I want to record myself playing games online, but I don’t want to rewatch the whole video to keep special moments. Is there a software that, when I press a button, saves the last 30 seconds of my screen?
I think that would require time travel.
No, it just requires something continuously recording but recording over the stuff you don’t choose to save. Fraps will do this (you set it up into options and then hold down the record key for several seconds - when you press the record key again, it keeps the last X seconds plus keeps recording from there on). The videos you record this way will be uncompressed and take up a large amount of hard drive space and it will impact the performance of your game if you don’t have a beefy computer, but it works.
Not really. My HTPC automatically records the last ten minutes or so of broadcast TV to a temp file in case the phone rings at an inopportune time, but of course that means it needs to be recording uncompressed video continously so that might cause the gameplay to lag.
Oh, it does? I’ll have a look then. It’s not mentioned as one of the features.
Fraps will only record so far as a 4gb file will hold - fraps still clings to an outdated max file size to support legacy systems and I’m not sure if you can override it. Uncompressed video at high res might only be 20-30 seconds for that file size, lower res video would last longer. Haven’t tested it.
Edit: The uncompressed part is uncomfirmed, saw a forum post that suggests it’ll be the same rate as normal fraps, which is typically ~2 minutes at 1080p. I can run a test if you need to if you’re deciding whether to get fraps or not. Other recording programs may have this feature though.
There are two programs I know of that are used a lot for WoW, not sure they’ll work for what you want.
Fraps
and Bandicam
Ok I tried fraps can’t figure out how to start recording. Will try again tomorrow.
Set the record button (default f12) and to do buffered looping recording, hold it down for a few seconds. The overlay indicator (if you have it set) will turn purple, then when you press it again it will turn red (this means it’s recording both the buffered footage, and what’s happening right now) and pressing it again ends the recording.