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Q u o t e:
If anyone has their Mac loaded up with 16GB or so of RAM, I'd love to know how well it works using a 14GB RAM disk as scratch. :)

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

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Q u o t e:
I've think I've figured out the "blank green screen" movie issue, where I'll get nothing but a green screen recorded.

This only happens on my system when I have the Show UI option deselected. It happens for all compression, framerate, or sizing options as far as I can tell. Otherwise it takes videos pretty well.

However, I seem to be running into a framerate wall. It might be a bottleneck on my system (likely, it's a older G5 Imac), but no matter what size, framerate, or other options I select, I always top out at 12-14 fps. Kinda annoying, specially when I'm getting 40 fps before I start recording. Take a look at my system, and let me know where the choke is.

17'' Imac G5 1.9 Ghz /w 512 KB L2 and 633 Mhz bus
1 gig ram
128MB Radeon x600 pro
250 gig Serial ATA 7200rpm
OS 10.4.10
Quicktime 7.2

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Q u o t e:

Those could also use an upgrade.

I'm really resisting the urge to rant about how overpriced Macs really are.

I might just build a Hackintosh. Anyone in this thread running on one of those? How is it?

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Q u o t e:

Those could also use an upgrade.

I'm really resisting the urge to rant about how overpriced Macs really are.

I might just build a Hackintosh. Anyone in this thread running on one of those? How is it?

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

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Q u o t e:

I take it this means that the video capturing is done in a separate thread which can take advantage of a second core/CPU?

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I have a problem, this feature is not available on Windows WoW clients, why is that?

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Where are my Windows only features?

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Why can't I have the little iTunes remote option in my game?

Why do I even use iTunes? wtf is wrong with me.

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

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Q u o t e:
I am haveing some problems geting this movie recording feature to work on my mac mini or macbook.

All the mac options are dimmed out on mac mini and macbook and when ever i push record start/stop key on my macbook and mac mini it just beeps and dosent do anything!

Please Help!

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

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Q u o t e:

Ran permission repair, restarted, no change, still no movies in the folder.

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

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Q u o t e:

As it is currently set up, if I stop recording a movie, it will go straight into compressing it. That means that I cannot start another movie directly after, but I have to wait the full duration of the compression to start another movie. Is it possible to have an option to delay compression? Also, if I cancel the compression while its in progress, do I completely lose the video that hasn't been compressed yet? Also I am unclear on how the "Recover Incomplete Movies" works.

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Will there be a way to setup a different target folder for the movies?

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I'm not sure on this but it doesn't seem like the movie is capturing at the same gamma as my computer. It may have to do with the resolution though.

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I'm not completely familiar with the different compression types. Do they affect quality of the movie at all? Or do they mainly affect the size of the movie after compression? Which codec would be preferable for speedy compression and small file size?

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I currently cannot record with the Show UI option unmarked. I can record just fine while showing my UI, but if I uncheck the box, my movie comes out as a green screen with the correct duration and sound, but no video.

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I am glad there is a movie recording icon on the minimap, but it seems rather small to me. Hard for me to tell on the fly if I'm in the middle of recording or not. This probably isn't the case for most people, but I thought I might as well mention it.

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While compressiong my framerate drops considerably. During movie capture it regulates the framerate well and runs smoothly.

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One of my coworkers actually found some really nice shareware whose name I can't recall right now sadly that allows you to batch process files. I think if WoW provided just one more codec - Uncompressed - then at the cost of massive amounts of disk space then players could easily just drop their uncompressed movies into whatever compression app they liked without having to significantly change the way the feature works now.

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Q u o t e:
I got this error while compressing a movie from World Of Warcraft.... I hope it helps in research!
WoWBuild: 16932
Local Zone: Durotar
Local Player: Sudo, 00000000000C2B8D, (1280.42,-4396.77,26.3038)
Add Ons: Blizzard_FeedbackUI

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Love this!

1: When i'm recording in jpeg at 40 fps, at res 800 x 500 stops at random intervals, and lock the game for 3-15 seconds. the times very, between 43 and 1 min 43 seconds. did 5 tests. i have 4 gb left on the HD so it's not space.

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Q u o t e:
New issue to file under stress testing:

I walked in Tree from AQ to Org, the trip took about an hour. The compression took almost two. The resulting file is over 6GB in size. This all makes sense so far.

