hello, I''ve created a very simple game and wanted to create a short video clip of it in action. I''m trying to find a program that will capture the game being played. Like a small utilitiy that will run in the background and record whats happening on the desktop. I have a trial of Adobe Premier, but I dont think it has this functionality, so I expect it can''t. Alternateivly, does anyone know of any good resources/tutorials on how to capture a sequence of frames from a game and save them to a sequence of file name. These files could then be imported into Premier for editing. Thanks in advance - kind regards.

That all depends on what your game uses. If your using GDI then something camtasia will work, however DirectX and OpenGL surfaces can''t be seen by other apps normally (Unless you turn graphics acceleration in system properties down). You also have to take into consideration speed: Real time video capture is a cpu, ram and harddrive intensive process, you''ll need a fast system to have both game and encoder running. It might be easier just to add capture capabilities to your program yourself. Try making something that dumps the contents of your primary surface every frame to a file, and get a utility to redirect DirectSound (or whatever you''re using) to a wav file. Once you''re done convert the raw video to bitmaps (just add the bitmap header info) and use something like Rad tools (www.smacker.com) to make an avi out of them.

If quality isnt a major issue, and your hardware supports it, hook up your computer to a vcr. Record onto VHS cassette, and then if necessary, play back what you recorded with the vcr hooked up to inputs on your computer. Tadaa quick and dirty hack..