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Recording Black For Full-Screen Game Recordings

edited September 2013 in Support
I'm posting this on behalf of a user who cannot use the forum who contacted me through YouTube:

Dear community,


I’ve recently bought a new custom build PC, with NVidia GTX 770, i7 4770 processor and running Win 7 x64.
For some time now I have investigated a problem that occurs to me while trying to record game applications. Let me start by saying that I have tried using several different screen recording softwares, including Camstudio, BB FlashBack, Ezvid, Xsplit, Fraps and some others, and all of them behave in exactly the same way and the issue seems to reoccur with all of them, so I strongly doubt that the problem is caused by the recording software. The desktop records perfectly well, regardless of the win 7 aero settings being on or off and with both 16 and 32 bit graphic settings. When I tried to record games (tried with Neverwinter 1 and 2, The Witcher, Euro Truck Simulator Assassins Creed 2 and 3) the second the game application takes over desktop on the recording I can only see a black image. Game sound records perfectly, sometimes I even get a glimpse of game cursor, but the rest is the deepest and blackest blackness. After researching a bit I tried to play with NVidia control panel’s 3D settings, but this did not seem to work (although I’m not a pro so may have missed something there).
Any input on the problem will be much appreciated. If any more information is needed, please let me know and I'll supply it.

Thanks in advance.

Comments

  • Here are some responses the above YouTube writer has received lately from elsewhere:

    http://forums.cnet.com/7723-19411_102-601837/screen-recording-issue/?tag=tracked-disc;track-601837

    ... going through other forums researching the issue, I found this sentence. May this be the key?

    " When a game is truly full-screen, it doesn't have to play nice and share resources with other applications running; it has full, total control over what gets painted to the screen. This lets the graphics card cut some corners, increasing frame-rate."

    To which there was a response,

    "To get max frame rate the screen does not have to exist in any frame buffer which recording apps use to get the image.

    I'm sure you have found prior discussions and this is not a new issue or unique. This is why those that want to record game play go with whatever works."

    All this sounds logical to me! Any comments from folks here?

    Terry
  • edited October 2013
    The long and the short of it seems to be that certain games can only be recorded if played in a window. If played full-screen, all bets are off - the game can bypass the frame buffers which the recording software sorely needs to capture its data.

    Terry
  • Part of this could also be due to the way the game is rendered onto the screen with overlays, common with "DOS" games running on Windows.

    In XP we used be able to workaround this by turning Hardware Acceleration Off but since Vista changed the way the screen renders with Aero, it can't be done as far as I know ...

    Cheers

    Nick :)
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