General Info on Encoding

(Re-) compression is required since the fraps or gamescam saved movies are encoded with a fast (to only slowdown the game as far as necessary) but size wise inefficient codec. While there are many tools/GUI's to assist encoding I never really used anything but Gordian Knot or Virtual Dub , with Virtual Dub being my favorite. You will need Virtual Dub for this of the guide if you don't use the editors export function for space reasons (see note). Download.

Most codecs allow to select in between single pass and two/multiple pass encoding. While single pass is usually enough for personal backups, the two pass system has advantages when it comes to file size and quality control.

You need to encode the video stream as well as the audio steam. If you are unsure about what the best solution for you is, chose Audio: Mp3 and Video: XViD or DiVX.

Note: Many videos editing tools also offer built in encoding but I prefer exporting the video and audio uncompressed to encode in Virtual dub. Virtual Dubs filter come in handy often and the resizing function is fast and gives good results. Being able to compress a full batch of files overnight or just to add both passes to the batch make it even more usefull. The drawback: saving uncompressed video takes a lot of hard disc space but makes sure no recompression losses happens. If you don't have the space on your hard disc it might be better to use the built in functions. The codec settings should be similar to the ones on the virtual dub explanations.