I recently started speedrunning Bioshock. I wanted to record my game play so I could get on the leaderboard. I was wondering what recording software everyone else uses and what I should use. Is it possible to record an hour long video using free software? Do I have to buy some sort of capture card? If so what should I buy?

Thanks

You can use OBS, it's free and you can either use it to stream and record or just record localy.

I tried OBS but it just recorded a black screen.

Also, how much memory would an hour long recording use?

If you're having a black screen, that's because you're not configurating it with a game or a window capture :/

And for the memory, it depends of the resolution you want to have in output (you can configure that too)

For example, I stream/record with a downscaled resolution of 780x438, one hour is ~320 Mbs, so for a resolution of 1920x1080, it could result with a 1950Mb vid. But I believe OBS compress it a bit but I'm not sure

Obs does compress the video by a decent amount, considering that when I do 720p 4hrs or so which is roughly 5 gb in size roughly. But that also depends on quality you wish to record in besides resolutions as well considering I want to keep it as close to real as possible thats why the sizes are still large half the quality or even a bit less would drastically reduce the finial size by a few 100mb or more easily.

Well if you chose to stream your speedrun your video you could create a highlight with it via past broadcast.

Best of luck-LARS9899

I have a n00b question too. I want to do a run on PlayStation 1, but I don't really like emulators, I'm practicing it on the real deal: the original console. Do you need to actually livestream your speedrun via Twitch or it's enough if you record it and then upload it to YouTube and then send the video's link and such?

Streaming on Twitch is not necessary, as long as you can record it and publish it somewhere so people can see it (youtube, dailymotion, etc) it's fine