Screen / video capture - FPS drop?

[zircon]

I've been using Camtasia for various screen recording things (tutorials, game footage, etc.) but I've noticed that even with my monster processor, video card and RAM, I often get low FPS in games - even simple ones like Return All Robots!, which I'm trying to capture now. Is there some sort of way to do screen capture recording without making the framerate of whatever you're recording drop? Also the *recording fps* is set to 60, so it's not that I'm recording choppy... it's the game itself that's choppy.

Related question: if anyone has better video capture equipment than me, or a way of recording TV output plus an Xbox 360, let me know...

[Late Mistakes]

Normally most video capture programs will drop FPS when recording. It may be best to use FRAPS http://www.fraps.com/ for game recording.

[Pyrion]

Yeah, pay the licensing fee, get FRAPS, record at your leisure. Although it'll still limit your framerate, at 60fps it's not really all that noticeable. Even 30fps is fine for most games (although not all...)

Thing to bear in mind that two of the key factors for recording video at high framerates are the resolution you're recording at, and the speed of your hard drive. Not necessarily capacity (although that helps too), both the sequential write speed of your hard drive and the spindle rotation speed are huge factors.

All of my AudioSurf recordings are recorded at 60fps (previously 960x600 (1920x1200 half-res), and now 1280x720) on a 150GB WD Raptor, preferred over a 1TB WD Caviar Black, for precisely these reasons.

EDIT: What also helps, is to record to a drive that doesn't also contain the game you're playing (as loading game resources will interrupt the recording) or the Windows pagefile (as any activity there will also interrupt the recording).

[zircon]

I'm recording to another hard drive, but the issue isn't the recording FPS... it's the game FPS. Capture res is 1280x720 (can't be any smaller.) The HD is a fairly new WD 640gb Caviar Black drive. Nonetheless, I don't think it's the hD.

[Modus]

Your recording software is likely the cause of the game's lower FPS. Even if the game can't get up to your demand of 60 FPS with Camtasia running, it will record in 60 frames regardless by copying frames. That's because video files can't have "variable" frame rates... well, they can but I seriously doubt recording software uses those types of containers.

Is Camtasia 64-bit supported? Maybe it's not using all your hardware to its full capacity. I have a pretty beastly rig and can easily use FRAPs to record at the highest settings in most games... I'd just give FRAPs a try and see if the issue is the software or not.

[Pyrion]

I wonder if Camtasia itself is just trying too hard (or not enough) to compress the video such that it's forcing the game's framerate down lower than the recording setting (which is what this is starting to sound like) due to either wasting too much CPU to compress the video (and forcing the game to step down its framerate further) or not compressing it much at all and thus lagging the hard drive to the point that, again, the game has to slow down.

What compression settings are you using in Camtasia, if any? Cuz FRAPS doesn't have anything along those lines, its codec does just barely enough compression on its end to manage a realtime recording but spits out 4GB AVI chunks that can contain anywhere from 10-20 minutes of video to a few minutes at most depending on what's being recorded.