Questions for Nvidia Shadowplay Users

[SFC (Ret) M. Brewer]

So, I want to start recording my missions and I have an Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 in my rig with a Intel i7-4770 CPU @ 3.4GHz with about 500GB free on my hard drive.  I'm pretty confident I have the hardware needed to record without a big hit to my performance.  I can run Arma at pretty much ultra settings and haven't had any performance issues on my end.  I've started playing around with Shadowplay and have recorded a few things but I have a few questions if anyone can answer or give me their experiences.

1 - I typically use Arma3 Sync to start my game and choose my mods etc.  But it appears that for Shadowplay to work, you have to start Arma through the GeForce program and then select your mods in game.  Is that the only way for Shadowplay to work?  If so, do I need to manually re-select my mods every time I start the game?

2 - I want to record in 1080p at 60FPS and Shadowplay says that is going to take 375MB per minute.  For a 1 hour video that would be 22.5GB.  So, I'm going to need a separate hard drive to record more than a few videos.  I've been eyeing some SSD's already.   For those that record regularly, how much HD space to you have dedicated to storing videos?  I'm thinking a TB drive would be a good place to start but I'd like some input please.

3 - In order to share videos on YouTube, what's the avg upload time for videos?  I know this greatly varies with internet speed.  My speedtest.net speed is showing 65Mbps download and 4.21Mbps for upload.  Given the example of a 22.5GB video to upload at 4Mbps that's like 93 hours?!?  Are my calculations correct? Or is there a way to compress the file first before uploading? 

Sorry for the newb questions, but rather than just watching videos I'd like to start sharing my experiences as others have.  Who doesn't want to see Brawler blowing things up? 

Thanks for any help you guys can provide.
-Brewer

[SPC (Ret) Harrison]

1) Shadowplay worked fine for me while running with ARMA3 Launcher, as long as you run in full screen, you should be golden.

2) I have a 2 TB HDD.

3) Depending on what you use to edit, it will compress the file automatically when you Render the video. I recorded a 1 hour training with Shadowplay, rendered it at 1080p 60 FPS with Sony Vegas and it came out at about 8 gigs. It took about 3 hours to upload with my 1.5 MB/s upload speed.

[Yordy]

1) Shadowplay worked fine for me while running with ARMA3 Launcher, as long as you run in full screen, you should be golden.

2) I have a 2 TB HDD.

3) Depending on what you use to edit, it will compress the file automatically when you Render the video. I recorded a 1 hour training with Shadowplay, rendered it at 1080p 60 FPS with Sony Vegas and it came out at about 8 gigs. It took about 3 hours to upload with my 1.5 MB/s upload speed.

#3. Personally I never saw the need to keep the raw video. Once you have the chance to go in and edit/compress than I would just keep it on YouTube rather than burn thruough HDD space.
Edit: also I have used Vegas a lot. Its an outstanding program

[Bazarnicki]

Yeah definitely don't bother with uploading an uncompressed 22GB video to youtube. Youtube's maximum filesize is 128GB, but unless you are uploading really long 4K videos, you shouldn't come close to that. Also, I think shadowplay encodes the video by default, but I'm not sure what settings it uses. I believe it uses the H.264 codec, which is what you want, but I'm not sure what kind of bit rate it would be at.

Either way, edit it down first. I personally use Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, and its really good. It has good export settings that can estimate video size with different codec options, bit rates, etc. but any good editing software should be fine. A word of warning though that most every free video editing software sucks, or at least they did last time I looked. You can definitely get away with using them for basic stuff but they will be pretty limited. However, if you don't want to edit it at all and just want to compress the files, there are quite a few good free video converters and the like, so you have some options.

[SFC (Ret) M. Brewer]

Looking online Sony Vegas 13 runs like $300-$600 and I don't want to pay that much for an editing program.  Adobe looks to be more in the $80 range, which I'm fine with....

I've seen some threads on free editing programs and I'll revisit those....

[Lafontaine]

So, I want to start recording my missions and I have an Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 in my rig with a Intel i7-4770 CPU @ 3.4GHz with about 500GB free on my hard drive.  I'm pretty confident I have the hardware needed to record without a big hit to my performance.  I can run Arma at pretty much ultra settings and haven't had any performance issues on my end.  I've started playing around with Shadowplay and have recorded a few things but I have a few questions if anyone can answer or give me their experiences.

1 - I typically use Arma3 Sync to start my game and choose my mods etc.  But it appears that for Shadowplay to work, you have to start Arma through the GeForce program and then select your mods in game.  Is that the only way for Shadowplay to work?  If so, do I need to manually re-select my mods every time I start the game?

2 - I want to record in 1080p at 60FPS and Shadowplay says that is going to take 375MB per minute.  For a 1 hour video that would be 22.5GB.  So, I'm going to need a separate hard drive to record more than a few videos.  I've been eyeing some SSD's already.   For those that record regularly, how much HD space to you have dedicated to storing videos?  I'm thinking a TB drive would be a good place to start but I'd like some input please.

3 - In order to share videos on YouTube, what's the avg upload time for videos?  I know this greatly varies with internet speed.  My speedtest.net speed is showing 65Mbps download and 4.21Mbps for upload.  Given the example of a 22.5GB video to upload at 4Mbps that's like 93 hours?!?  Are my calculations correct? Or is there a way to compress the file first before uploading? 

Sorry for the newb questions, but rather than just watching videos I'd like to start sharing my experiences as others have.  Who doesn't want to see Brawler blowing things up? 

Thanks for any help you guys can provide.
-Brewer

1. I first started out recording my videos with shadowplay but I soon realised that I lost a lot of quality when it came down to my personal satisfaction. I now record with Dxtory, it`s not a free program costs about 40$ but personally I find that it is worth it, You get a lot more options when it comes down to selecting the quality, resolution, colors, file sizes.

2. I personally bought myself a 3TB hard drive simply because I like to stock my footage because recording becomes a drug, you`re always recording everything you do and you`ll find out really fast how much it sucks to always have to be rendering your videos every day because you`re about to run out of space on your hard drive.

My personal computer setup is

1x 128GB SSD for my windows.
1x 1TB HDD for my games and programs
1x 3TH HDD dedicated to my recordings. (This allows me to store raw footage and not having to render it every time I finish recording).

3. RAW footage can be huge, like 300-500GB huge depending on the quality you use and how long you record, Once you run your RAW footage to a program like Sony Vegas, your raw footage becomes rendered making it a more decent size 3-10gb`s. (10GB`s being like an hour and a half to 2 hours of rendered footage).

[SFC (Ret) M. Brewer]

One more question about video rendering etc. 

What are you guys running for memory in your systems?  I have 8GB now but I'm considering stepping it up to 16GB.

Thanks for all the input.

[Bazarnicki]

8gb will work fine, thats what I have. Not sure how much of a performance increase you will see by doubling it, but you won't really need it. When I used have a slower computer and would render videos, I always started it before i left for work or before going to sleep if it was going to take many hours. Same for uploading, when I had slower internet.

You generally probably won't want to do other stuff on the computer when rendering, as it will slow everything down (thats probably where the more RAM might help), but I wouldn't worry about it too much. I think my bottleneck is my older CPU more than my RAM.