I am currently in the process of gathering supplies in order to repair a PC that was given to my husband and I by our roommate. I know, I know -- you're married and living with a roommate? Yeah, I know. I don't even wanna -- can we just say, its a college thing and leave it at that?
Anyway, there really isn't anything special about the PC. It was built by a local company that pretty much went under, save for one, lonely, little PC repair shop in a nearby town, is about seven years old, and is in need of a new motherboard for whatever reason. It was given to us with no monitor and no OS, so it wouldn't be unfair to say that there's a good chance that it is a worthless piece of crap, but despite its problems, our roommate swears up and down that it's actually good for playing games.
On low graphic settings but whatever.
Now, in the long run, I want to just turn this into the sort of family, living room PC that everyone can use with no qualms whatsoever. However, I would also like to try and get into doing Let's Plays. This is partially because, you know, I love playing video games and want to share that with other people, but it's also because I happen to have a little something known as social anxiety. It used to be a lot worse when I was younger. As a child, I couldn't be introduced to anyone or even order my own food at a restaurant without bursting into tears. It really pissed my family the hell off, so when I got older, I started to reason with myself that people weren't so scary and it started to get better.
For a while.
After some rather recent negative encounters with an estranged family member, I started to regress a bit and it got to the point where I was afraid to post on my own Facebook page. After a couple of months of living by a set of carefully constructed rules I'd developed strictly for the internet -- don't talk to strangers because they don't care about you, don't bother posting because no one will read it, don't share anything that will start an argument -- being pretty much as PC as is probably humanly freaking possible, I decided that things had to change....Plus, the fact that keeping all my emotions to myself was making me have anxiety attacks may have played a role.
So I figured, hey, why not do some Let's Plays?
It would give me a chance to practice my public speaking, play some new games, and learn to interact better with people. Hopefully.
Getting back on topic, though, because I want to do LPs, I've been doing a lot of research on which screen capture software would be best for me -- and other gamers and LPers -- to use on a plain, ol' regular computer with slightly limited (4GB) memory. For a while, I was leaning towards FRAPS because it seemed like a good software and the vast majority of LPers used it. Then I found out that a FRAPS save file would take up a lot of memory on my poor, ol' PCs hard drive. So I checked my research again for a good alternative and discovered that Bandicam save files actually take up less hard drive space and the software costs about the same price as FRAPS.
The only drawback to Bandicam is that there are certain games that it will not record in full screen mode, which I guess might be a dealbreaker for some LPers, but not for me. The way I see it, you can adjust the screen settings so that the game play takes up most of the monitor space, while still looking clear and then just record the footage like that. Oh, and bonus, going with Bandicam also means that I won't have to install additional software like Audacity or something because as far as sound recording and editing goes, Audacity is really the only good one (that I know of, granted) to record the LP narratives. That makes Bandicam the screen capture software for me.
For those of you who are considering doing some LPs yourselves, I will post links to both the FRAPS and Bandicam websites below, so you can compare and decide which software is best for you. And quick note: I actually am in the process of saving for the a legit, gamer PC build, so I'll be able to play and record better, but it's a really slow process so....Just wanted to throw that out there before anyone commented.
FRAPS
Bandicam
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