Let's Play Programs?

Thinking about starting a Let's Play channel on YouTube for fun.

My question is whats the best combo of software to use for video/audio recording for games and commentary? I've been suggested a lot, such as FRAPS, DXTory, FFSplit, and such. What are your thoughts, FFXIAH?

Also, I need a good channel name ._. I suck at names. Suggest a few? Of course I'll credit it to you if I choose a suggestion here.

I can't be much help on the technical side of things; recording programs and all that jazz, and the part where I could help, there's not enough information to give you something worthwhile.

Like what's your angle? Comedic effect like Rooster Teeth-Rage Quit, or more in line with an Exhibition of actual Gameplay like Zemalf? What kind of games do you intend to exhibit? What's your overall Style of play, RP-Standard-Rulebreaking?

Also, is your intent to record Live commentary (During Actual Gameplay) like most people do, or Play the game and then add commentary over it, like Yahtzee 19. (The Latter is usually better if you have a group of people participating in commentary)

For example, Rooster Teeth is Comedic, Sandbox, Rulebreaking, so they took a name with some guffaw in it.

Eh, a little of everything. This is just for fun, as I've never tried anything like this before. I'll see how it pans out.

Ideally I was thinking it'd be along the lines of/a mix of

this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg0fZWMzHQM
Very entertaining once he spawns the Wall of Flesh.

and this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N771Sf4zO2M
He sounds a bit more "How to" than anything else.

I'd like to do commentary if possible.

As for games, I haven't thought too much about it yet, but probably some classic games like Super Mario RPG, Zelda: Oracle of Seasons, Legend of Dragoon, Lunar 2, etc. But once I get the hang of it I have a few PS3 games I'd like to work with.

The guys over at Rooster teeth , or Achievement hunter more specifically does amazing Let's plays and a lot of other things. But they have very high end recording software and gear for proper sync on voices and everything. That and they are funny as hell and have a huge fan base to generate more material off of.

It's harder then you think to do something like this, but if it floats your boat, the more power to you ^^

Oh I know lol. I am subscribed to a lot of different channels, including some big ones like Pewdiepie, Dashie, all the Yogscast, etc. I know its a lot of work, but its something different I'd like to try and see how it goes.

Depending on your ethics for authenticity, it's not actually that hard to make yourself look way more witty/funny than you really are. The magic of Editing and all that.

If you're just about to jump in, you might want to give Zemalf's channel and blog-FAQ a look, he's got all his recording crap listed, and he's not exactly a "Hugely popular" LPer, so I'm extrapolating that to the assumption that he's not rocking Studio-quality editing and recording gear, so it's probably a good entry point to at least look at. Then again, for how little I know, he might just have a fully functional fusion reactor.


As a general rule of thumb for selecting games to exhibit, usually the more Volatile, the better, especially if you plan to go with a live-record reactionary based approach. Avoid script-heavy games like most modern shooters.

Finally, you haven't really given me enough to suggest a channel name, but sex and violence always result in hits, so how about Destructive_Intercourse ????

I'll try to use these 2 words together within the next 3 weeks in a serious real life discussion.

Combine it with a 1m summer sausage and you've got the greatest pickup line ever.


Those guys sound like they're trying way too hard to be entertaining. Comedy is 99% timing, and that stuff really comes off like forcing a punchline with no setup. Just my personal taste though. Yahtzee (Zero Punctuation) 19's Let's Plays are, in my opinion, the best overall I've seen, but he does them so rarely. I think the combination of Writer/Amateur Developer is an unfair advantage though, he's got a lot of insight few people would, fortunately he's not above *** jokes either.

Welcome back Faelar.

FRAPS has been very reliable for me, and it saves it all nice and neat in a proper format mhrmm. You'd need another program for editing of course though but FRAPs is excellent quality and iirc is a free version and pay version, pay version is cheap.

Well if you are doing Let plays i know Action! by mrillis (i think thats the company's name) works very well with most games nowadays since it captures DX required games. It will only record gameplay. I tried using Fraps but for odd reasons it lags when i try to record Arma II or Arma III footage. Yet Action doesn't bog me down as much. What is nice with Action replay it also allows you to record your full screen or part of your screen. It lets you format the size and location of the screen you want to record very easily. It also does benchmarks and screen captures and voice recording. I usually use the voice recording if i try to make commentary.

if you want me to show you the program i can upload a youtube video about it but i'm sure there someone has made a review about it too.

Now if someone can suggest me a decent video editing program that wont cost me 200+ dollars. I was thinking of getting sony vegas 12 but that is way out of my price range atm

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

Trying out some diff programs atm, so far got DXTory running, seems great. Haven't tried commentary with it yet, but so far the video quality is great and doesn't lag my gameplay at all so far. Tested it playing Mega Man X2 on ZSNES.

Question though, is there a way to reduce the outputted video's size without sacrificing quality? This 6 min video of the intro stage and Wheel Gator's stage is 7.17 GB o.O Found a solution! I'll link to the video once its uploaded, let me know what you guys think. Next time I'll try adding commentary.

EDIT: compressing took it from a 300+ min upload time to a 4 min upload time, schwiiiiing!! Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzKYRCnLP1E

Looks great for a 480p vid lol.

Bump! Looking for some channel name ideas and suggestions for games I could play that you guys might enjoy watching. Pretty much anything able to run on an emulator or PC is an option right now.