Screencasts

I've always wanted to do this and to see other people do it too, especially very high elo players and first-timers (though theres a few helpful vids for that on YT).

Never gotten to all the technical stuff necessary though. If possible I'd like to have keys pressed displayed, because I think that's really important for people who watch. I thought about creating a few mini tutorials that way.

I could do this on Twitch but I would likely become silent as the action intensifies.
Could anyone recommend a good free recording program?
I guess I could use OBS http://obsproject.com/ but I have only used it for streaming this far.

I guess I should mention there's two kinds of videos players might want to consider making:

a) Screencasts of live play, with or without commentary

b) Commented replays

Both are good. With the first, we get to see how you play, i.e. how you use your mouse and hotkeys, control your camera, select and order units, etc. That could be very interesting and helpful for new players. With the second, we get to hear why you played like you did. That's probably even more interesting and helpful.

But I'd love to see both. Or either one. Whatever the better players feel like doing. It's all good.

There's something kind of like that. If you're using COFC you can turn on tracking the selected player's camera. When you do, your camera will follow that player's camera location. There are a few limitations, though.

Player camera locations are only updated every second or so. You can see this when you're watching the colored spots move around on the map. So when you set your camera to follow the spots, the camera will jump around once every second or so. The movements are smoothed out, but it's still somewhat jerky. Try it and see for yourself. It's neat, but I wouldn't use it for a cast.

Edit: I'd actually been wondering whether the send-players-camera-position widget couldn't be updated to send updates more frequently, like maybe ten times a second or something. I can't believe that the overhead would be all that much, either from a CPU or network perspective. It's distributed with Zero-K, so the devs could update the frequency in the source and then everyone would get it in the next update.

Edit: Now that I think about it, I think the COFC option tracks the player's mouse cursor, not camera. Which is also interesting, but not what you were asking about. I guess you have to use Lockcamera for that.

Oi, here's my first screencast without commentary. It's just a test and not a high skill game, so disappointment is ensured! In case you even get so far, there's a pause at 8:10 - 8:45, just skip it. I had to QQ in #zkdev about captured CAI units moving around on their own.

I wanted to safe on upload time so the recorded resolution is just 840:525 (half of my monitors). Bitrate was 2000kb/s. For other things OBS defaults were used. The next video should have a higher quality. Tips on how to achieve that appreciated.

By the way, my upload speed's around 4.5 MB/s. Is that enough for me to do some live screencasts?

Great stuff! Moar please. :)

The upload time will only depend on the bitrate, not the resolution. For a given bitrate, a higher resolution will look better when still but have more motion artifacts when moving. Similarly, for a given bitrate, a faster framerate will produce smoother video but have more motion artifacts.

For a given bitrate and resolution and framerate, you can get fewer artifacts by telling OBS to use more of your CPU to do the encoding. There's an option setting in one of the menus that has superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, slow etc. The slower you set it, the more CPU will be used to encode and the better the encoding will be (i.e. fewer motion artifacts). The downside is that leaves less CPU available for other tasks, including running Spring, so your game may become slow, laggy, and choppy.

You'll have to play around until you find the sweet spot for your rig. The best option, though, is to be patient with your uploads and use a higher bitrate. Nothing will improve your quality as much as increasing your bitrate. Since you're uploading rather than streaming, your only limit is how long you're willing to wait for the upload to finish. Kick it off, then go outside and play in the fresh air. When you get back the upload will be done and you'll have gotten some healthy exercise. :)

The main difference in quality comes up mostly with motion. I played around a fair bit with test videos to figure out how much it mattered, and the difference was basically that on veryfast, any and all motion (at least in ZK, not so much Achron) would cause brief artifacting, which ultimately meant the entire video felt blurry. With fast, there are still some artifacts, but only on really large movement. The artifacting from zooming and panning with the middle mouse button is minimal, rather than constant and noticeable.

That being said, I'm only doing it because streaming is limited by both the streamer and the viewer, so it's to allow me to stream at 2250kbps rather than 3500kbps(Twitch recommended max) without having much of a loss in quality. Ideally I could stream at 8000kbps(10mbps upload) and have Twitch handle dynamically downsampling, but they only do that for partner channels.

honk honkerson ...really

video is watchable though.

"no towers" - Yeah, but you made slashers so what's the difference? :)

Watching now, quality looks pretty good.

The very best kind of video might be a game recorded first-person with no mic, then overdubbed afterwards with commentary by the same player talking about what they were thinking at the time.

Edit: I like the way you use z-shaped line moves to spread your units out across a front while concentrating them in the middle of the front. That had never occurred to me before, and probably never would have without seeing your video.

Got some footage now.

quote: The very best kind of video might be a game recorded first-person with no mic, then overdubbed afterwards with commentary by the same player talking about what they were thinking at the time.

What is the easiest way to do this? Can I do it with OBS?