WHAT to use to record

[tyrell.trammell]

Hey what do I use to record and still have good quality and no lag on my i5 laptop?

[Miri]

http://grpforums.ubi.com/showthread.php?35480-Best-Screen-Recording-Program-Suggestions

If you don't feel like reading that, the long story short is that you should use OBS, Open Broadcasting software, which is an open source broadcasting community made software app that is meant to stream to twitch.tv, however, you can simply check "local file only" to make it simply save videos to your hard drive, it becomes a very reliable recording tool. It encodes "on the fly" so you don't have the FRAPS huge video files. This means you have to have some CPU horsepower to use it (also you must have enough CPU to spare WHILE running the game you want to record)

To start, I would set encoding bitrate to about 2500kb/s, and make the resolution 1.25 (1280x720), and the FPS (frames per second) recorded to be 30. (As youtube only supports 30fps at the moment)

You can then set up a "scene", all you need in your scene to start your adventure is a single "Game capture". Right click that and select ghost recon phantoms when you have it running, and it should begin to capture ghost recon phantoms, you can then click "edit scene" and make the capture of GRP fill the recording window. (You can also do this by right clicking the "Game capture" and using the "fill the screen" option.

Should be good to go, if you find it's making your system lag, then you may want to turn down the resolution to 960x540, and turning the bitrate a bit lower, to like 2000.

Resolution does not equal quality. The bit rate is the amount of quality it will allow inside your picture every second. You can record 1920x1080 in 300 kb/s and it will look awful.

The best thing to do is to balance your quality for your file size, for the typical 30 minute GRP match (27 minutes video) a 2500kb/s at 1280x720 should be about 800,000 megabytes.
The only reason you would need to worry about it is if your upload rate is pretty slow, it takes me about an hour, maybe 2, to upload 800,000 megabytes. If it's no issue, you might just want to turn the encoding up to whatever you feel is the highest quality without being so big that it's just wasting space, which I don't really know.

The resolution and frame rate are what most impact system performance with recording, My system (i5 2500k @ 4.00ghz) can really only handle 1280x720 and keep the game at 60fps, if I do the 1920x1080, then it starts to choke down GRP to 57fps sometimes, which I don't like.

I didnt achieve best quality until I watched a tutorial video and gave myself a custom buffer size of 1000 in encoding, and in advanced options, checked "custom x264 encoder settings" with the command line "crf=19" These two things change your "buffer timing" and won't give you that blurry screen effect every 3 or 4 seconds like if you just set a bitrate. However, it impacts file size slightly. (+10%-15% maybe?) These options may impact system performance, not quite sure, but my i5 didn't notice.

You can also use this program to stream to twitch, that's it's main purpose originally, but that's a whole nother set of instructions that I won't go into

[Miri]

"Help me, I just want to record"

Download OBS for free
Open the Settings
Goto >Broadcast Settings, and change it to "File Output Only"
Goto >Video Settings and change the resolution to something your system can handle (1280x720 or 1920x1080?)
Goto >Encoding and change max bitrate to something you are happy with, this will trade file size for quality of video and more will also impact system performance slightly. (I suggest 2000 for low systems and 7000 with high systems)
Also change Buffer Size in the encoding settings to osmething between 1000 and 7000
Goto >Hotkeys and set a "Start recording" and "Stop recording" hotkey, you can also set a push-to-talk hotkey for your microphone in your video if you want to use push-to-talk
Goto >Advanced and type "crf=20" in the "Custom x264 Encoder settings" (Leave the box CHECKED)
Close the settings by hitting "OK"
On the Main window, RIGHT CLICK "Scenes", and select ADD SCENE, Name it whatever you want (("Main 1"))
Since "Main 1" is selected, RIGHT CLICK "Sources" and add a source to your scene. Use Game Capture.

This should be complete, when you start recording it should automate your "game capture" to ghost recon when you start, but if it doesnt, just right click your game capture source and select "Ghost recon phantoms"

You can add watermarks, or scrolling texts to overlay your gameplay with extra sources in your scene.

[tyrell.trammell]

thnx

[Knee Grow®]

Guys, everytime i use the OBS it crashes my game!

[Dimzin]

I use nVidia's Shadowplay, It can stay running in BG w/no effect (That I've noticed) and I've got it set to manually record the last 20 minutes (or portion thereof) w/hotkey press.

As for encoding, There are soooo many options available that personal taste really comes into play and I'm not going to venture there.

[Eric Adams Secret Bathtub Lore]

there is litecam 100fps recorder, uses verry little ram, should see no drop in performence. Nvidia sheild is also good, howver it is still in beta.
(litecam, I got it on sale was 2 dollars)