Next Gen Recorder - News & Support

I got the experimental Audio Mixer Recorder up and running on iOS and tvOS too.

EDIT: Audio Mixer Recorder is now available and requires Next Gen Recorder 0.9.11.0 or greater. Please see from post below how to download it.

 

Thanks! Happy to hear

Are you using the scripts from the website documentation (end of the page)? http://www.pmjo.org/nextgenrecorder/integration.html If yes, are you using stacked cameras (multiple cameras)? If you are, you should be using the lower scripts and define the recording camera. If you use stacked cameras and use the first script the capturing would be called multiple times per frame. If not, could you maybe create some simple scene that reproduces the issue and send it to me at support [at] pmjo.org and I would be happy to investigate it.

The watermark positioning does not yet exist. It has been in my backlog as low priority item since people have mainly wanted to remove the FREE watermark. I'll try to take a look into it

 

That's a good tip. Setting the target framerate and frame skipping properly is really important for correct and smooth results. Setting the Application.targetFrameRate is also important because it is -1 by default even the app runs 30 fps. More about that: http://www.pmjo.org/nextgenrecorder/usage.html#controlling_the_video_frame_rate

It is also important to define downscaling rules for high resolutions, especially when you record 60 fps. Not all devices can handle full resolution in 60 fps. More about that: http://www.pmjo.org/nextgenrecorder/usage.html#downscaling_the_video

One simple option is to drop RecommendedSettings.cs to your scene and set the framerate through it. It will also have some basic downscaling rules.

 

Next Gen Recorder 0.9.11 is out! Please remove the old package before import and restart Unity after import.

WebCamRecorder example was removed from Next Gen Recorder examples folder but a new updated version with audio recording is included inside the new experimental Audio Mixer Recorder extension package. Audio Mixer Recorder allows you to record any Audio Mixer bus instead of Audio Listener or Audio Source. Audio Mixer Recorder extension can be downloaded from here.

EDIT: Updated examples to work on iOS. Unity microphone is garbage. You need to do lot of hacks to make it work after returning from background and also to get rid of the lag. In real use it is better to start the microphone just before starting the video recording and stopping it after stopping the recording. You should also set DSP buffer size to Best latency from audio settings. Hopefully I have time at some point to write my own microphone for Unity.

Audio Mixer Recorder last update: 19-09-21

There are two different example scenes inside the Audio Mixer Recorder package:

a) VideoCommentary: Demonstrates how to mix microphone with game audio without playing the microphone out. It also shows how to use ducking to lower the game audio volume so that the microphone is always heard perfectly. It also renders the webcam to a small box but incase you want to record the microphone only you can simply remove the WebCamInput game object.

b) WebCamRecorder: Shows how to record microphone without playing it out. Game audio is ignored. Webcam is recorded in full screen.

Examples are found under NextGenRecorder/AudioMixerRecorder/Examples.

Audio Mixer Recorder is still experimental and poorly tested so there can be issues. I hope you can help me out by testing it

Basic workflow:

1. Import Next Gen Recorder if not yet imported
2. Download and import NextGenRecorder.AudioMixerRecorder_190921.unitypackage
3. Add AudioMixerRecorder component to some game object in your scene. If you already have AudioSourceRecorder in your scene, please remove it.
4. Create a new AudioMixer (Assets->Create->AudioMixer) or open your existing one.
5. Add Audio Mixer Recorder effect to the bus that you want to record. If you don't want to play that bus out at all from your speakers you can move the Attenuation effect below the recorder effect and set the volume to -80.

More about audio mixing at https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/audio-mixing and https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AudioMixer.html

 

A couple of notes related to Audio Mixer Recorder:

a) Audio Mixer Recorder EXAMPLES require Next Gen Recorder and Next Gen Recorder EXAMPLES to be imported. You don't need to import examples if you don't need them.

b) If you try to record the microphone without the headphones it is recommended to lower the game audio/music/sfx to a low value (for example to 0.1) to make sure you will not hear the game audio echo through the microphone. There are free libraries to detect if headphones are connected or not. Even easier option is to always lower the game audio volume when microphone recording is enabled.

