[Doc Brown]

Hello everyone,

I found this forum through Google and I hope someone will be able to answer me regarding my question.

I want to make videos for youtube; this includes Gaming and Tutorials.
Now, I want to record my desktop and fullscreen games.
Until now, I used a program called Fraps.
However, everytime I record anything ingame... the FPS has hickups and drops from 30 to 10 for about a seconde. This is annoying, disturbes the recording and lowers the quality in the video.
So I'm looking for an alternative. Something that doesn't depends on your hardware or processes on your computer. So I've done a little research...

I stumbled upon a hardware device called HD PVR 2 Gaming Edition .
Now, I am wondering about some details.
- Is this device standalone, in other words... do you need a strong PC to be able to use this efficiently? What I understand from reviews and other documents... is that this device records LAG FREE (no FPS drops) no matter what pc you use. Is this correct?
- Are there other altenatives that you can recommend besides the HD PVR? If so, what are they?

Thank you in advance,
Best Wishes,
Doc Brown.

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Gday Doc Brown, .

Please provide a little more informaiton.
Your full system specs.
The software used for editing.
The country where you will purchase.
Your max budget.

- Is this device standalone, in other words... do you need a strong PC to be able to use this efficiently?
Answer. If you just go by the System specs for both which are quite low, you would have a poor gaming or video editing build.
PVR 2 > http://hauppauge.com...vr2-gaming.html
elgato >http://www.elgato.co...game-capture-hd

What I understand from reviews and other documents... is that this device records LAG FREE (no FPS drops) no matter what pc you use. Is this correct?
Answer. Yes, providing you meet the system requirements but, they will only record at 60 fps and only output at 30 fps.

I have not used hardware capture devices like the HD PVR 2 But have looked at Pro reviews and User videos. The general opinion favours the Elgato Game CaptureHD
There are lots of videos but this one does cover everything and not too annoying.
> http://www.youtube.c...h?v=RE1qYj5vxUA

The above are really only capture cards in a fancy enclosure with some software. An alternative is a PCI-E capture card inside the computer. You can start at the lower end which may be OK for you, depends on your editing software, see link, or go all the way to a pro card starting at about $700+
> http://www.mwave.com...re-card-aa79640

May be able to improve your existing method, depending on your specs.

[iammykyl]

Gday Doc Brown, .

Please provide a little more informaiton.
Your full system specs.
The software used for editing.
The country where you will purchase.
Your max budget.

- Is this device standalone, in other words... do you need a strong PC to be able to use this efficiently?
Answer. If you just go by the System specs for both which are quite low, you would have a poor gaming or video editing build.
PVR 2 > http://hauppauge.com...vr2-gaming.html
elgato >http://www.elgato.co...game-capture-hd

What I understand from reviews and other documents... is that this device records LAG FREE (no FPS drops) no matter what pc you use. Is this correct?
Answer. Yes, providing you meet the system requirements but, they will only record at 60 fps and only output at 30 fps.

I have not used hardware capture devices like the HD PVR 2 But have looked at Pro reviews and User videos. The general opinion favours the Elgato Game CaptureHD
There are lots of videos but this one does cover everything and not too annoying.
> http://www.youtube.c...h?v=RE1qYj5vxUA

The above are really only capture cards in a fancy enclosure with some software. An alternative is a PCI-E capture card inside the computer. You can start at the lower end which may be OK for you, depends on your editing software, see link, or go all the way to a pro card starting at about $700+
> http://www.mwave.com...re-card-aa79640

May be able to improve your existing method, depending on your specs.

[Doc Brown]

Hello iammykyl,

Thank you for replying.

"Please provide a little more informaiton.
Your full system specs."
- Windows 7 Prof
- Intel i7 860 @ 2.80GHz(4 Cores)
- 8G RAM
- ATI Radeon HD 5800 (4G)
- 1T hard drive
- VIA High Definition Audio
- I hope this is enough.

"The software used for editing."
- Adobe Premiere Pro (CS6) and/or Adobe After Effects CS6
- Recommend any other?

"The country where you will purchase."
- Belgium, United Kingdom, France or Germany.
- Depends where it has the best deal. (Amazon, etc)

"Your max budget."
- Around 200€/£160 max. for now.


- It seems the Elgato and the HD PVR 2 are both quite good, but it seems the Elgato requires higher system specs. Not sure if mine are good enough.

Best Wishes,
Doc Brown.

