Smooth screen video recording?

[EllenC]

Hi all,

My son is getting all frustrated, trying to record his precious Minecraft into videos for YouTube. He says they are all choppy and don't have good resolution. Right now we are using QuickTime, but he wants to buy Screenflow or something similar. I have been doing a lot of searching on the internet and it almost sounds like, no matter what you do, you can't get past this? He watches videos on his cheap phone and says they look fine.

What can we do to make this work without spending tons of money? I am unemployed at the moment, but would like to give him something he could have fun with and be creative.

We have a iMac with an Intel Core i3 processor, 3.2 GHz

 

[Quad5Ny]

From what I remember Minecraft can be very CPU intensive and a i3 iMac might not be able to keep up with the game AND encoding a video at the same time. But try the stuff below before buying extra software.

• You might need to record at a lower resolution, if your trying to record at 2560x1440 (or even 1920x1080) then that's what could be causing your lag. Change your display resolution to 1280x720 (this is 720p you see on YouTube) before starting a Minecraft video.
  
  .​
• Also you could try a external USB hard drive to record the videos to instead of recording them to the internal. Your internal drive might not be able to handle the bandwidth of loading the game and saving a video at the same time.
  (This is more of a issue with games that have a lot of art assets streamed in, but its also worth a try with Minecraft)

P.S. You sound like a awesome parent.