FRAPS

One of the tools you can use to record in game videos is FRAPS which can be downloaded at fraps.com. The test version is free but restricted to a water mark and 30 seconds recording time. The full version costs $37 at the moment.

Setting up FRAPS for recording videos

After you installed FRAPS the way you want it, start it and go to the "Movies" tab. The following options are important.

• Folder to save movies in: Set this to a folder where you want to save you in game videos. If you leave the default value all recorded videos will be saved to the folder where you installed fraps.
• Half-Size / Full-Size: Set this to Full-Size. The internal resizing by half through FRAPS doesn't give as good results as using Virtual Dub or other tools to do this. Especially text usually is impossible to read when using the FRAPS resize function. Please keep in mind that the maximum size for a recorded video is 1152x864. If you go above that size FRAPS automatically reduces the image size by half.
• Record Sound: Activate it. You don't want to go through the pain of synchronizing audio recorded with another tool, I am sure (;
• FPS: I use 25fps for most of what i record, sometimes just 15 or 20 to reduce the load on the machine or to create smaller files. Other fps rates might be fitting if you're producing videos for other uses, eg for display on a NTSC-TV you'd likely use the 29.97fps option.
• Video Capture Hot key: Set this to something you don't accidentally hit but still have in good reach so you can always enable recording when there's something worth the hard disk space. I set it to the German character "ü" since it's not used in any of the games i play.
• No Cursor: Activate it if you don't want FRAPS to record the mouse pointer.
• No Sync: Fraps will not wait for the image to be full drawn before it's captured. Disable this.

Optimizing FRAPS

One of the biggest drawbacks with using FRAPS is the low frame rate most users get. For example on a Athlon XP+ 2500 w/ 1 GB RAM the typical frame rate for recording a Lineage 2 in game video was 2-4fps first - depending on the amount of objects. The following changes to my system helped:

• Second Hard Disk. My frame rate improved by about 40% when I added a fast 250GB HD on the second ide bus. Both the higher transfer rate caused by a bigger cache/faster access times and loading game/cache data from another HD then the one where the video data is saved to.
• RAM: Depends on your system. Replacing 1GB DDR 333 RAM with 2GB DDR 400 helped the frame rate to jump over 10fps constantly. But this might just be due to Lineage 2 being a big memory hog as well as containing various memory leaks causing the system to swap out space more and more over time. Other games might be a lot less affected.
• CPU: The more the merrier. FRAPS compresses the videos before it saves them to the HD and needs the CPU power that the game misses when recording
• Graphics card: With FRAPS braking out the CPU graphics cards are usually not a big problem but of course the frame rate is also directly affected. You can try to lower specific settings like isometric filtering etc to see if you fps rates improves but if you don't have a slow graphics card the CPU is usually the bottle neck.
• Recording Size: I use 1024x768 windows mode for all videos i can record. Try to use smaller resolutions like 800x600 if that still is too slow.
• HD De fragmentation: Defrag your hard disk every now and then. A slowly heavily fragmented hard disk will be a major brake for frame rates.

Testing your FRAPS installation

Start a game, set it to the resolution you want to record with. Now hit the recording hot key. If you have FPS display active you'll see it changes its color to red and the results of your optimization work. Press the key again to end the recording. An AVI file should just have been saved to the folder you defined.