Anyone know the tools/process used by Starcraft 2 commentators to create the screen recordings of games?

I tried FRAPS which makes great (albeit HUGE) avi files however there tends to be random times (ever 3-6 minutes or so) that the audio will skip/blup or the whole video will freeze for a second or two during playback. I was thinking about maybe going into windowed mode and using CamStudio but it only had the option to record windows sound OR mic, input not both.

The idea is to capture both voice over as well as game sound, and in the end be able to convert to a good quality YouTube video. Quality is the concern, for an example of good quality see: http://www.youtube.com/huskystarcraft.

EDIT: Yeah it could be my system causing the hiccups in FRAPS..

Thinkpad T510, i7 2.67ghz, 4GB of RAM, with this card: http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-Quadro-NVS-3100M.24738.0.html

Solution 1:

Actually, I'm pretty sure I remember Husky explicitly saying he was using FRAPS, though I don't recall in which video, so I can't verify it.

I think that if you encounter skips or stutters you just need to make sure that all other applications are disabled, and if that's still not good enough then maybe you should think about upgrading your system - recording high-resolution videos while playing a game is not an easy task for the computer.

You can also find FRAPS tips online; for example, recording to a different physical hard drive than the one used for the game is supposed to be great for performance.

Solution 2:

Do you get the video hiccups before or after encoding the raw AVI? It matters because a lot of media players can't handle the bit rate of RAW avi @ 1080p.

Try encoding the video to mpeg4 or use real editing software to review the quality. And no, Windows Movie Maker is not real video editing software. It's really bad at pretty much everything.

You can get a trial version of Sony Vegas, it will probably handle the RAW AVI a lot better (I have no experience with vegas as when it comes to video editing I'm an apple fanboy). If you see no stuttering or issues in Sony Vegas you just have to encode your RAW AVI to some better format before uploading to youtube.

Solution 3:

I use Microsoft Expression 4 recorder and it works fine for me. I play full screen games, but in Windows.