How to capture game video for YouTube quickly and easily
PlayClaw setup and video capture
With PlayClaw and a few freeware utilities, you can quickly capture game video and prepare it for upload to YouTube.
To begin, you need to configure capture settings in PlayClaw. If you want to capture high-quality HD video, you need to remember that minimal resolution for HD video is 1280õ720, and frame rate must be 25-30 (3).
To get HD quality, set game resolution to 1280x720 or higher (it’s desirable to maintain proportions, in this case 16:9), and in the settings, set the frame size to Full Size (2). To achieve HQ quality, you should either select lower resolution, or select the frame to be half size (2).
To achieve better quality, we recommend you to select low compression (1). However video capture in this mode takes plenty of space on hard disk. If your computer has fast Quad processor, you can select high compression quality. In this case, the size of the captured video will be fairly small.
Once all settings are configured, you can capture what you need and quit the game.
Conversion in VirtualDub
VirtualDub is a free and simple utility to edit video. We need this program to convert captured video from PlayClaw format to some other more common format (and most importantly, the format which is supported by YouTube).
Let’s get started. Open the video in VirtualDub.
The sound track settings (video was captured with the sound) can be left as they are without changes (1).
Now we are going to convert the video (1). Select Full processing mode and choose a codec (Compression).
Selecting a codec (1). If you do not know for sure which codec to choose, download a free pack of codecs K-Lite codec pack. The pack contains FFMPEG pack, which offers many popular video and audio codecs. Well, select FFMPEG and click the configuration button (2).
Now we need to configure FFMPEG. To get started, select compression type (codec) (1) and bitrate (2). H264 is a "native" codec, which is used by YouTube. Besides, the codec produces high quality output. As for bitrate, we can play with it a little. In the picture, the bitrate is 3000kbps, which is more than enough for quality HD video.
Ok, it’s almost ready! On the menu, select Save As and VirtualDub converts video to a new format.
Upload to YouTube
There is one more little step to make. Go to YouTube (do not forget to log in), click (1), select the file to upload, and then click (2). That’s it. YouTube does the rest of the job automatically ;)
As you may have noticed, there’s nothing difficult in it. Just give it a try. Good luck! ;)