A new, free movie recorder that works with Second Life — WeGame

Everyone should know I love to share my enthusiasm about tools that'll do you well, and after hearing about it yesterday @ TechCrunch, I signed up for an account at WeGame.com and downloaded their movie recorder. Kinda like a "YouTube for games" with the unique bonus of giving you the tool to record with, they just went into Public Beta — while it's Windows-only at this time, it is free and, as I'll emphasize again, very easy to use.

How easy? I wouldn't overstate it by saying that WeGame has the most easy-to-use "record and upload" process I've seen so far. It all begins when you start the WeGame recorder app, which shares the same polished design as their website (it's really pretty). After logging in (the registration form is as minimalist as Philip Glass, and literally took me 15 seconds — good usability, guys!), there are very few preferences to set. No complicated codecs to tinker with, just two quality modes — "Web" and "HD" recording which also depend on your computer's power, and they make sure to inform you of this. Considerate.

After configuring those in a few more seconds, you can start recording by booting up your supported game/online world of choice — I was very pleased to see my fave Second Life in the list (which is what drew me to try this out in the first place). A little red square appears in the upper-left corner (you can't hide it at the moment, a possible downside to the simplicity of the options), and turns red after you tap the recording hotkey.

Note: I experienced oddities when trying to record and resizing my active Second Life window (I run it in windowed, not fullscreen mode), so start SL at a resolution you intend to film at. I hope this'll be alleviated in the future, because it's convenient to capture video on-the-fly at a smaller size without the pain of relogging, especially if your monitor's a substantially larger resolution (I have duals, and the one I use for SL is 1920×1200).

After recording, the WeGame window has a little button to upload your footage. Click it, enter title and description, and you're pretty much done:

it then starts the FLV (Flash Video) encoding process, uploading after that's complete. A progress bar keeps track of what's happening, and if you're on a reasonably beefy computer, you might as well get other things done while this goes on in the background.

Wait a few more moments, and the video's on their site, ready for viewing to the world. It remains to be seen if things will be as responsive when WeGame is significantly more popular (as seems likely to happen). You can embed videos into your blog like I have using a code snippet, very similar to how most popular videosharing sites do it.

In a little more than half an hour, I uploaded 4 videos, just raw footage of me wandering around Second Life and talking out loud. It may be a change from the polished Tip of the Week you're used to, but it's still me.

Apparently, I also got selected as a Featured Video, and while I hope the comments here don't degrade into YouTube level — which is a generalization, and not to knock YouTube as a whole since I receive many nice comments from existing and would-be Residents there — there's no moderation tools yet.

I've already written to the WeGame inventors with thanxies and a query about how to report bugs, as I found these quirks:

• I thought it wouldn't show the red recording dot in the upper left on the final footage, but it does.
   
• WeGame doesn't seem to recognize other Second Life viewers (like WindLight) yet… could this please be added?
   
• Cursor isn't captured either. Would be nice to have this for video tutorials and video bug repros (and because FRAPS offers it too).
   
• Sound recording seems very choppy and has intermittent "hiccups". Would like to see — or rather, hear — this improved, as well.
   
• After a title and description are entered, they don't seem to be change-able from within the desktop app, and I don't see a way to edit from the website either. Looks like a clear feature to add.

Am waiting to hear back from them.

Also on the plus side, compression looks fairly good for final filesize. And as a bonus, since it encodes in compact FLV (which looks crisper in the small video player window than YouTube's blurry kind which obliterates fragile UI elements), you can upload that to other video-sharing sites, hopefully without much further loss in quality.

Even better, I notice it recorded inworld sounds — I only had UI ones on during my earlier sessions — at the same time as my mic without needing to record through my speakers. FRAPS and other "game movie recorders" I've tried only do one or the other, to my knowledge. The inworld sounds were too loud and distorted, alas, so maybe I just need to turn that slider (in Preferences > Audio & Video) down. I'll experiment later…

Oh, yayzerama, that experiment took me just a few minutes more! Proof, meet pudding.

I just found out you can encode + upload existing films AND record new clips at the same time… this is upright kewl, it's gotta be highlighted MOAR.

And definitely, especially with the problems in Second Life's built-in movie recorder, it's very cool that this is free, in a not-crippleware way.

I like people to have a choice in preferred platform for getting their work & play done, so I also wonder: are Mac and/or Linux versions planned too? Will have to followup.

*rewinds*

This morning, I was feeling a pounding joy, a rush of spontaneity that came out of being able to record-and-share-with-the-world so quickly and effortlessly. Part of it stems from me having been bogged down in so many "OMGSLOW" video production workflows, and the user-UNfriendliness that comes with them and discourages more folks from getting into, say, machinima or even casual inworld vlogging. I daresay this could really help doing video bug reports (which is not the same as showing off how your party slew the 14-headed manatee-wyrn in the caves of Narrgath but still very noble), and after I forwarded word of this to fellow Lindens, I received enthusiastic responses in kind.

I was musing recently about some way for me to share snippets of my inworld experiences more directly, and this may be it.

Have you tried WeGame? What are your thoughts + feelings? Let the Torlster know.

Tagged as: General, Inworld Exploring, The Web, Video