Curious if anyone knows any quality video capture software? I've been hyping my editing skills for 4 years now to my guild and friends, time to put my money where my mouth is so to speak, and make a few neat videos with some of our Everquest Raid footage as GoD comes out.

I MOVIE or Final Cut Pro are teh BEST and therefore what I use on my Mac. On a PC adobe's Premire is nice and Final Cut PRo for the PC is ok but the mac is way cooler and only has one mouse button!!!!!

hrm, maybe I wasn't specific enough. Short of piping my laptops screen through s-video cables to a deck (that I don't have) I was hoping to digitally copy images (like screenshots, only 29.98 frames per second worth of screenshots!) into like a quicktime or other video format. You see Everquest videos all the time, I just don't know any good capture software.

Fraps. fraps.com.

Great stuff. ANd a fast hard drive is a good thing.

Everquest videos come from piping one machine's video out into another's video in usually. About the only single machine solution I know of is fraps, but it sucks horribly for EQ last time I tried it.

If you search, there have been multiple threads where the Vision guys explained it to death.

I wish one of you hosers would hurry up and get a video of us killing RZ for the news. Malse and Korlis both said they'd do it for me, like 384 RZ kills back, but never did.

This (http://pub142.ezboard.com/fsolusekseyefrm11.showMessage?topicID=369.topic) is the thread on the Vallis Aspectus message board that covers how a lot of the old Vision videos were made.

Not sure how up-to-date it is, but there might be something useful for ya there.

I use Fraps now. I'll put up 2-3 videos from it tonight and update my guide.

This is perfect! I'm figuring I can capture the footage, throw it over onto one of the boxes at school and final cut pro them, then throw them onto their servers and put em into after effects. I've done this with a few samples and they worked out pretty good, registering the program now. Hopefully it won't lag to hell in raid environments though.

For those of you planning on doing this ...

I've found that the Sorenson codec for various compression programes (like Cleaner, which makes me hot) is probably the best for this type of media. Can compress down to a really sweet and small package perfect for burning to CD or posting on the web. Sorenson doesn't have a good audio codec, but compressing audio beyond a wave file can limit your end result. I guess you can compress to MP3 if its just music or something too, which I guess an Everquest movie would be.

I edited on Final Cut Pro because, well, its the best program ever.

I then threw some of my practice films (with the fraps.com watermark and the 15 second capture limit) into Adobe AfterEffects and worked in a few little buggers I created in Maya (like a "Rest in Peace" logo, and a copy of the Singing Short Sword I made months back) and of course the overused lense flare :) All in all, the quality of the fraps program, even on a half screen resolution, is almost broadcast quality.

I captured at 20 fps. I know that television runs at 30 fps and that caused some problems, but once you get to the end stage it doesn't really matter. Quicktime and FCP kinda work that out for ya.

Lastly what I wouldn't suggest is dumping this down to beta and trying to work on an AVID. For some reason the AVIDs have a really hard time importing these graphics, or maybe just the AVIDs at school blow. Anyway, keeping it in quicktime format and working on FCP (or I guess the Premier is kinda the PC equivelent) is the best bet and makes for some really neat end effects :)

Thanks again Sanchek / Palimax, using the program FRAPS instead of what Palimax outlined on the VA page a lil while back (which is another viable alternative) kept it all to digital, and the entire process (while I was just screwing around) only took me 3 hours from Everquest footage logging to playing it back on my miniDV player.

Why is having one mouse button an advantage? =/

If I ever bought a Mac (meaning it would actually play some game I wanted to play) the first thing I would chunk is that damn mouse. Aesthetically it looks pretty...the clicking action feels very natural...but one button is a dealkiller for me =/. I want scroll wheels, multiple buttons...maybe a throttle...and a directional HAT might even work...

Lyrik to Jobs: Cater to gamers and maybe you'll sell more Macs...

Actually, if you're talking about the current Apple Pro Mouse and Wireless Mouse, they're pretty nice mice (the older hockey-puck mice, on the other hand, were an abomination.)

I've had Apple notebooks of some sort for the last 2 or 3 years, and the only time I've really wished I had a 2 button mouse was recently when I was playing D&D on my PowerBook (with this (http://www.kloogeinc.com) Java-based client) while kiting Agnarr & friends on my PC. Klooge.werks' useful functions are only available through context menus, and ctrl-clicking to open them is difficult when one hand is occupied in EQ...

Other than that, I really haven't missed the second mouse button on my Mac, and I "live" in a world of 2 and 3 button mice at work.

Of course, the lack of games on the platform is a different matter entirely...

The video and audio editing software for the MAC is far superior to the PC, Premier can't hardly do what FCP can. AVID is technically a PC software, but its really a whole different animal, and I still like FCP more.

Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, etc. were also first created on the MAC and MACs are still the only computers used in the design industry.

In many cases, only because of tradition and very steep price discounts.... Heh.