Retro game capture

[Ghost]

I'm thinking of starting a YouTube series about gaming including retro games and was wondering what would be the best way to get captured footage of retro games. The ones I'm looking into at the moment are the elgato game capture HD or the Elgato game capture HD60. Also would playing the games through a framemeister make a huge difference to the capture quality?

[briareos_kerensky]

The Elgato HD only offers composite and S-Video inputs, the Elgato HD60 and the new PCIE cards only HDMI; of course this won't affect revording if you plan to have a Framemeister or other upscalers/conveters between consoles and recording equipment. Upscalers, especially game-oriented machines like the Framemeister, can mean a lot difference if you plan to have the final video in 720 or 1080 because their upscaling is optimised for consoles; upscaling in post, even when using nearest neighbour filters, isn't as sharp as a native 720 recording from a FM. As for the equipment, I wasn't happy with the Elgato because they use preset bitrates in H.264 and looked blurry at 720p60; this won't be a problem with non-upscaled sources, and probably with upscaled 16bit sources as well. Blackmagic has a series of internal and external capture cards (no RGB or VGA inputs though) with uncompressed video capabilities, but that opens a new can of worms (SSDs for recording, more intensive editing capabilities), so the Elgatos should be your best option.

[speedlolita]

http://www.sixfortyfive.com/streaming/xcapture1.html

I plan to buy one of these, some day.

[Asura]

http://www.sixfortyfive.com/streaming/xcapture1.html

I plan to buy one of these, some day.

That seems quite impressive. Can you do live streaming with it too? Or just capturing?

[speedlolita]

Same thing.

Basically, this seems to be one of the few, if only devices, that can capture true 15kHz RGB straight out of a console.

[Ghost]

http://www.sixfortyfive.com/streaming/xcapture1.html

I plan to buy one of these, some day.

Looks really impressive but that price O_o

Think Ill go for a framemeister + Elgato HD60 combo which will work out about the same price as the xcapture by itself. Thanks for the comments guys

[speedlolita]

http://solarisjapan.com/products/xcapture-1-usb-3-0-hd-capture-unit

http://solarisjapan.com/products/xrgb-mini-framemeister-compact-up-scaler-unit

It costs the same as a Framemeister.

And what do you expect, you get what you pay for.

Getting a Framemeister seperately would probably be a more versatile solution if you don't have a kickass scaler or CRT to play your stuff on as is though.