I open the file through Finder, into Quicktime, and it says the clip is only 2:52 long.

VLC confirmed that the clip is "only 2:52" long, as did iTunes.

The original was recorded H.264, 23.98fps, high quality, 600x400 resolution, and I'm using a brand new 20" iMac.

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Q u o t e:
Tigerclaw, by any chance do you have any idea what a safe throughput rate would be for a Firewire iPod used as an external disk?

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After some more testing a video clocking in at 20 minutes allows for the full video to be accessed, but the quality is severely degraded compared to shorter videos at the same settings in the same areas. 1-5 minute videos around the Dark Portal give me nice crisp results at my chosen settings, but the 20 minute version is choppy from beginning to end without regard for in-game framerate. I'm not sure where the limit is, but I'll do some more testing in the 10-15 minute range. Understandably it takes time to both record and then compress.

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Q u o t e:
320x200, 38 minute duration, 20fps, H.264, flew back and forth on the flight paths in Outland.

Opening the file yields an error in Quicktime player
"The movie could not be opened. The movie contains an incorrect duration."

I went out and updated VLC and it turns out that the current VLC can play many of the previous problem files without the reported stutter, and can open this latest file without error.

The massive 6gig file, however, still reports a runtime of 3 min.

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

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Q u o t e:
2.04 GB wound up only taking an hour forty seven minutes. Unfortunately the server maintenance interrupted the compression, so I'm waiting on that and posting this meaningless update for no really compelling reason. Hopefully the recovery will pick up like last night and I won't lose the file. Since 4 GB is going to clock in at a little over three hours I'll try and snag that this evening while we're watching LotR and secretly wishing that we could all be at a Potter Party instead.

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

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Tigerclaw, update from a Mac that can't use the video capture (iBook G4 w/R9200):

The iTunes portion of the Mac Options Panel is still grayed out on the new build of the PTR. Not sure if you guys got to working on that part yet, but if you had, just letting you know.

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My biggest problem is that parts will loop, and if i wasn't the one recording, i wouldn't understand whats going on because.....the thing is jumping all over and what not.

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Does'nt always compress the movie when i simply hit the stop recording Keybind

record keybind is: shift[ or {
stop record keybind is: shift] or }

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Recorded at 70fps and 100fps without the corrupt frames I was getting before the last patch.

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considering the fact that the Mac options in the interface has a panal for iTunes remote is it planned that the movie maker will be updated in the future to record music from itunes?

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What I've found that usually throws off the sync is rapid changes in framerate (or what would usually cause that since when you're recording your FR is locked).

Flying around shat on a nether ray is good for this, when you buzz over large areas, especially when the groups of NPCs are drawn.

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

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Q u o t e:
I found that in order to capture at a reasonable frame rate I had to severely knock my graphics settings. Normally I play with everything on/maxed (including the infamous Fullscreen Glow and Vertical Sync) and get 20-30 FPS outside. When capturing, in order to get 10FPS in a 640x480 movie I drop to (I think?) 800x600 resolution with terrain distance at less than half.

Dual 1.8 G5, 2GB RAM, Radeon X800 Mac, more info can be posted if needed. ;)

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Q u o t e:
Where could I find my videos?
Would they be in my WoW Folder? Or what?
Please help me out here.

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I have a Mac and every time i press the button to record (5 i think it is) My comp beeps and i dont think anything really happened how to record properly???

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I bugged this but will post it here too.

The recording is awesome! Thank you!!!!!

Two bugs:

1) When turning off UI (thank you!!!!!!!!) recording, it still records UI generated sounds (tooltips, windows opening and closing, etc)

2) Movies are not saved internet fast start (like you can choose with Quicktime pro export) so the movie data is stuck at the end of the movie, and thus the entire movie needs to load before it can play on a web page. Internet Fast Start ensures the movie data is saved at the beginning of the movie file.

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

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Q u o t e:
"movies"

And as for the internet fast start, It would be nice to see this as an option, and not the norm. I have had some odd issues in the past with editing those types of files.

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I have one of the brand new 24" iMacs with 2.0GB of RAM and anytime I start recording the application completely locks up. The first time it happened all I could see on the screen was a striped pattern.

