- I use a program called Fraps to record StarCraft 2 video/audio and audio from my microphone. This makes a bunch of AVI files.
- I use Windows Live Movie Maker to edit and encode the AVI files into a single WMV file.
- I upload the WMV file to YouTube.
For a longer description, read on!
Step 1: Start Fraps!
Fraps is an application that allows you to capture a video of a program that uses DirectX for graphics. While capturing the video, it can also capture the Windows audio and audio from an external input.
This is perfect for my needs since SC2 uses DirectX, I want to record the game sounds (Windows audio), and I also want to record from the microphone on my headset (external audio input).
As you might guess from the screenshot, Fraps also lets you capture screenshots from a DirectX program (the title banner for this blog was captured using Fraps) and monitor or log the performance of a DirectX program in frames-per-second (thus the name, FRAmes Per Second).
Step 2: Watch an SC2 replay and talk!
When I start up SC2, I can see little yellow numbers in the upper left, showing my frames-per-second. These numbers turn red if Fraps is recording. I configured Fraps so the numbers don't appear in the recording.
Then I login to Battle.Net, set my status to "busy" (so people don't message me in-game), select a replay, press the "Load" button, then quickly press the End key (the hotkey I've assigned in Fraps to start video recording). The numbers turn red and we're "live".
When recording, I run the game with a vertical resolution of 720 pixels. Since I will only be publishing a 720p movie to YouTube, I pick this lower resolution (my monitor can handle 1080p) hoping to lower the impact of recording (Fraps) on the game performance. I also configure Fraps to capture at 30 frames-per-second, which is good enough for YouTube videos (and some games for that matter!).
When I'm done recording, I press End and the numbers turn back to yellow, and I breathe a sigh of relief.
Fraps records the gameplay/audio as a series of AVI files. (I'm no expert on this, but I believe this requires less encoding work?) Each file is about 3.5 minutes of recording and is around 4 GB. My first video was 3 files for a total of 8 minutes 24 seconds and 9.4 GB.
Step 3: Edit and encode with Movie Maker
So now I use Movie Maker to stitch these movie clips together, add some title text, and encode them into a single file.
Here you can see me editing the title text object on the left. On the right you can see a timeline of the movie and can see the three files that I recorded with Fraps. You can also see how long the title text lasts.
Once I have the text in place, I save the movie as a 720p WMV file. This is referred to as "encoding" - as it's encoding the movie into WMV format. I think this part takes my computer around 4x the recording time - so my 8.5 minute movie took 34 minutes to encode. My final file was 263 MB.
Step 4: Post to YouTube
Now I upload my video to YouTube - this took about an hour - so around 8x the recording time. I suspect this is highly dependent upon YouTube upload traffic - their help page said it could take up to 1 minute per MB, which would have been over 4 hours for my 8.5 minute movie!