Major concerns about the product that need to be addressed.

[strychzilla]

I loaded up the trial version to give it a shot and it records great. There is barely an FPS hit when recording. That's really the only great thing I can say about the product.

If you plan on doing any editing it's a poorly thought out process. You have to render what you recorded in order to load it, with audio, in an editing program. Even after you render to get the audio, it does not make separate audio clips for you to load into the timeline. You are stuck with 1 track and unable to remove ambient sounds or mic sounds. When you render the footage, it's rendered at 30 FPS which is terrible for FPS games and slow mo's. Whatever codec is used to record, Sony Vegas, the only program I have tested, does not like working with it at all. There is extreme stuttering and I had to reload the project a few times in order to make basic edits in the timeline.

Why you are forced to render footage, just to edit it, and render it again is confusing for me as that will greatly reduce the quality of the footage.

Anyway, are any of these issues being addressed? If you just want to record and go straight to youtube this is great for that. If any editing is required this is a terrible product.

[AlanDavison]

I loaded up the trial version to give it a shot and it records great. There is barely an FPS hit when recording. That's really the only great thing I can say about the product.

If you plan on doing any editing it's a poorly thought out process. 1) You have to render what you recorded in order to load it, with audio, in an editing program. Even after you render to get the audio, it does not make separate audio clips for you to load into the timeline. You are stuck with 1 track and unable to remove ambient sounds or mic sounds. 2) When you render the footage, it's rendered at 30 FPS which is terrible for FPS games and slow mo's. Whatever codec is used to record, Sony Vegas, the only program I have tested, does not like working with it at all. There is extreme stuttering and I had to reload the project a few times in order to make basic edits in the timeline.

3) Why you are forced to render footage, just to edit it, and render it again is confusing for me as that will greatly reduce the quality of the footage.

Anyway, are any of these issues being addressed? If you just want to record and go straight to youtube this is great for that. If any editing is required this is a terrible product.

1) You don't have use the built-in export function to get all of your audio tracks separate. You can just use an external tool, like ffmpeg to rip out the audio streams and work with them that way. Now, I do agree that it's incredibly strange there's no built-in tool to export the audio tracks. That does seem a little short-sighted to me, but it certainly is possible without using the export function.

2) Considering that if you're uploading to YouTube in the end, 60fps isn't truly necessary, but I see and agree that you would rather allow your own editor to reduce the framerate to 30 instead of letting YouTube tear it to pieces on its end. I can't speak for your problems with Sony Vegas, since I have no problem with it myself. (Check the edit at the end of the post!) There's also the added fact that Sony Vegas is the one editor I know of that fully and natively supports multiple audio tracks, thus meaning you don't need to use the built-in exporter. You can just edit the raw files in Vegas as-is, you won't have an in-the-middle transcoding step, and you'll have access to the multiple audio tracks on their own.

3) You're not... strictly speaking. (See what I say after this point) I've gone over why you don't need to in the previous points. I even threw together a little batch file to extract the audio tracks from raw Action! files using ffmpeg. Just check my post history if you want to find it, and keep in mind that it will just throw an error if the file only has a single audio stream.

Having said all of that, I would love to see an option in Action! to record the mic and game audio to separate audio files altogether, instead of just in a separate stream. Or, at the very least, an option in Action! export the streams separately. So overall, I do agree with most of your points, but just wanted to address a few of them!

Edit: I just saw your other post saying you don't get multiple audio tracks in Sony Vegas, and I find that really strange.. are you getting no audio in Vegas when using raw Action! files, or are you only getting the first audio track? I really don't have the slightest clue why the audio wouldn't be working, especially when Action just uses plain old AAC.

[strychzilla]

1.) I figured out the audio issue. That was actually user error. It had something to do with the multi channel so if I don't check it it works fine and doesn't crap out halfway through the recording. Though, thanks for that tool I didn't know about it, I will tinker with it some time.

Lastly, all of my problems have been resolved since switching to Premiere and might I say holy fucking shit was I missing out using Vegas. Premiere is incredibly easier to use, does not crash, and the H.264 codec does not skip in when previewing from the timeline. So, now that the audio works, I can edit my clips etc. I must say this product, if not using Vegas, is actually quite decent. If nVidias soon to be released recorder fails I will definitely be picking this up as my recording software.

The only thing I could really ask for is a separate wav file for the mic and the game footage.

[radi]

The only thing I could really ask for is a separate wav file for the mic and the game footage.

You can do this quickly using Virtual Dub.