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I don't have the PTR installed, but I'm curious - this means that the expected codec list will include:

Motion JPEG
H.264
Uncompressed RGB
???
??? (couple new choices)

Any word on what the ??? will be filled with? =D

EDIT: if using Uncompressed RGB or any other near-lossless codec, does that mean less time waiting on the compressor before restarting capture? Currently with iShowU, it's done compressing the Apple Intermediate capture before I'm done with my corpse run in SSC, which is perfect.

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Q u o t e:

I don't have the PTR installed, but I'm curious - this means that the expected codec list will include:

Motion JPEG
H.264
Uncompressed RGB
???
??? (couple new choices)

Any word on what the ??? will be filled with? =D

EDIT: if using Uncompressed RGB or any other near-lossless codec, does that mean less time waiting on the compressor before restarting capture? Currently with iShowU, it's done compressing the Apple Intermediate capture before I'm done with my corpse run in SSC, which is perfect.

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[ Post edited by S4d1k ]

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Q u o t e:
FYI Tiger, I tried movie recording a 3rd time on my new iMac. Only this time I tried using movie recording in windowed mode and it works. So it looks like the crash bug is only happening while trying to record movies in fullscreen on the new iMac.

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Q u o t e:
That makes sense. Well at least mathematically. Why there's no input validation is still a mystery.

But that means you should be able to get a ~4 GB disk image with a "number of sectors" around 109050000.

And you can create a software RAID-0 set to give you about 8 GB total. I don't have the RAM to test on big RAM disk, but it at least works for me on small RAM disks:

dhcp-249:~ profplump$ hdid -nomount ram://100000

/dev/disk1

dhcp-249:~ profplump$ hdid -nomount ram://100000

/dev/disk3

dhcp-249:~ profplump$ diskutil createRAID stripe ramStripe HFS+ disk1 disk3

Preparing partition 'disk1s2' for RAID

Adding disk 'disk1s2' to new RAID set

Preparing partition 'disk3s2' for RAID

Adding disk 'disk3s2' to new RAID set

Creating RAID Set (disk1 , disk3 )

Bringing RAID partitions online

Waiting for new RAID to come online "DBF356CD-7434-42AA-A0D2-A44B13AABA83"

Creating file system on RAID volume "disk4 "


The RAID has been created successfully

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

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Q u o t e:
Just spent most of the morning messing around with settings in the movie cap to find what worked best for me.

My set up:

20in. iMac Core Duo
2 gig ram
256 vid card

I have an external drive connected via USB 2.0 which I have the config file pointing to.

Here's the thing that might help people. Haven't read through all the pages of posts so this might have been stated already.

I'm using H.264 as the encoder and outputting at 30fps. I was recording at fullscreen. The thing I noticed was this. When I started messing with the settings I started with 10fps figuring that would create the smoothest capture as far as gameplay framerate was concerned. It turns out that at 10fps I was getting choppy fps during gameplay recording. At 30fps everything was smooth. The resulting video was crisp and nearly flawless.

So bottom line. If you have your framerates bumped down...try moving them to 30fps and see if that smooths things out a bit. It's odd how that worked out so I can see people maybe overlooking it.

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Q u o t e:
I'm running PowerMac Quad G5 (4 x 2.5GHz) with 4GB of DDR2 SDRAM. My video card is an ATI Radeon X1900. I have Mac OS X 10.4.10 and Quicktime 7.2.0.

I've tried recording 3 different videos. In all of them, the video is updside down and has 3 bands of different colors through out. The top half of the video is green. The bottom half is split between normal color and a high gama (washed out) color.

Is this a known issue? Is there a config I can change?

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Q u o t e:
After playing with it some more, i realized you can que up several recordings at once by hitting the "compress" button more then once as the different pre-recorded files show up. The problem comes when you get disconnected from the server while processing several large recordings. While the game will finish a single recording, it will not proceed onto the next one until you login. Kind of annoying if your processing several 10 min + takes.

Either an external program to process the files, or a way for the game to continue onto the next item in the list while logged off and at the main menu would be nice.

Also. Could we adapt the progress bar to show how much of the total render has completed if we have several qued up?

Now to go find a good format to import into iMovie with...

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Hmm, can I have numbers in my name too?

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No matter what I do, the framerate on the movies are always very sloppy. How can I fix this, I understand changing the framerate to lowest, but performance wise, it doesn't make a difference. Is there really a way to capture smooth gameplay???

