Windows Video Capture Apps with good playback and resolution?

[Charles Simonson]

On the PC, there is the free Windows Media Encoder, and there is the paid Camtasia Studio. Both do a good job for most projects.

On the mac, there is Ambrosia Software’s SnapzProX, a great utility. Probably the best thing to do, but maybe not possible because your content is gaming based (is it a computer or console game, and if computer, does it use OpenGL?), is to buy a hardware card like a cheap DeckLink board and use its Desktop video output feature to a SDI device to recapture it back in at full Uncompressed glory.

While these solutions should work at least somewhat in all cases, I still don’t understand why you want to upres the content when editing it. Seems pointless to upres at the editing stage.

[Ben Waggoner]

Also, Camtasia and WME are designed for normal computer-like tasks, like IE and Word. If it’s a full-screen video game, both will slow to a crawl. You’re better off with a scan converter in those cases, which could take VGA to SDI, and then capture from that with an SDI capture card.

There are also DVI to HD-SDI converts if you really want to work in HD. 1280×720 60p works great with some games, and looks great as well.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html