Capturing high quality gameplay footage

If you’re going to be making a game trailer, you’re most likely going to show some gameplay footage.

One of the things to keep in mind is that you’re going to want to capture your footage at the absolute best quality possible. That usually means capturing and saving the footage to some uncompressed or lightly compressed video codec. This means massive files and gigs and gigs of data especially if you're capturing at 60fps.

One other thing to keep in mind, is it’s best to capture your footage with your in-game music turned off. Generally, you’re going to want to have a different soundtrack playing for your trailer, and you don’t want to accidentally capture your footage with the music baked in. Turn that off, and just capture the footage with the sound effects enabled, and that will give you the most flexibility when editing your trailer down the line. You also may want to disable the HUD on your game so the gameplay isn't obstructed by any distracting elements.

When you're trying to capture specific gameplay moments you may want to create some cheat codes or warping abilities in your game.

Screenflow (OS X)

Let’s just start out with the best piece of software for the job, and that’s Screenflow. Unfortunately, it’s OS X only, which is a damn shame, considering how good it is.

Screenflow is super intuitive to use, and has an option to capture lossless 60fps footage internally to an uncompressed format, and then save it out to an uncompressed Quicktime which you can bring in to any editing package. It’s a rock solid piece of software, and you can capture multiple streams at the same time. You can capture audio through a USB mic (or iSight) along with capturing footage from your screen, and from your iSight or webcam all at once, and it brings those in as multiple video tracks into Screenflow’s editor.

It also allows you to remove or replace the mouse cursor with whatever you want. If you don’t want the mouse showing up in your footage, a simple checkbox removes it. You can also edit your entire trailer inside of Screenflow if you want (I wouldn't recommend this) but the capability is there.

I like Screenflow so much, that I’ve installed Parallels on my machine so I can capture some PC game footage using this software.

I used to recommend FRAPS as the best recording software for Windows, but the best tool out there for Windows is now Bandicam. If you have a capable graphics card, you should definitely use the Nvidia NVENC codec which offloads the encoding to the video card. With fullscreen games, it seems to magically capture the raw output without affecting the performance of the game. There's also options for RAW capture with external codecs, though if you want to bring that footage back into OSX, you will need to transcode it.

Capturing NVENC H264 videos to MP4's instead of AVI's seemed to work better for me when brining that footage back into OSX. You can specify some incredibly high bitrates for the footage as well, which makes playback a pain, but transcoding to an edit friendly codec on OSX (like ProRes 4444) seems to be an adequate workaround.

Capturing iOS or console footage