Recording ingame altitude video

[Posthitter]

I'm guessing Fraps is the best way to do this, or has steam provided a way now?

[VAN1SH1NG]

Fraps is one of the best ways if you have more than 1 hard drive as recording to same drive as game and OS leads to worse performance. If you will do a lot of recording you'll need that Fraps drive to be large since Fraps files take up a ton of space. You can reencode them into a smaller format after recording if needed though.

I think Dxtory has probably overcome Fraps as the most popular recording software, but it is much more complicated to use. Fraps is simple and has very limited settings.

If you want slightly lower quality, but still very good looking video with smaller file size you might look at Action! by mirillis.

If you have video cards that support it, you can also use the recorders from Nvidia or AMD. If you have only one hard drive you'd probably be best off with either Action!, Nvidia Shadowplay, or AMD Gaming Evolved.

I really only have experience with Fraps though so can't personally compare my experience with it to the other options.

[LewisH]

If you have CPU power to spare, some software can encode the video to a compressed format as it's recorded, making disk space and speed less of an issue and saving time from transcoding after. I use SimpleScreenRecorder for this and love it, but it's only avalible on linux. For windows, OBS (made for streaming, but can also save to a local file) works well, but it seems much more complex to set up than something like fraps.

I record altitude in 720p on my laptop with a 2GHz dual core intel processor, encoding to H.264. This uses less than 50% CPU and no frames are dropped.

[Posthitter]

my computer struggled even with the fraps so doubt any of the others will be any better. But thanks.

[Solikos]

Fraps ran good on my older computer, but really kills performance on my new machine (FPS drops from ~140 to ~20). I'm told OBS runs a lot better, so give that a try. There are tons of options, and I haven't figured out how to run it effectively yet -- but looks like there are some tutorials on youtube.

Good luck!