Capturing videos in LOCK-ON

[firesoldier845]

Just wondered if any of you A\V computer gurus out there could give me a hand with a few technical questions.

 

I've been really gettting into making flight sim videos, it's a lot of fun and has helped me a great deal with making home movies of my daughter that has helped me score big time points with the wife.

 

Anyway, I've been using FRAPS but I have some issues. The main thing is that my videos are choppy because LOCK-ON is very demanding on hardware. Even though I can get 40-50fps while flying or playing back the saved track in LOMAC, once I turn on fraps my fps hits down into the teens and the movies are choppy as hell.

 

I've found a nice cheat and that is that I set the resolution in LOMAC to 640X480 and it looks like hell at full screen but then my movies are smooth as heck in fraps cause I am getting over 100+ fps in the game at that low of a resolution. They look great when played in media player and are smooth as silk. This works nice and seems like I have the issue solved BUT I really would like higher resolution videos so I can go to DVD or even HDTV format.

 

So, a potential workaround was to use my S-Video output on my video card and send it to my camcorder and record LOMAC in DV-AVI format - and totally bypass FRAPS. Great idea, but I found out when I bought my camcorder cheap that it doesn't have S-Video IN, only S-Video OUT and not even A\V in only has firewire IN\OUT. If I spent a few more bucks I could have got a camcorder with S-Video in and problem solved but I didn't so I am screwed.

 

I wondered if there was a driver and program that would allow me to send the game video through my firewire port out to my camcorder but no luck. Is this even possible? Anyone ever here of something like that? Maybe even a convertor box that would take S-Video IN and output to firewire???

 

On the other hand too I see these video capture cards for less than $50.00 online - would this be what I needed???

 

I also thought that if i got a 2nd HD and used RAID that maybe FRAPS would be able to capture at higher resolutions without dropping frames??

 

Or if I got a firewire HD and saved the FRAPS screens to instead of the HD LOMAC was running on it would it work better??

 

The last thing I could do is use the in game video render AVI tool. I mean I could use this because I could set FULL graphics to incredible levels and render a kick ass movie but that means time and I am very happy with FRAPS if I could get it to not drop frames. Like I mentioned before I found a method that works half ass but it works.

 

I know I provided my own solutions above but I don't know which ones will work or not work and I have to spend money to find out if most of them work or not and don't want to spend $$$ if I ain't sure if it will do what I want or not.

 

In conclusion I am buying a laptop next month and can get windows media center edition with it that has S- video IN which I guess could solve my problem- the thing is that it's $199 more for the S-video in and if I could find a $50 solution or even a free solution I could save $199 on my laptop.

 

Sorry for the long post, any suggestions????

 

cheers

[GGTharos]

Why not just use the built-in AVI renderer and record form tracks?

[firesoldier845]

Yeah I am leaning towards this and I won't have to spend any money to do this. But I am concerned about the rendering times and also I've read a few issues about file size of the AVI file problem if it's larger than 2 gigs. I am not clear on this issue though - is it true or not that if the file size is 2 gigs or more that it won't work? I have DVI-AV files on my computer that are 12 gigs that play fine and edit fine in Sony Vegas but I've read that 2 gigs or more with LOMAC that are problems. Is this true or not?

 

I'll probably use the AVI render in LOMAC, but what kind of times are we talking to render a ten minute clip? Is it better to break the movie up into small tracks and render them individually?

 

Is there a way to even break up tracks using LOMAC? I sure wish there was a rewind button or way to save tracks mid playback.

 

I like the convenience of FRAPS very much but again, I have those issues with dropped frames at higher resolutions.

 

The ingame render times I mean how bad are they for a typcial track like 5-10 minutes of gameplay - will it finish over night in like 8 hrs or are we talking even longer times?

 

I guess worst case scenario could create many seperate missions for tracks and render each scene seperatley in the renderer??

 

Also one other question about tracks. I noticed (and I only tried this a few times) that if I setup a mission with certain settings for graphics and then go back and try and change the graphics settings in the track and set them higher that it reverts back to the old graphic settings. Is this a bug or is my install nerfed or maybe I am just doing the procedure incorrectly.

 

For example, I recorded a track with SCENES MEDIUM and WATER to MEDIUM and then tried to set SCENES HIGH AND WATER VERY HIGH and when I play the track back it reverts back to SCENES MEDIUM and WATER MEDIUM. From what I have read here it seems that it should not be doing that but it does that for me and can't figure out why.

 

cheers

 

firesoldier845