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Q u o t e:
Something I noticed about recording movies that I thought I might suggest be altered:

When you record a movie without the UI, you still get all the UI sounds. Opening the map, opening bags, discovering a zone, etc... Would it be possible to have the game not record the UI sounds if it is not recording the UI? It is kind of awkward hearing all these sounds, without them being in context while watching your recorded movie.

Just curious.

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

[ Post edited by S4d1k ]

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Q u o t e:

When the program attempts to move from one file to the next when at the login screen, it crashes and results in an error. I have a copy of it, but I sent it in useing the crash tool anyway. I watched the directory in Finder, so I know that it had just jumped from one file to another.

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[ Post edited by S4d1k ]

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Q u o t e:
I just tried it a few times in a row.

What happes is that the last two temp files (the last video temp file of a given recording) and the last audio file, disapear from the directory. The file is compressed, and results in a good movie file. The game instantly crashes after this however, before the next .mov file is created.

Also, I dont know what I changed but movies are playing back very choppy again. Even after moving them to the internal HD on my laptop, they play very 'clunkly'. Quicktime will actualy take 3-4 seconds to play one second of video. This is not the same as the freeze frame issues, as in that case the video continues to play in quicktime smoothy (the time code progresses in real time), but the frame stays stuck.

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Q u o t e:
I just tried it a few times in a row.

What happes is that the last two temp files (the last video temp file of a given recording) and the last audio file, disapear from the directory. The file is compressed, and results in a good movie file. The game instantly crashes after this however, before the next .mov file is created.

Also, I dont know what I changed but movies are playing back very choppy again. Even after moving them to the internal HD on my laptop, they play very 'clunkly'. Quicktime will actualy take 3-4 seconds to play one second of video. This is not the same as the freeze frame issues, as in that case the video continues to play in quicktime smoothy (the time code progresses in real time), but the frame stays stuck.

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[ Post edited by S4d1k ]

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Maybe its not compressing correctly? I try to stick under 25 MB/s if I can help it.

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Q u o t e:
I seem to have run across a bug in the compresser or something..

I captured three movies. The first was 10s, the next 20s, and the last 40s. Each movie captures fine, but they are all 40s long. After the 10s run of the first one, the last frame is held for 30 seconds. The second movie has 20 seconds of its last frame held.

I tested again with a 5 second, and a 10 second capture, same results. The 5 second movie is actualy 10 seconds long, it just has 5 seconds of its last frame held.

Doing it in reverse order (10 second capture, then a 5 second) results in two perfect videos.

*continutes to break stuff*

[EDIT]

Also, does anyone else notice an extreme increase in the time it takes to compress something? A 10 second clip used to render really fast, I had to race to get to my log in screen to trigger that old crashing bug. Now it takes nearly a minute. 6:1 time ratio for a compression hurts, especially if you would like to save a raid thats two hours long (12 hours of renderings, ahhhhh!).

I am capturing at 25MB/s, onto an external drive that could take 80 MB/s in theory (but i am to a-scared to do it). The settings are 30 fps, 960x600, H. 264 with the quality set to one less then max. I'll try to see if other codecs are getting the same slow down, or if lower settings seem to help at all.

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[ Post edited by S4d1k ]

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Q u o t e:
The sound from voice chat still doesn't get recorded onto the movie file. Odd considering that sound is muted correctly when I hit "push to talk".

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Q u o t e:
Will the Mac Mini ever support the movie making system?

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Q u o t e:
I had difficulty getting recording to stop/start the other day. The keybinding was null, so I tried setting it to F15 (didn't take), shift-F13, shift-\, and \, and using any of those bindings simply wouldn't start a recording.

This is on a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with 2 GB RAM; I tested video capture the first week of the PTR successfully.

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[ Post edited by Tigerclaw ]

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Q u o t e:
Also I seem to have found a compression bug. All the movies in a sequence seem to compress to the same codec. I compressed 4 recordings, to try to compare them, and they ended up all being motion jpegs...

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Q u o t e:
Will rez., fps, quality, etc also be effected by what they are set to when you compress?

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Q u o t e:
Tried this today, worked very well. My only question is (and sorry if it's been answered before, long thread), will there be support for saving them to a fat32 hard drive?

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