Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone!

So i love both WvW and PvP but am kind of a noob when it comes to computers and technology in general! So my question to everyone is….

What Program/s is/are best suited for video recording and editing for both WvW and PvP? I would prefer a free program obviously but wouldn’t mind buying a reasonably priced one. Please let me know and thanks in advance!

I use OBS for recording. It’s free. It’s also a streaming software, but local recording is perfectly possible. Previously, I used fraps, but it is aged in comparison to OBS and produces really huge video files and is not free.

For editing, I found no good free software. First, I used avidemux for simply cutting my videos, but it is very limited and crashes often. After cutting, I recorded my comments with Audacity and added the audio track to the video with avidemux. All this was very tedious and didn’t allow much video editing.

Not very long ago, I bought Adobe Premiere Elements for about 100 Euro, which performs very good for my editing tasks. No external audio recording necessary any more. I don’t know if it is the best program for this price, because I don’t have experience with this kind of program. I simply picked it out of a few like-priced similar NLE video editor programs.

I second OBS. It’s fabulous, and I’ve been doing video capture for a good 15-20 years.

Sony Vegas is a nice editor, but I tend to use Premiere because it’s in the Creative Suite.

I also agree with Audacity, it’s great for hard editing your sound.

I use OBS to record and Lightworks to edit.
Lightworks does have some limits on the free version with the main ones being limited rendering options and 720p max output. Also a bit confusing so there’s a learning curve. Have some older software but never bothered to buy new ones.

Lightworks: http://www.lwks.com/

Now you mention it, I remember why I bought a video editing software instead of using a free version of a commercial package.

The limits of all of the free video editing software that comes as free or paid alternatives is that they limit the resolution harshly and/or not offer an encoder for state-of-the-art codecs like h264. This limits the video quality, so it is useless for todays game videos. No one wants VHS-quality these days. Windows Movie Maker is the only one that has an almost-decent video output quality.

As far as I researched this, it is not (always) due to an arbitrary limitation to encourage buying the full version, it is caused by the h264 licensing instead. As long as there exists a commercial (paid) version of an application, the use of a h264 encoder must be licensed and paid – even for free or demo versions. This means, the vendor has to pay for every download of a free version out of his own pocket. Since this costs the vendors money, they remove h264 support from their free versions.

Only fully free software has a fully free license for h264. Because of that, you can use h264 in free video converter software like Handbrake or ffmpeg or OBS, but not in the free versions of Lightworks or Magix.

But there is no decent fully free video editing software out there – with the sole exception of Blender. Blender is not only a 3D modeling software, you can also edit video with it. Unfortunately, its interface is completely unusable and incomprehensible for the hobby user who “just wants to edit a video file”. I wasn’t even able to find the function to open a source video file i wanted to cut and edit.

Wanted to mention this, so people won’t run on a fool’s errand to look for what doesn’t exist.

Lightworks free exports as h264.
I’m good with the quality it outputs, could be better, but find it reasonable.

Tried other free editors out there and found them to just be yuck. Would rather pay for another proper editor or simply continue using lwk.