How to easily capture gameplay footage for YouTube

This page was translated using AI and machine learning.

(Pocket-lint) – If you want to start a gaming channel on Youtubeyou’re probably looking for the easiest way to capture footage that you can share.

There are several ways to capture gameplay, some easier than others. We’ll show you some of the ways we’ve used different software to capture, record, and edit footage to help you do the same.

Recording footage with Nvidia GeForce Experience

If you’re using a gaming PC with an Nvidia graphics card, chances are you have Nvidia’s GeForce Experience installed. If not, you should because it is very useful for a number of things.

You can use GeForce Experience to optimize your games to run smoothly. You can use it to overclock your graphics card and get more FPS. You can use it to take screenshots.

It’s also one of the easiest and most useful tools to capture gameplay footage, stream it, and record it.

The first step is to download and install GeForce Experience if you haven’t already. Once it’s done, you can activate it whenever you want by just pressing ALT+Z. This brings up an overlay and from there you can do all sorts of things including taking screenshots easily and streaming live gameplay footage to Facebook, Twitch or YouTube with ease.

We focus here on recording gameplay.

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Instant Resume

Instant Replay is one of our favorite options for recording footage. This is a tool that records constantly, you just need to click a few buttons to save some game time.

To use instant playback, you must first enable it in settings:

• Press ALT+Z
• Then click on Instant Replay
• Then click “Activate”.
• You can also do this by pressing ALT+Shift+F10.

Once it’s done, it’s activated and you can continue playing your game. Whenever you want, you can then press ALT+Z and click Instant Replay again and click save. However, it is easier to click ALT+F10 each time you need to save the sequence, which allows the last minutes to be stored.

By default, Instant Replay mode captures the last five minutes of video from the time you pressed the buttons. These sequences are recorded at game resolution, 60 frames per second and at a certain bitrate. You may want to record in a specific resolution, at a higher bitrate, or for a shorter or longer period. You can easily set this in the settings and adjust it accordingly.

We like to capture three-minute footage at 1440p because it’s short enough to be useful, not too long to take up a lot of space on your hard drive, and of good enough quality to be viewable on YouTube.

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Recording footage with GeForce Experience

GeForce Experience not only allows you to record for a fixed duration, but also to simply record.

Like instant playback, recording can be set to capture at a specific resolution. The difference is that you press the record button and the recording starts, but it only stops when you click to stop it. The easiest way is to press ALT+F9 to start recording and press again to stop it.

Obviously this means that there are a lot more images and it takes up a lot more space, but it is a very simple system and ideal for beginners.

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Steamlabs

There are a few different standalone tools you can use to capture footage and stream it to the various game streaming platforms. There is XSplit, Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), Medal and others.

We personally care deeply about Streamlabs for a number of reasons. If you’re looking for something a little more advanced than GeForce Experience, Streamlabs is the tool for you. It not only lets you capture and save footage, stream it to YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook, but much more.

Streamlabs, for example, offers Multistream, which allows you to stream to multiple platforms at the same time. It also offers overlays and widgets to make your gameplay footage and streamed content more engaging.

But even for recording, it’s simply convenient.

We also like how Streamlabs is linked to your personal YouTube account, so the settings are stored in the cloud and you can rely on the same settings even when installing it on different machines.

Gameplay recording with Streamlabs

Recording gameplay with Streamlabs is quite simple. The video above shows most of the basic settings and how to configure Streamlabs to record footage that you can then use on YouTube.

The key is to configure your game as a source:

• Click the plus icon in the lower left to create a scene.
• Click the same plus icon in the “sources” box to add a source.
• Choose Game Capture and click add source
• Double click on game capture to see specific settings
• You can then choose “auto” or “specific window capture” and then choose the specific game (while it’s running).
• At the bottom right of the software, you will see two buttons next to the green “Go Live” button. These are REC and a rewind button
• It’s the record and instant playback buttons that work the same as the GeForce Experience.

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Basic registration with Streamlabs

Open Streamlabs settings and under output you will find a section called “recording” where you can set where the recordings will be stored, you can change the quality and set the bitrate. Don’t forget to adjust the video resolution in the corresponding section.

There is also a replay buffer tab where you can specify the duration of recordings in the replay buffer. This is the same logic as instant playback.

It should be noted that you can also define hotkeys in the settings. So you can define keys that you can use to start and stop recording, start streaming or start playback buffer and capture clips.

The best way to achieve this is to set the replay buffer to start before you start playing. To do this, click the Streamlabs rewind button when you launch the part you want to record. Then click this button again to capture the last minutes or seconds of gameplay (depending on how long you set for the replay buffer).

Don’t neglect your audio

You know, I hope, the importance of a good sound. Not only from your game, but also from yourself. We’ve already written about the best microphones for streaming, and you might want to record the best sound possible when gaming. Other gear might come in handy if you plan on streaming at some point.

In Streamlabs and GeForce Experience, don’t forget to adjust your microphone and sound outputs in the settings so that your recordings have sound.

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Editing your recordings

There are various tools to edit your gameplay footage once you have captured it. You can use YouTube Studio’s basic editing tools, although they are not very advanced, but they are easy to cut the footage and add audio.

At the same time, there are tools like DaVinci Resolve. It’s one of the most popular video editing tools out there, and it’s free to use, which is the best price, so what more could you ask for?

Written by Adrian Willings.