About Direct Video Game Capturing May 8, 2013

Some of you regular viewers may be aware that I typically do not include directly captured game footage with my site’s videos.  In the videos where I have shown game footage it would usually be restricted to during a convention, beta test, or when I’m doing a short commentary.  In these cases, I have usually stuck to doing an off-screen capture using the same camera that I have shot all my videos on.  The camera is quite good at capturing video footage clearly, but it has nowhere near the same quality that a direct video capture can provide.

There are several reasons why I have been unable to produce videos using a direct capture system, the most obvious one being the cost.  The cost of some of these devices can range around what I paid for my site’s HD video camera, and with the amount of games (and game consoles) that have been coming out in the past few years, and with my intention to focus the site’s content more on written articles, voice recorded podcasts, and videos I would be appearing in myself, buying a new game capture device was not on the top of my list for site expenses.

The other reason was that up to this point, I have been quite unhappy with the wide majority of capture devices available at retail.  First off, when I first started shopping around for them, the vast majority of them couldn’t capture in HD, even if they said they were HD on the box!  Since I shoot my site videos in 1080p HD, I have been waiting for a decent capture device to release that would meet that specification, on top of all the other specifications I had for it.  Some of these personal specifications included 1080p HD capture support, ease of connectivity, external storage support, console and PC compatibility and HDMI support.  We live in the HD game world, and a simple SD capture device wasn’t going to be good enough for me.  Lets face it, if I was going to pay money for something, I wanted it to be able to do everything I needed, and if I couldn’t get it I was willing to wait.

Well, some new capture devices have hit the market which now meet my specifications perfectly, and I have been considering finally putting one on order in order to capture game footage for upcoming site videos.

My question is this, what new kinds of video series would you like to see on the site that could make the best use of this?