To Casters - Which software do you use to cast?

Hello!

I've become interested in doing some videos for casting, and I did a little research about softwares available for casting. Well, needless to say, I got a little confused about the possibilities - there are a lot of options!

So, what software do you use for casting? I'm not trying to find "the best", but rather know what I need/can use effectively. Mind, as well, that I don't use twitch, and don't know how it works.

If possible, could you be so kind to answer:

- What is your preferred tool?
- Why did you choose it?
- Is it a generic software that can be used well with any game, or there are games that get better results with this or that soft?
- Does its use interfere with the gaming experience? Memory use and such
- Is it relatively user-friendly? I mean, I never used anything like this before, so this will be a totally new experience.

Lastly, I'm asking this using my laptop, but I have a desktop where I usually game on. It came with a Radeon R9 graphics card, and along with it came some softwares installed that seem to do the trick - are they good? For starters, are they enough?

Thank you for your time!

If the mods could be so kind as to edit the typo on the title - it should read "To Casters". My Keyboard ate my "s", and this sounds so bad

Nvidia Shadowplay or AMD Gaming Evolved are the lowest performance impact options and work pretty well for most people.

FRAPS, Obs, MSI Afterburner etc all work perfectly fine too but have different degrees of performance impact. FRAPS is the highest, OBS and Afterburner are pretty similar.

I would recommend trying out AMD Gaming Evolved's video functionality first as it has the lowest impact on game performance and will be easy to set up.

https://obsproject.com/

Thank you! I particularly enjoyed the fact that you can "test" your machine and connection and it calculates recomended FPS and resolution. As a bonus, I found Speedtest.net, which I always wondered about.

(...) I would recommend trying out AMD Gaming Evolved's video functionality first as it has the lowest impact on game performance and will be easy to set up.

Got it.

I forgot to mention, but it's important to say that I won't be making any "live" castings, which surely makes it much easier for post editing, or so I think. The purpose is uploading to Youtube.

- What is your preferred tool?
- Why did you choose it?
- Is it a generic software that can be used well with any game, or there are games that get better results with this or that soft?
- Does its use interfere with the gaming experience? Memory use and such
- Is it relatively user-friendly? I mean, I never used anything like this before, so this will be a totally new experience.

1) I use OBS. My very first casts were with Nvidia Shadowplay. At the time, Shadowplay lacked features that I wanted (like the ability to easily add overlays), but that may have changed in the ~2 years since I last used it. I feel like Shadowplay gave better-looking recordings with the default settings, but OBS is very configurable and I was able to get good results with some tinkering (mainly to bitrate). OBS can also easily output recordings with a small file size, which may or may not be important to you.

2) OBS is "generic". You can use it for many other games or simply for screen capture. It is also free, which is worth mentioning.

3) I do not feel that there is a noticeable impact on the game. My PC is by no means high-end.

4) Getting OBS running the first time can be tricky. If you decide to use it and want help, send me a PM.

Good luck!

Hey,

I use the new OBS Multiplatform (cf. https://obsproject.com/download#mp) and it works pretty well. Sources are now global so it's easier to configure by default. OBS is highly configurable so you can have very good image quality but it can have an high CPU usage depend of the configuration.

If you don't want to create scenes, add multiple video/image/info in your video or spend time to configure OBS maybe try first AMD Gaming Evolved Client (cf. http://www.amd.com/en-us/markets/game/raptr). It use your GPU through the VCE (Video Codec Engine) to record.

Thank you! I particularly enjoyed the fact that you can "test" your machine and connection and it calculates recomended FPS and resolution. As a bonus, I found Speedtest.net, which I always wondered about.

http://beta.speedtest.net Speedtest without flash ^^