[iammykyl]

Gday.
Thanks for the info, but do need a bit more please
Your brand/model of the MB.
The brand/model of the GPU as I can't find a 58xx with 4GB of Vram except Asus ARES ATI Radeon HD 5870 X2
The brand/model of the PSU.

Your system is good enough for using the two capture boxes, but falls short with HDD quantity and configuration both for FRAPS and software, which is
tops, don't think you can do much better.

A few things you could do first before going the capture card road. stay with FRAPS, add a second HDD which would be used as a dedicated recorder for FRAPS. You would then be reading from the OS drive and writing to the second HDD as against doing both on the one drive.

We may also be able to use the second drive to speed up editing/rendering in the Adobe software though a min of three drives should be used.

Clean up and optimize your system to free as much resources as possible.

[Doc Brown]

Gday.
Thanks for the info, but do need a bit more please
Your brand/model of the MB.
The brand/model of the GPU as I can't find a 58xx with 4GB of Vram except Asus ARES ATI Radeon HD 5870 X2
The brand/model of the PSU.

Your system is good enough for using the two capture boxes, but falls short with HDD quantity and configuration both for FRAPS and software, which is
tops, don't think you can do much better.

A few things you could do first before going the capture card road. stay with FRAPS, add a second HDD which would be used as a dedicated recorder for FRAPS. You would then be reading from the OS drive and writing to the second HDD as against doing both on the one drive.

We may also be able to use the second drive to speed up editing/rendering in the Adobe software though a min of three drives should be used.

Clean up and optimize your system to free as much resources as possible.

Hello iammykyl,

Here is the information you requested:

Power supply: ANTEC TRUEPOWER 750WATT NEW SERIES TP-750

I made a mistake with the graphics card, sorry about that.
This is the correct one: SAPPHIRE HD 5830 1GB GDDR5 PCIE (Game Edition)

MB: https://www.asus.com...rds/P7P55DE_LX/

Side question: when using one or two more HDD's, the writing speed of each doesn't matter?

Best Wishes,
Doc Brown.

[iammykyl]

Gday.
Thanks for the addition info. A good strong board and PSU. GPU will do the job but is a little limiting in performance. If you become more serious in your production, I would advice at a later date, upgrading to a Nvidia card to take advantage of the Adobe software where CUDA is preferred.

when using one or two more HDD's, the writing speed of each doesn't matter?

Hard drives are the bottleneck in a system, so the faster the drives the better. If you just want to do a test writing to another drive, an will do but a 7200 RPM is better, (not green drives)
2 or more drives in a RAID array must be identical. no blue or green drives
The most ecenomicle way to buy drives at the moment is 1TB. In the top right on this site, you can just click on the country location and your selected items will change to prices for that country.(my choice, Seagate ST1000DM003) > http://uk.pcpartpick...=64&f=2&sort=a9

[Doc Brown]

Gday.
Thanks for the addition info. A good strong board and PSU. GPU will do the job but is a little limiting in performance. If you become more serious in your production, I would advice at a later date, upgrading to a Nvidia card to take advantage of the Adobe software where CUDA is preferred.

when using one or two more HDD's, the writing speed of each doesn't matter?

Hard drives are the bottleneck in a system, so the faster the drives the better. If you just want to do a test writing to another drive, an will do but a 7200 RPM is better, (not green drives)
2 or more drives in a RAID array must be identical. no blue or green drives
The most ecenomicle way to buy drives at the moment is 1TB. In the top right on this site, you can just click on the country location and your selected items will change to prices for that country.(my choice, Seagate ST1000DM003) > http://uk.pcpartpick...=64&f=2&sort=a9

Hello iammykyl,

Will the GPU's limiting performance be noticable in the video or are you talking about the speed it will render?
Anyway, I much appreciate your help in this matter.
If anything else comes up, I will contact you again through this topic.

Best Wishes,
Doc Brown.

[iammykyl]

Gday.

Will the GPU's limiting performance be noticable in the video or are you talking about the speed it will render?

If using two HDDs, the in game frame rates will improve and the render time should go down. The limitions are how high the setting you can use while gaming and the ability for the card to use the Mercury Playback Engine (MPE) capabilities.
CUDA, > chrome-extension://hehijbfgiekmjfkfjpbkbammjbdenadd/iecontainer.html#url=http%3A%2F%2Fforums.adobe.com%2Fthread%2F773101
Disk resources, > http://forums.adobe....tart=0&tstart=0