Best way to record gameplay footage from editor game window?

Looking to create a trailer for a mobile game but not sure which software is the best. Ideally free. The problem with fraps is that
It captures the game editor UI ( the grey bits ) can the full version record part of screen and output it to like 1600x1200?

I tried OBS kept capturing footage slow with black artefacts and sometimes opening the video files crashes. Any recommendations on correct settings?

Any other recommendations? Capture footage at specific resolution without the damn grey bits.

 

You can capture editor window with fraps (with UI), camstudio (if you specify region).

The best idea would be to build the game as fullscreen application and run fraps. Then convert result into mp4 with ffmpeg or something else.

 

I'd recommend Action!
https://mirillis.com/en/products/action.html

It's not free, but it has the best performance for this type of stuff. FRAPS hasn't been updated in years. It's really slow and out of date.

 

I can recommend the Open Broadcast Software
https://obsproject.com/
It's free and it runs quite well! A bit tricky to set up though so you might want to read the documentation for that, but once done it's really just straight-forward to use.

 

I would say OBS Studio is your best bet. As for setup, set it native to your game resolution eg (1080p), minimum 40 - 60 Mbit/s recording with VBR, x264 codec(CPU). If your PC is too slow, use the NVENC H.264 codec (for compatibility with premiere) the AMD version might work as well. Don't use Intel QuickSync if you use Premiere Pro, there seems to be a bug in how OBS Studio is handling the compression and it throws the audio out of sync and creates artifacts in the beginning of the recording. (Sony Vegas can handle it though if I remember correctly)

You should aim for your recorded footage to look indistinguishable from what your game looks like on the screen. (Just crank up the Mbit/s as you need) cause once you start editing and compressing for YouTube, you will loose quality. Oh yeah, almost forgot, choose MP4 as your format. Hope this helps.

Edit: For best results, build your game first so you can avoid unnecessary artifacts.

 

if you got a nvidia gpu, just build the game run fullscreen and use shadowplay

 

If this is for a trailer can't you crop it when you're editing your footage together?

That said, you're probably going to get better results from a build in any case.

 

This recorder works well also,
https://getsharex.com/ (opensource free)

or directly in editor to mp4
https://github.com/unity3d-jp/FrameCapturer

*update 2019:
frame recorder
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/?stay#!/content/94079

 

only the video bitrate setting for that is completely broken and has no effect so its all really low quality audio isn't saved either... even tested with the new cisco h264x 1.6 release. I don't have the time nor interest to look at the c++ code part of it. And according keijiro, i-saint is really busy and probably not going to get back to it, that was months ago when I asked and he didn't.

 

I actually did that at first instance the result was a horrible messed up resolution. Cropping out the top and bottom part just makes it look like some unnatural wide screen resolution.

I will play around with obs settings and also try a build.

 

Cool, let me know how it goes.

 

I ended up using my ipad build and connecting it to my macbook. Used
Quicktime to capture high quality footage no lag nothing! Just huge files though.

 

Nice, I guess you have a little of compressing to do once you are finished editing lol.

 

Try this soft https://screen.center . Using this tool, you will be able to record normal screen output and have the option to record audio through the computer mic or a headset. Hope it will work as fine for you as it does for me.

 

Hello, does anyone know a of a free software that can record your gameplay/editor window and has the capability to record certain parts of the screen (only the inspector tab of the Unity editor)?

 

Why don't you just crop it whilst editing?

 

OBS can do this.

 

This honestly sounds like a far better workflow if you need to do cropping. Make the bit where you do recording as easy as possible because you need to concentrate on making quality footage, not on fiddly technical guff.

That said... if it's for a trailer or gameplay footage, record from a build! Have you ever been browsing Steam games and been turned off by badly comped footage, odd resulotions, or shaky frame rates in trailers? Don't be that person! Take the time to figure out a nice pipeline that gets good footage, and stick to it.

Or don't. Less competition.

Of course if it's for this kind of thing, just do whatever is easiest.

 

Whatever you do, don't use this https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/unity-recorder-94079
It records at bad quality even with "High" quality settings.

 

So using OBS, how can I capture a specific tab or window in the Unity editor?

 

For anyone finding this thread in the future (or now that it's been necro'd), I recommend using Unity Recorder which is available via the Package Manager. It can record at a fixed frame rate by slowing the game clock to match your video frame rate. Overall it has a few advantages:
1. Performance overheads of the Editor itself are a non-issue.
2. The frame rate (and therefore animation) won't have any jitter.
3. You can record at whatever resolution you want, independent of what you can show on your monitor.
4. No cropping afterwards is required.
5. From memory there are options for lossless recording, which is great if you're going to edit it afterwards (which you probably should!) assuming your HDD can keep up with it.

In short, you can ignore what I said in those 6 year old posts about the importance of recording from a build.

For recording the Editor itself I've often used ScreenToGif. It's open source, easy to use, I don't really care about perfect picture quality (though I've had no issues), and despite the name it can output to mp4 videos to keep the size nice and low.

 

I can't find this, in the Asset Store or Package Manager... did it get renamed? Discontinued? Only available in certain editor versions?

 

It's still there for me in the package manager. What version of Unity are you using?

 

Yeah, it's still there. By happenstance I used it recently, though, and due to changes in how it encodes things it's nowhere near as good as I remember.

In particular, the highest available setting for recording MP4 is too compressed to get decent results, especially if you're going to use it as source for editing afterwards. So you need to capture a PNG sequence and turn it into a video in separate software, which is a bit of a pain. Not sure if it supports audio capture in that case, either.

Its main advantage compared to a 3rd party solution is that it can capture at a controlled frame rate, which is still very useful in certain use cases.

 

Might just want use OBS
https://obsproject.com/
with Fullscreen Editor
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/fullscreen-editor-69534

 

that should have been fixed in the last year or so. I remember discussing it in a thread with an engineer here. However because the encoding got moved into a core feature I believe those settings got locked to a Unity version, thus regardless of the package version of the recorder you are using you may not have access to custom encoding settings

 

Good to know. I saw people asking about it and the encoding change explanations, but didn't see any comments about it being addressed in the wild.