how do you guys capture gameplay?

dracono99

dracono99

[09] Warrior
im looking into obtaining a capture system to capture gameplay from my ps3 prefferabley hd 720p but relitivly cheap would be nice after all i gotta have some money 4 sc5 right
 
Uh, how much are you willing to pay? Realistically if you want HD you'll probably need to spend around $150 at least.

I have a friend who uses a Blackmagic Intensity Pro, which is a little under $200. It's an internal install, and I haven't heard many good things about Blackmagic's customer service. It used to be a good deal a few years back, but there's better stuff for less out there nowadays.

Hauppauge has the best track record for capture cards - if you are comfortable with internal installation the Colossus is excellent, only $150 and has true HDMI support. They also make an external capture device that's easier to use but it's more expensive and only has component inputs.

Roxio sells a low-cost (relatively) card at $100, but it only outputs video at 480p. Haven't heard or seen much about it aside from the price...if you've never used capture devices before it is probably your best choice; it sounds easy enough to use. But if you want the highest quality possible, I'd go with Hauppauge.
 
thanks you have confirmed my research we'll see if theres any good deals during the holiday season
 
Anyone who buys a Hauppauge is a fool (and yes, most streamers out there are FOOLS). Hauppauge does not use DirectShow when their input feeds; which means you can't view the video directly in your preferred capture program like VirtualDub, Wirecast or FMLE. This is why you see a lot of streamers using screen capture software to output the video. What they are doing is viewing the input with Hauppauge's shitty WinTV software, and then screen capturing the view.

If you're doing this, you are losing a lot when it comes to quality and can lead to a lot of aliasing. Out of all consumer level capture cards, the Blackmagic Intensity Pro is the only one I've found that can do high definition, HDMI and uses the DirectShow interface. You would be a FOOL to buy the Hauppauge just to save yourself $50 as it will give you more trouble in the end as they are in fact NOT easier to use. Easier to hook up, yes, but not the use.

Not to mention, the HD-PVR is a sham. It claims to do uninterrupted HD, but this is simply not true. It is impossible, yes IMPOSSIBLE to send HD video over USB2.0; there is just simply too much data going through the pipes. So how does the HD-PVR do it? It doesn't. It takes the HD signal, compresses it, sends it over the USB2.0, then decompresses it at the other end. Which of course means a massive loss of definition and quality.
 
I can add that an external solution would be the Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle which works on USB 3.0 and unlike the regular internal Intensity Pro, you can capture at full 10bit uncompressed 1080p (although SCIV is natively in 720p and possibly SCV as well). And if you happen to use a Mac then you even have a better option with Intensity Extreme via Thunderbolt which offers even higher data throughput via an external device. Whatever you get, just make sure you also have a computer thats to spec to handle HD and have software (post compression, editing, etc.) to do whatever it is you want to do.
 
Jaxel left something out about using the Black Magic cards. You will have to get some extra hardware to prevent tremendous input lag when you're playing. However this is not the case with the HD-PVR's. You can use it right out of the box without any extra hardware and have no extra input lag added (just what you get from using component cables). You'll also need a beast of a computer in order to use the Black Magic cards. You'll need at least 2 or 3 harddrives synced together in a RAID to process all of the raw data coming through. Otherwise your video will be choppy and dropping so many frames that your video will be unwatchable. In the long run, you'll be spending alot more to use the Black Magic cards than the HD-PVR, but like with anything involving quality, you get what you pay for. The quality on the HD-PVR's are still really good. Just some food for thought.
 
Enkindu... thats almost true... if you use the pass-through on the BMI Pro, it will add a SMALL amount of input lag... not "tremendous". But its still unacceptable. You can get a $50 component distribution amplifier at RadioShack to fix the issue.

You will need a beast of a computer with the BMI Pro, because as I said before... it actually does REAL HD, and real HD requires a lot of bandwidth. However, you don't need 2 hard drives in a raid array anymore. Several years ago, you did; because hard drives were slower and MJPEG sucks. Now, hard drives are much faster, and the MJPEG codec has been greatly improved. You can record to a single hard drive with uncompressed video without issue.

However, I don't record uncompressed anymore... I record in flash h264 compression in order to stream, and any random hard drive can record that without any issue (although, you need a super powerful computer to encode flash video in HD on the fly)... Core i7 was designed specifically for this kind of media encoding. In fact, if you DONT do something like this, you have absolutely ZERO reason to have an i7 and you're wasting your money.
 
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