Ever thought of recording your Xbox One or PS4 Game play................

You've had a fantastic kill streak on Call of Duty, the games ended, but no one else knows how brilliant you were (not something that I have ever had a problem with however). You can show the world how good you were by recording your game play and uploading it to YouTube so that everyone can see! These are some tips on what you'll need to think about to get your game play uploaded.

There are video sharing options already built in to the Xbox One and PS4. If you only want to upload basic, un-edited footage then these are ok options. One thing to remember though is that if you want people to actually watch what you've uploaded, the quality of this type of upload, compared to other gaming videos out there, doesn't really compare and it's less likely to get many views. Sad fact, but you may get lucky and be happy with the results. If your looking to get better results however, to truly show off your skills, then you're going to need to invest in some video capture hardware.

There are a number of options out there such as the AverMedia Live Gamer Portable Lite shown above. You can get this for around £60 and boasts video capture at full 1080p. That said most options on the market also capture at 1080p but you can pay upwards of £100 to start for some. Having had personal experience with the AverMedia, I can't fault what you get for the price with HDMI pass through and audio options the quality is really good. 

Making gaming videos is not as daunting as it sounds providing you have the right kit. There are options out there for capturing game footage without connecting to a PC such as the Hauppage HD PVR Rocket. 

This enables you to save footage to USB storage and has a lot of functionality. However, recording to a computer does make life slightly easier from a later editing point of view. One thing to remember is that recording at 1080p and 60FPS will produce videos with a large file size. Even a video of 15 minutes will take up Gigabytes of storage and this obviously will have an effect when you come to upload your video to YouTube, so it could take a while. It's worth pointing out that recording at this level may not be completely necessary as YouTube compresses the file size when you upload and although they do make some changes to improve the quality for viewing, it may not be worthwhile recording at such high levels.

Another thing worth thinking about is what games are you looking to record? Retro games need far lower bitrate (how much data is saved per second) than games such as Call of Duty Infinite Warfare and it depends what you want to achieve, if it's the visual wow factor that your looking for then you will need the higher bitrate and the larger file size. But, be warned, video editing high res game capture is going to need a good a high spec computer ideally (we used a Mac Book Pro with the AverMedia with a quad-core i5 processor and 8 gig of RAM, the 128 Gig SSD got full pretty quickly though). Video editing software is also important, you can get free options, we used iMovie as that was already pre-installed but keep in mind that you may need to buy some decent editing software unless you look at buying a capture device with some bundled software.

Hopefully this has given a little background as to what you may need if you are thinking about doing some game capture. There are other things to think about such as setting up a YouTube channel for example and your audio requirements, but we'll look to cover these at another time.