For now I'll keep to automatically recording, since that's what I use myself and I'm not really into the whole manual thing. TBH I'm not even sure how it all works and everything, but maybe someone else does and can explain it somewhere in the comments ^^ (then I can quote it below my guide).
1. Download the client from here.
2. Run and install.
3. You'll then get a window with several videos, and people you can follow.
To start recording your own gameplay, go to Preferences (the wheel thingy in the top right). You'll get a screen just like this:
To automatically start recording your gameplay, put it on automatic. This does however mean that it records ALL your gameplay. So let's say you're playing StarCraft II. The client recognizes this as a game, so the moment you launch your game you're already recording. This means you'll have to cut out more to get the gameplay moment you want to highlight/keep/whatever.
The upside with this is, with the new Alpha league of legends client, it only starts recording from your loading screen. So no, there's no champion selecting or queue waiting with dodges and all that shit. Only the gameplay itself. And since it doesn't recognize the client as a game, it will automatically stop recording when you finish your game and get into the score screen.
Automatically recording asks more space of your computer than manually recording. This means you'll have to put on the “Auto-manage space” to avoid your memory getting full with only gameplay videos. Unless of course you don't mind x'D
In my case, it's on 10.0 GB. Depending on your Video Quality Presets, it will show the time you can record in one go. As for the quality and such, you should know what your PC specs are and what you can run. You can just try it out a few times to see how your PC reacts to it and if you can handle it with framedrops etc in-game.
Editing records
Once you have recorded something (in my case that's a bunch of League of Legends and Starcraft II gameplay), it will appear in ”My Feed”. It will look like something like this:
As you can see, in some cases it recognizes what I've played. Like 2 days ago I had a game with Ashe, and 3 days ago I had a game with Taric. There's several recordings in there that don't show their champions. This is because Plays is still not fully into that. Anyway, to start cutting your record, go to the one you want to highlight/keep/whatever. To show you how to do it, I've chosen my Ashe game.
On the left you can see which highlight I've chosen, when I recorded it and even the time. It also shows that I had a defeat, even though I had a 11/10/25 KDA as Ashe support and the game took 38 minutes to finish.
Anyway, on the bottom you can see several buttons, the timeline and “Create a Clip”. Le obviousness. You press that little white button to make your highlight. Once you've made your highlight you can save it to Plays.tv. This means you put it online already. Don't worry, only your followers can see this, and the people you share your link with. This also puts the highlight in the folder you've chosen (you can find this in Preferences too). When plays recognizes your game, it will put the gameplay videos AS WELL as your highlights in the folders with the same name as your game. If plays does NOT recognize which game it is, it will be put in the folder “unknown”.
All highlights will be saved as .MP4, which means you can watch these back even with Windows Media Player. Like every other video file, you can drag and drop this in video editing software, such as Sony Vegas Pro or VideoPad or whatever video editing software you may use.
After that, upload your video to a website such as YouTube and your friends will be able to see it too!
You can also upload your highlights from Plays.tv directly to your YouTube. This requires you to link your accounts, or log in to YouTube anyways, and then you can upload them! As you can see in the image above, if you right click your highlight, you get several options. You can upload it to YouTube from here! Oh man that was hard! Well not really...
And that's how you record and share your gameplay using Plays.tv.
If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to share them with me in the comments. And if someone knows more about manually recording with Plays.tv I'm looking forward to read that ^^