Clip Capture only recording 1-5 SECOND clips

[LCstuntman]

Holy sh*t I'm f*cking pissed. I (was) making a video of random awesome things that happen in GTA 4 PC and one of my buddys crashed his chopper into the ocean after hitting the tail off. He was way further than the boats so I decided to try to fly super low in my helicopter and told him to try to get in (something I've tried thousands of times before but never done before). IT WORKED THIS TIME, and I flew away for about 5 seconds, then hit the clip capture button (F2 ofc). Later that day after other random funny stuff I CC'd I went to look and edit the footage and EVERY MOTHERF*CKING CLIP is only 1-5 seconds long. The particular helicopter rescue one is 3 seconds. Its just me flying high above the water towards the land. Every other clip is like this too, just the 2 or 3 seconds before I hit the CC button.

 

I don't know whats going on, all I know is that I'm ready to print out a piece of  paper that's says "CLIP CAPTURE", tape it to my wall, and repeatedly punch it, then crash my car into it.

 

I used to be able to get up to about 60 seconds at the airport, and now I'm getting 1-5 in the same goddamn place. 

 

Bullsh*t.

 

Oh yeah, and:

 

Two installs of GTA IV, but this shouldnt be a problem since I recently got a clip of me spawning, shooting the ground with a rocket launcher, going flying, pulling the trigger midair, killing someone. that was 12 seconds and it's that short because CC only starts from when you respawn. I got that clip yesterday well after I got my two installs.

 

NO MODS ON THIS INSTALL.

 

uhhh what the hell system do I have... I think it's

 

Athlon II 630 X4 2.8ghz quadcore

ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB

4gigs ram

 

I run medium settings and high textures

 

and I'm typing this from my phone which has a touch keyboard and the worst spell check ever made so don't expect perfect spelling and grammar.

 

Does anyone know what the f*ck is going on here? Are the long files hidden or am I f*cked?

 

thanks in advance,

 

-pissed off guy that's pissed

[mkey82]

The only thing that comes to mind is HDD space - do you have enough free on the system partition?

[_corTEC]

Please explain this more because I have had hundreds of gigs available and the damn recorder only gives me around 20 seconds. It's annoying. Please explain the recording system to me, thanks.

 

(I thought it had something to do with processing power, not HDD space.)

[LCstuntman]

Well, I know that youre definitely going to get around 20 seconds if what youre doing is hard on the processor. FE if youre in the middle of star junction (times square) RPG'ing a bunch of taxis then 20 seconds is expected. but when youre in the middle of the ocean with only a helicopter 50+ is expected as long as youre not spawning a bunch of sh*t with a trainer or something.

 

Anyways:

 

 

Not incredible, but nothing wrong.

 

 

This is the only possible cause I can think off. I'm gonna try moving everything out of there to a backup location, so I get a blank slate to start with and see if it solves the problem. First Im gonna edit everything I have, and export it though so I dont lose anything. Ill try some more tests too.

 

Thanks for the replies

 

f*ck, Im still gonna have to redo that badass ocean rescue

 

EDIT: Whats a system partition? I hope its just a fancy word for HDD hehe

[LCstuntman]

Been testing after I delete a bunch of stuff and the only possible reasoning is that sometimes without thinking i tap the button more than once and I think thats the thing causing it. Not sure though.

[mkey82]

EDIT: Whats a system partition? I hope its just a fancy word for HDD hehe

It's usually the C drive, that is the partition/drive you have your OS installed to.

 

It was a long shot anyway, like I said. So you fixed it by clearing out the clips folder?

[_corTEC]

I may have to clarify this but I only get around 25 seconds anywhere, and I OC my quad to 3.83GHz - it also stops if I get in a car or just generally change states.

 

Oh yeah, mkey82, offloading physx and cuda works so get a life. Check out my new GPU! Gonna SLI it soon, it made a nice difference to GTAIV. I more than happy with it...

 

4870 512MB... boo hoo...

 

I have an old X850XT 256MB for you if you want to offload some of the work off your gpu!

 

Or maybe you could give me £178.92 for my old GTX260 SP216, that's exactly the cost of another GTX470... peace out.

Edited December 2, 2010 by _corTEC

[_corTEC]

On a more serious note: my max GPU usage is around 48% and my max CPU usage is around 80% - framerates can still drop to 27FPS in hectic situations - WTF?

 

It seems as though GTA is not using all of my PC's power. I have 20% more CPU to give and the game is struggling.

 

I have OC'd the cpu to a high level, what else can I do to increase my recording time and increase FPS? Is GTAIV really better on i7, or does it just use less cpu resources to perform the same and give the same framerates?

 

Oh yeah, and I also run Win7 x64 and GTAIV from an Intel 2nd Gen SSD! :> FTW

[Stinky12]

If the build in capture function is not working properly. You can use FRAPS as a alternative.

The free version allows recording for up to 30 seconds.

The pay version has no limit (or free space you have on your HDD)

[_corTEC]

Yeah thanks, I know, but what about the % usages of my HW?

[mkey82]

Oh yeah, mkey82, offloading physx and cuda works so get a life.

You should really get that sand out of your private girly parts.

[IronHide-AW]

...Is GTAIV really better on i7, or does it just use less cpu resources to perform the same and give the same framerates?

Everything runs better on i7 in general because of architecture improvements.

[_corTEC]

You should really get that sand out of your private girly parts.

I know, even having a better sexual organ than you must really piss you off.

 

Props to nVidia and Intel for providing the wit behind this post...

[mkey82]

I know, even having a better sexual organ than you must really piss you off.

What's better about tiny, I don't get it.

 

Nothing pisses me off as much as you have to be pissed off each and every morning when you look in the mirror and see the same mug over and over again. That's a tough burden to carry, I would find it in the least strange if you would off yourself.

[LCstuntman]

-deleted-

Edited December 4, 2010 by LCstuntman

[LCstuntman]

The results are totally random, so the only thing I can think of is the fact that I use Steam to launch my retail copy of the game (NOT THE STEAM ONE).

[Jimbatron]

Just a stab in the dark, but how much of your 1GB video ram is not being used in your resource bar? With Clip capture on it's got to continually buffer what's going on somewhere incase you press F2 at any time, and from memory when I maxed out my resource usage the record time was poor. You may need to lower your settings a bit.

 

It does vary substantially based on the amount of Peds/cars close by, but instances at sea, like you say with the helicopter, you should get long record times because there is not so much about.

[mkey82]

The results are totally random, so the only thing I can think of is the fact that I use Steam to launch my retail copy of the game (NOT THE STEAM ONE).

So it's fixed or not?

[LCstuntman]

Nope... god this is f*cking retarded

 

And Im only using like 600 or 700 out of the 1000 resource usage available so that shouldnt be a problem. I should note that some cliips (like 25%) save fine, at average 40 seconds.

[mkey82]

"Resource" is actually VRAM and that shouldn't have anything to do with clip length, their length should be system memory dependent.

 

Does the captured clip length get shorter the longer you play?

[LCstuntman]

Do you mean it gets shorter as I play in one session, or over the whole time I've had the game? Because it appears to me completely random, one could be 1.27, another could be 5.62, another 38.92, another 11.2, etc.

[mkey82]

I meant during one session.

 

If this was due to some "memory leak" issue, it would become more of an issue the longer you played. But this is obviously not the case.

 

I'll assume the game has some sort of algorithm taking various parameters (available system memory maybe, intensity of the current ingame situation, maybe current map position) and deciding how long the clip will be, but something has obviously gone wrong in this decision making process.