Screen recording solution when running 2D surround?

[QuackingPlums]

It's been a while since I asked this, and from a rudimentary search I still don't see a solution: is there a screen recording solution (preferably free or at least cheap - I don't do it often enough to fork out a lot for this feature!) that just records my middle screen as a 1080p 16:9 video when I'm running 3 screens in 2D surround?

I was enthused when Nvidia announced Shadowplay but was disappointed to discover that it didn't support my old cards (2xGTX580 in SLI). The latest rig has 2xGTX980s and it still cannot be activiated, presumably because I'm running triple-wide! I don't even want to record all three screens - is there an actual solution?

[Haldi]

You cannot do this.
When Recording you always record the whole DirectX window.

i myself use MSI Afterburner and record in MJPG 5760x1080 (best Performance IMHO) and then use Handbrake to reconvert the videos into h264 Q21 and crop left and right 1920 pixels away. This leaves me with a propre 1920x1080 Center Monitor Video only that is way smaller in Size than MJPG.

Normal:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/v/vTIUO7-sZaE[/youtube]

Cropped:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/v/uhs-jgbKZ3Q[/youtube]


You could try this by using Custom Encoding Codec in MSI Afterburner, use X264 and set the Crop settings there.
But then you would be doing a live h264 encode while recording, even on Ultrafast which is horrible bad quality you might get to much CPU usage while playing.

Shadowplay / Quicksync and all that awesome Hardware assisted encoding stuff doesn't work for surround because the Pixel Limit is 1920x1080 (and for the GTX960 and new AMD Fury 3820x2160) which is way below 5760 pixel in width

If you want your middle Monitor only you'd best buy a hardware capture card and plug it between monitor and PC.

[QuackingPlums]

The 960 has a higher pixel limit than the 980? Not that it helps I suppose.

Thanks for the comprehensive response - I've been asking this question for years but this is the first time it has been pointed out to me about the DirectX window. Maybe it was obvious for everybody but I never realised this before. Thanks.