Recording equipment

[Swim]

So two of my friends and I are considering pooling some money and buying recording equipment for youtube videos. One of our channel ideas was (surprise) gaming. I'm trying to do a little bit of research because I know nothing about cameras, but I understand that some of them don't record stuff on monitors and TV screens very well, but there are some that can. We'd like to be able to record content played on consoles and PCs, and I was wondering if any of you have suggestions. I also know that you can buy cables connect your console to the PC and just record everything that way, is that the way to go?

I appreciate any input, thanks guys.

[Andrew]

Well, for PCs, all you'd really need is FRAPS (or a product similiar). It'll record more than just games as well, from what I've seen. It's multi-functional. XSplit and OBS are programs that have livestream functionality. Xsplit also does "local" recording, much like FRAPS.

I know that Xero uses a Blitz Box for his DMC3 videos, which is basically a capture card.

[Xero Bloodline]

BlitzCast Website

This is a good place to start. They have affordable capture cards for your PC, and are fairly user friendly. They allow you to hook up most consoles to your PC and a TV at the same time. They have various models to choose from, or you can always do a search for "console to PC capture card." As far as software, I record directly into Ulead VideoStudio 11 for my PS3 recording, and use Audacity for my audio/vocal recording. Ulead has an easy learning curve and is great for editing videos, but I know Andrew has had issues converting his Xsplit videos into a format Ulead will recognize. So if you plan on doing alot of streaming and recording at the same time, you might wanna do a bit more research. But if you're only going to be doing one or the other, Xsplit works great for streaming as long as you have the computer RAM to handle it (which I don't right now), and BlitzBox and Ulead work great for recording game videos from a console.

[Swim]

Thanks you two, this should be helpful. We're going to a couple stores today to do some more research.

[Nightmare]

I use Fraps for recording my DDR and Touhou videos, and it's alright but it's not very reliable, and on occasion causes some lag that interferes with the game. I probably would use something better if you were going to do this seriously.

Ulead I can vouch for being a great program, even if you were just using it for editing it's incredibly powerful and pretty easy to use.