BLINDSKUNK Grand VJ Full HD1080p at 30fps Record

GrandVJ is a Video DJ tool with some powerful features for creating real-time animation and visuals to music.

One of the major hurdles I have been trying to overcome is full HD record of the video output from this very cool program. in the pursuit of creating HD music videos.

I didn't want to go down the road of having to buy an extra piece of hardware to record things. or record the screen on a HD camera.

I have a relatively powerful PC (bit old now) but thought it should be possible..
(QX6700 - 4core 3.2Ghz 8G Ram-running  2xNvidia8800GTX - Windows 7)

The major reason for problems is the vast amount of data being saved per frame

This amount of data is quite a bit but not that much of an issue with hard disks speeds of these days, but to actually keep this stream of data passing through the whole computer system and not to slow in any of the processing, on its way to the hard disk is the issue, so not to create jerky video , is more of the issue.

All the following was done on ACA Pro screen capture application running different codec's.

I tried uncompressed video recording, and this was so bad, an overall 10-15fps was the max it could do at a relatively low resolution!

The only solution is a codec to squeeze the frames down to the system to keep up.

I tried several codec's including DivX and Pegasus Imaging MJPEG supposedly being one of the fastest on the block.

Even though these guys are fast, you still have to let your machine be able to play Grand VJ and perhaps a sequencing application.(Cubase etc)

Once all these are running you will notice you are squeezing some serious processing power out of your machine !

With the best of the above I only managed to get up to 720x540 resolution and even that wasn't solid, and had serious issues when Grand VJ was doing its best to squeeze a few million pixels onto the screen. This often resulted in portions of the animation dropping to 10fps.

After a few weeks of playing with this, I stumbled upon the answer ! 

FRAPS - this cool application was created for the use of recording in Game action.

  http://www.fraps.com

As its built to directly record directX output, it works a treat with the Grand VJ output window..at full screen

Once FRAPS creates the video (optionally with sound) you can import this into a video editing suite or convert it with Virtual Dub and create a DivX (as this is not in real time, you can crank it up to insane quality)

Highly Recommended Application...