 

Finally had time to try out AVPro Movie Capture. In my opinion it is overpriced but the performance was not bad at all. On iPhone XS Max it was almost as good as in Next Gen Recorder and Cross Platform Replay Kit. Funny thing was that without an ice brick under the phone I was unable to get any good results, even there was no recorder used. <3 Apple. When benchmarking you also need to have the phone almost fully charged and low power mode disabled.

 

Next Gen Recorder now supports game audio and microphone mixing by using the experimental Audio Mixer Recorder. More about it in a post above.

 

In my low-end benchmark (on iPhone5S) AVPro Movie Capture performed a bit worse. It actually crashed the app when audio recording was enabled but without audio I got the following results. With audio it is probably a bit slower. In these results other recorders did record audio.

 

Hmm. That sounds odd since NGR mostly runs in it's own threads. Prepare iOS for recording does nothing with NGR. Better uncheck it.

a) Has the issue been there all the time? Or did it just start to happen?
b) So you were using the custom integration (UrpRecorder.cs with recordedCamera)? Could take that out for a while and try if the same happens with MetalScreenRecorder? Then I would know that I need to investigate UrpRecorder scripts. Have you modified the scripts?
c) Are you immediately starting the recording when the camera opens? Calling PrepareRecording and StartRecording sequentially does not help. PrepareRecording is automatically called if it has not been called before StartRecording. For smallest possible lag there should be some time between PrepareRecording and StartRecording. It would be good to call PrepareRecording when for example initializing the level and StartRecording a bit later.
d) What else are you doing when starting the recording? Are you for example starting the microphone or something else?
e) Does the issue happen only when calling the StartRecording for the first time? On first time a bit more buffers are created if PrepareRecording has not been called earlier.
f) Does the issue happen with all devices or with just some?

It would be great if you could somehow reproduce this with some small test project so I could take a look at it. Or if you can give access to your project I would be happy to investigate it. You could send me the project or a link to support [AT] pmjo [DOT] org.

 

That is probably the reason. Starting the microphone will block main thread. You could try start the microphone when you initialize the scene. In my opinion Unity microphone is the most terrible API in the engine.

 

Hi there. Unfortunately the timestamps are not exposed to the user as they are tracked on the native side. Basically the timestamp is captured when the frame rendering happens in the rendering thread. May I ask why you need the timestamps?

 

Hey! Sure I can try it out at some point. I have just left Unity Technologies behind and now putting up a new startup (not related to recording technology) so quite busy at the moment

 

There is no 100% guarantee of frame being recorded because worst case scenario can be that the encoder is too busy and it needs to skip the frame. This however usually does not happen when game is running smoothly. Another scenario where some frame might be skipped is that you run game 60fps and you have set the recording to be 30fps, then every second frame would be skipped.

I didn't quite understand if you want to record the game in realtime? like every frame in 60fps or 30fps. Next Gen Recorder is meant to be used for realtime recording. None realtime recording however can be achieved by setting realtimeRecording to false but that has some limitations (constant frame rate instead of custom frame time stamp).

One thing that came into my mind is that you could maybe use Next Gen Recorder's Highlight feature (http://www.pmjo.org/nextgenrecorder/usage.html#highlights) to mark the places you are interested in. I would then just need to somehow expose these to the Unity side.. for example add an event that is called when the highlight is added. But if you want the timestamp of all frames then this would not be the way to go.

 

I'm happy if it helps you! By using the AudioMixerRecorder you have total control what audio gets to the video and what not. However you must have quite good understanding how the Audio Mixer works. Please examine the provided examples inside the AudioMixerRecorderPackage, especially VideoCommentary-TestScene. It might actually be enough to do a similar Audio Mixer and when you have an Audio Source that you don't want to record you just don't set the Audio Source Output field to point to the mixer, just leave it empty and for the ones you want to record you set it to Master -> Playback. Things to watch and read: https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/audio-mixing and https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/AudioMixer.html.

EDIT: The experimental AudioMixerRecorder package is downloadable from a post above

 

I'm not yet sure if I will add it to the Asset Store package because the examples will cause the app to require camera permissions even the application would not be really using the camera. Unity incorrectly checks if camera is used or not. Or if I add it, I will add it without the examples. Other option is that I will add it as a separate product or just as a download on my website. I would love to hear how it work but nobody has said anything about it. Are you using it atm?

