Recording and editing video game footage on a laptop?

[John Rofrano]

[Norman Willis] “He has a Dell E1705 laptop with a CoreTwo Duo at 1.83 GHz, Windows XP, 2GB of RAM, an NVIDIA 8600 GT video card, and a single 7200 RPM spin hdd. He can boost the RAM to 4GB physical(which should give him 3.25GB usable). Will this get him started?”

I assume that game footage is going to be high resolution and a 1.83Ghz CPU is a bit slow for this. Also 1.83Ghz is meaningless on a laptop because the laptop CPU’s have different ratings. For example the T4000 series is good for surfing the web and word processing and not much else. The T6000 series starts allow more multi-media processing but you really need the T9000 series for serious video editing. If he has a 1.83GHz T4300 I doubt he will be able to edit much. So knowing the series of CPU is important in a laptop.

[Norman Willis] “He is on a budget. Is there a good free screen capture utility he can use to record screen footage?”

FRAPS is the standard tool for capturing video game footage. I would keep the resolution really low because of his slow CPU. He will need to convert the footage from FRAPS to something easier to edit. Motion MPEG is probably a good choice.

[Norman Willis] “Also, does VASST Gearshift work with Vegas Movie Studio?”

No, VASST GearShist uses the Vegas Pro script API’s and Movie Studio doesn’t support scripting.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Darren Campbell]

https://www.playclaw.com/

PlayClaw is an alternative to FRAPS.