Action is Great! My suggestions...

[Fish]

So, Action is missing several features that make it difficult to use on a serious level. I currently own Fraps, Playclaw (lol), Dxtory and Mirillis Action. I also own a Live Gamer HD capture card -- Don't get me started on that thing. Ugh! (Cap cards are designed for consoles, and you can sometimes jimmy-rig them to work correctly with PC's.)

I love the Action interface. The Mirillis codec does a great job keeping high image quality with very little hit to performance. In that area, Action is definitely #1. But, I WANT this to be the best recording software. Not just the best at performance. I currently use Dxtory, but it has poor support (one guy working out of his basement) and a terrible interface. So here's what I'd like to see in Action:

Hotkey Options

Why can't I customize these? There are some keys on my keyboard, that will not work as hotkeys. The primary one I notice this with is Scroll Lock. I use that for PTT, because it's basically the only key not in use for other things. It would be nice if I could set this to any key I want.

While we're on the subject of a PTT hotkey, why am I limited to one? Let me set multiple PTT hotkeys. For example, when playing Planetside 2 I have 4 different PTT keys in-game. Would be nice to bind those in Action. Unfortunately for me it is not an option to use voice activation, due to background noise where I live.

Overall the entire Hotkey Settings tab, feels like an afterthought to the development team. The way they are displayed and bound could be completely overhauled to be much more intuitive and customizable.

Audio

This, in my opinion, is the biggest issue with Action. The audio quality is not very good. Even if you have the bitrate set to the highest option (512 kbps AAC) the microphone sounds terrible. In Dxtory my mic sounds glorious. But in Action, it sounds muffled and quiet. I've played with the "Audio Balance" section of the audio tab, but it requires me to lower all other sounds, in order to record the mic louder. This makes people in TS/Skype sound too quiet. In this respect, Dxtory just works. I set my mic volume to ~90% and BAM, it sounds great. I generally play with the game on about 15-20% volume in the game settings, so voices are easy to hear/understand. For reference, I use an Audio Technica AT2020 USB mic, professionally mounted on a Rode swivel arm, with a shock mount and pop filter.

(On this subject, as a side-note, I've never been able to get the "Record mic into separate track" feature to work, even while using AVI.)

Again, I'm using Dxtory as an example because I feel it is the benchmark that all recording programs should strive for, when it comes to their feature set. The audio tab is amazing in Dxtory. I can add as many, or as few, audio items to the tab as I want. I can use Virtual Audio Cable in conjunction with Dxtory and it will create a separate audio track for my game, Teamspeak/Skype, my voice and my system sounds. So I can mute out things like Steam chat message notifications, while still hearing everything else. I can also turn the volume up/down on people I'm chatting with separately from the game and myself. The audio is crystal clear and is honestly Dxtory's shining feature.

On Screen Display

The OSD for Action is nice. But it gives me information I don't care about (average framerate), leaves out information I DO care about (current video framerate) and at times is too large and intrusive. Again, Dxtory gets this right -- Give me my current framerate and the framerate my video is recording at. Completely hide the video framerate when not recording, so that it's not taking up extra screen real estate. It would be nice if I could customize the color and size of the OSD, as well.


As you can tell from above, I like Dxtory. But like I said, it has bad support and a pretty bad performance hit in comparison to Action. What I'd truly love to see are the features above (and any other Dxtory-type features) added to Mirillis. But the biggest thing that keeps me from using it full-time, is the audio. I just can't seem to get it right in Action, no matter how much I try.

[Fish]

Oh one last thing...

A better ignore feature. Not just a text file, but an actual ignore feature built into the UI. =)

[radi]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Some of them are already on our users wishlist but some of them would be great to see in future Action! updates.

[Slash]

Hi. I just activated Action! and found out that "SCROLL LOCK" is not possible to use as push to talk key for mic recording. That is a huge problem! Can you please fix this issue?