 

I see. Unfortunately I haven't had enough time to test it out. Have been kind of hoping that someone who needs it could be testing it and if no problems are found it is ready to go out. Currently I have nothing to add to it so it is finished in that sense but proper testing is not done (like multiple devices, different Unity versions, going background while recording and coming back etc.) I would really like to do my own microphone recorder also because the Unity microphone is really bad.

 

After working there over 6 years I have actually just resigned and now putting up a new startup company with some old friends.

 

Hi and thank you! So if I understood correctly you want to capture game audio but not the microphone? I assume you still want to capture microphone for processing it? If this is the case you could disable microphone speaker playback with Audio Mixer. Then it will not get recorded. You cannot simply mute the microphone Audio Source because that would cause audio processing not to work. Instead you can follow Workaround Steps from this link.

For more complex setups you can use my new experimental feature Audio Mixer Recorder which explained in posts above (download is there too). It will basically allow total control what gets recorded and what does not.

 

I think the volume is not affected but when you use Unity microphone the audio might get routed to the ear speaker instead of the main speaker. You can maybe force it back to the main speaker from iOS players settings with Force iOS Speakers when Recording option. Beware: you must have done the above mentioned microphone muting Workaround before enabling it or you get a really nasty echo effect

 

Hi! I guess it does I personally had not tried it before but did a quick test with https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/arfoundation-samples sample and with the Free version of NGR.

Workflow I used:

1. Import Next Gen Recorder FREE
2. Add SimpleRecorder prefab from NextGenRecorder/Examples/Prefabs folder to the Menu scene
3. Added Metal Screen Recorder on to SimpleRecorder object

Here is the video:

 

Thanks! Happy you got it working! And you are welcome

I'm not totally sure what you mean by keyframe/seconds controlling. In NGR you can control the frame rate but not the time of a specific frame. You can also use constant frame time by disabling realtime recording. You can read more about frame rate and realtime recording from here http://www.pmjo.org/nextgenrecorder/usage.html#controlling_the_video_frame_rate

 

Hi! I assume you are running it on iPhone? Your project is quite exotic and I'm not sure if Unity audio plugins have been built that in mind. You could check what the UnityPluginGetAudioEffectDefinitionsFunc ptr above the UnityRegisterAudioPlugin actually is, is it NULL for example. Are you sure the crash comes from UnityRegisterAudioPlugin and not from ngr_GetUnityGetAudioEffectDefinitionsPtr? If so the AudioMixerRecorder binary should be in build. You could also try with some third party audio plugin (or unity audio plugin demo plugin) to see if any audio plugin works with your combination. You can also contact me at support [AT] pmjo dot org and I will give you a version of AudioMixerRecorder that has some debug logging in it to investigate this further.

I do have one line of code (native side of the plugin) in mind that we could try to change.

 

I always answer support emails so if you don't hear from me, please check your spam folder. 95% of my emails go there directly because of my exotic email address

 

No problem. Glad you got it working.

 

Thanks! That feature has been in my mind many times. The API for it is just a bit difficult to decide. Pixel coordinates would be easier for the user but if the user requests a texture size that is not supported or uses scaling the position would be incorrect on the actual recording texture. So I think the coordinates should be normalized between 0 and 1 or -0.5 and 0.5. That would however make pixel perfect positioning a bit more difficult for the user.

Other option would be to be able to set a corner, like BottomLeft and then margin/offset from the screen border. Any ideas?

Need to think this more.

 

Hi! Good news. I have been working on the watermark positioning feature and it's about ready for testing. Please contact me at support [at] pmjo [dot] org and I can email a version for you to test

 

I have noticed that Virtual Screen/Automatic Integration no longer works properly on Unity 2020 and 2019 when running Mac/Standalone. Please use other integrations on these Unity versions. I might need to deprecate Virtual Screen in future releases if I don't find a fix. More about integrations methods in online documentation.

 

@distastee @Mawari_AlexanderFedorov I am happy to inform that Next Gen Recoder 0.9.13.0 is out and it now supports positioning of the watermark

 

Some more good news. I have created a new extension for NGR called Realtime Microphone. It is a super low latency microphone for iOS and macOS, hence called Realtime Microphone. Basically it could be already tested with Audio Source but I'm still wondering how I would implement it so that it would offer an easy api for microphone data processing also.