figure out what that's about and hopefully next time I won't have that problem.

Now I finally have my first video uploaded to youtube. The link is below, along with a link to the Hero of Allacrost channel where it was uploaded to. Thanks again for the help everyone!
http://www.youtube.com/user/Allacrost/


youtu.be/x9scSYkFK5o

EDIT: updated video to point to a new version with improved volume settings.

Roots {l Wrote}:the screen shakes just a tiny bit
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I'm very excited about more foss game devs using commented videos!
When does it shake?
The voice is too quiet relative to game audio (I won't watch the video because this makes it impossible for me to watch it "on the side", as I'd have to focus too much due to the volume problem). Compare with recent commented videos made by wolfire or openmw, to see good volume levels.

Well I just checked out the video on youtube, and thankfully the shaking isn't there. I only saw it when I viewed the rendered file on my home system, so maybe it was just a bug with the player (I had noticed other bugs with that player as well).

Yes, I know the voice is too quiet. It's at the worst during the boot screen (where the music is really loud), but I think it gets better after that. I'll adjust the volume further for the next video I make. I already turned down the playback volume quite a great deal when I rendered this video and I was a bit too concerned about making it too quiet. The game sounds better than my voice, after all.