Going into our new project, we were very aware that we'd need video capture for various reasons. Gameplay footage, trailer footage and dev streaming to name a few. No one on the team had a lot of experience here so we decided to roll up our sleeves and figure it out, the true indie spirit haha. We were aware of the name brand capture gear like Elgato and Avermedia but decided to try something cheaper to get our feet wet.
Beyond capturing our current work on our dev machines, we also wanted to get vidcap of one of our old games on Xbox 360! It was quite a blast from the past, and the cheap capture card seemed to do ok. The Xbox 360 is not a very high resolution machine so the video bit rates we tried seemed to look fine. The movement on the capture was slightly rougher than native but wasn't too noticeable. All of the Xbox 360 footage was archival and B-Roll if want to do a cool 'Then vs Now' type of thing so this was acceptable. I couldn't quite get the audio right either, there would be a little bit of crackle and it was hard to normalize - some sound effects had harsh spikes when they went off or played simultaneously. I tried different bit-rates, codecs etc but we might just need something better for accurate audio capture.
Fast forward a few months and we were ready for some trailer footage of our current game - but we were behind schedule for implementing our new UI in said footage. Fortunately our video editor was accommodating, so we tried getting a bunch of vidcap later than promised and toss it over. Single player, multiplayer, menus, game modes, customizations, sweet VFX, the list is quite long of features and cool stuff we might want (or need) to show. This trailer was so important to us since we were also lining up a potential press release and other events from a PR company we've been working with. A few of our team members captured hours of footage, hoping to pull some magical clips from it all.
When we started taking stock of what we had and critically reviewing the footage, my heart sank: all of the footage had a roughness on certain animations. In our game, the cylinder of puzzle tiles constantly rotates left and right. If the cylinder had a lot of different colors or was really full, that left and right rotation looked really rough. When we were capturing all of the footage, I thought it was turning out like the Xbox 360 vidcap - just slighty rougher than native. But when we were really reviewing it, it just wasn't good enough for the trailer. :(
So with due haste, we tried increasing the bit rate to crazy amounts to capture more footage. We tried so many adjustments in OBS but just couldn't really smooth out some of the crucial footage we needed. Our studio head Nic Allen (@agamerguy) kept asking "Have you tried ShadowPlay?" Other old timers know what that is/was, now it has become the Video Capture settings in the GeForce Experience. But I'm so glad he asked - fortunately we've been using Nvidia GPUs so it was pretty easy to set up and try. Wow, it worked great and was easy to see that it was super close to native in terms of clarity. We had already decided on some choice clips to use and so we didn't have to spend much time re-capturing all that. Whew, problem solved for trailer footage! But we'll probably need to figure something out for better streaming as we start our Steam dev streams/broadcasts and take to Twitch... Join us on the journey and wishlist now! <3
