Recording Amiga footage on the PC
 

Hello everyone :) I would like to record footage from my Amiga A500 onto my PC by connecting it up with a SCART lead or something of similar good quality. Does anyone know how I can do this? I'd appreciate any help, Thank you :)

Using WinUAE would be easier. The emulator has a built in record function. Quality will be 1000 times better than a TV card capture from a real Amiga.

Why would you want to do that? Firstly you'll downgrade the image quality enormously, which won't, in my opinion, justify even attempting it.

As Alexh says, use WinUAE, although there is a quality issue recording video, it never looks as good as the real thing as the resolution is lower, but hey, it's better than wasting your time connecting the miggy to the PC.

In my opinion, just use WinUAE to show off your footage, whatever that may be? and forget about recording it, it's much better quality ;)

Say what?

You record in whatever resolution you want, the finished result is whatever you want it to be (even better than real amiga if you used to play on TV). The movies we record over at RAG ar top-notch quality, pixel by pixel... no blurred shit. And as the usual resolution of an amiga is 320x256, all Amiga recording are done in double that, ie 640x512 for perfect quality. Don't go by the quality of our movies on YouTube, download the vids instead.

Go to Recorded Amiga Games, click on a game title and look at the screenshots taking from the movie. Isn't that good enough? :)

Some examples (fromt he actual video file):

http://recordedamigagames.ath.cx/mod...shots/210a.jpg
http://recordedamigagames.ath.cx/mod...shots/223a.jpg
http://recordedamigagames.ath.cx/mod...shots/223b.jpg

Really? ;)

Hmm. I tried it once and I wasn't very impressed. I'll give it another go 'cause I really did think it would be high quality. Maybe I hadn't the correct settings for Excellent quality.

btw. I never judge anything from the, sometimes shocking, quality off YouTube. I judged it off what I tried to create years ago ;)

Well, you never said "in my experience" and the like, so :).

You need to use the right codec, tools, and settings to get the best results, like in the above screenshots, stuff like xvid, divx etc will not do.

To learn how to get these results, check the "how to record" tutorial in the general forum at RAG, or join our irc channel at later times for help (which most people do.... shortly after they too record quality stuff).

Another good thing is that (depending on the game) some movies can take very VERY little in comparison to the movie length. Take ERBEN DER ERDE: DIE GROSSE SUCHE, this movie is over FOUR and a HALF hour long and is only 400mb, that's like 1.5mb/sec and still it's in PERFECT quality :). That quality can't be achieved with xvid stuff, and if you could, they would have to be like 2GB or something :P.

Erm, little bit off but also on topic depending on the circumstance, how does one record a PPC demo or game ? (output from BlizzardVision/CyberVision VGA output)

I can only see two ways:

One is using a VGA to Composite/S-video transformer box, then connecting it to the Composite/S-video capture card input.

The other is if you have a modern TV, connect the RTG card VGA output to the TV's VGA input. Then use a Euroconector from the TV output to the composite input of your capture card.

The quality will not be much, but at least you can grab it.

If you couldnt be stuffed using WinUAE or not sure how to use it, you can use something like FRAPS which I think handles resolutions upto 1280x720 but uses an uncompressed video codec to record with.
Your files can be quite large (4mins might be as much as 6 gb @ 1280x720) but the program is very easy to use, you will then have to compress the files using something like Adobe Premiere and/or Pinnacle Studio or something similar to make/edit your videos with. After saying all this, I have never tested FRAPS with a tv capture card:nervous

To achieve the best quality with you video card use DScaler + Panasonic DV codec.

If you need to make editing and filtering use VirtualDub or VirtualDubMod. To encode AutoMKV is your tool of choice. It can encode to everything and is very user friendly and customizable.

All freeware products and the best you can find.

Yeah, forgot about AutoMKV, top choice:great

Thank you very much for all the kind help :spin

I am a big Amiga fan but new to WinUAE. I would like to record footage from some of the Amiga games I wrote myself. They were written in AMOS and BlitzBasic. So I am not sure whether WinUAE will emulate these? I *should* be able (providing all the disks still work) to compile them so they are exe files (or whatever they are called - its been a long time). They should work then ok I guess.

Yes my friend I will check out your channel for tips on making great quality videos. Thanks for the help.

Does anyone know if AMOS and BlitzBasic are emulated 100% on WinUAE? Thanks :)

From what I know, YES

Yes :D No worries WinUAE is quite close to emulating a real Amiga (only very few features are missing and none of them affects AMOS or BlitzBasic :))

OK Thanks- thats great that they can emulate all these programs. (I use Blitz on the PC now :))I just check the FAQ but I am still not sure on the basics of getting a file from my Amiga to the PC. Is there anyway I can read my Amiga disks in a PC floppy drive? if not can someone tell me which method I need to use? - I have an (expanded to 1 meg) standard A500 with Workbench 1.3

Nope. What OS are you using on your PC

Well I have two laptops - one with XE and one with Vista.

Use PCUtils on the miggy to write your files to a 720k floppy and pop it into your PC.

Edit: Or laptop :D

Edit2: I'm not sure but you may be able to serial link the miggy and laptop together and transfer the files that way. I know you can do this with the A1200, but I'm uncertain with the A500

Edit3: For A500 under 1.3 (Extras Disk) use:-

PCUtils
PCCopy - Allows Amiga to copy files from PC disks
PCFormat - Allows Amiga to format PC diskettes
ToPCCopy - Allows Amiga to copy files to PC disks
Read Me - Text file on using PCUtils

It's all in our "How to record" thread at RAG. You need like 5+ things, all Freeware, including Virtual Dub (my choice for editing videos), MeGUI, x264 encoder, YAMB etc..

It's all here: "[Tutorial]How to record games with WinUAE and MPEG4 AVC". Some less experienced users (first timers etc) gets guided to our IRC chat where people help them step by step on how to do these things if the tutorial isn't enough.

I use FRAPS, bloody awesome program for recording full window / screen content.