Recording with fraps

[Sharp]

Hey, I've been think of recording with fraps, but it laggs and I know its not the cpu or gpus fault coz it runs them at 60 fps, but it still laggs, this means that my hdd is to slow to record everything, therefor I'm thinking of buying an exsternal hdd dedicated to fraps, what do you guys think about it. And if its a good choice which is the best for the money, I don't need a big one just a fast one.

Regards

Sharp

 

[Matthias2437]

I think it would be better to get a dedicated internal drive for fraps. You could get a WD velociraptor 150gig for $100 now. It will be faster than an external drive.

 

[SieB]

Is your HDD SATA? I can't see it being the HDD if it is. What FPS are you recording at?

Try recording at a higher FPS, record without sound and choose half size. FRAPS uses a lot CPU and depending on what game it is and whether or not it's a CPU intensive, like WoW, it will cause lag.

 

[JCBenton]

When I updated my GPU I could fraps at the full resolution @ 30 fps with no problems, so the GPU does affect it in some way.

Best settings for youtube would be 1280x720 @ 30fps.

Try playing round with vsync etc. Maybe turn AA off.

But yeah, a faster HDD (or even SSDs in the future, heh) will also factor into it.

 

[I Hunta x]

Ive been playing around with it a bit the past few weeks and some things ive been doing to help reduce the lag/frame loss have been such.

1. Record to a different drive to what the game is running from. (like drive 1 for OS and games + drive 2 for recording)

2. Alt+tab out of the game once you have loaded it up and set core afinitys so fraps has a full core to its self (i find the last core usualy 1 or 3 depending if you have a dual or a quad works best for fraps) and set the game to run on all the remaining cores.

3. set frames to 29/30 frames (sometimes telling it to record at 29 makes a suprising difference depending on the game for somereason)

 

[Sharp]

Thanks for all feedback!

I've been checking around and the velocity raptor is much more expensive here in norway, so I've thought about the Samsung SpinPoint F3 250GB, is this a good choich?

I know its not as fast, but I hope its fat enouigh...

If anyone wanna know I've got a 950 processor and a 6879 grapich card

I've though about recording some cod4

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

Thanks for all feedback!

I've been checking around and the velocity raptor is much more expensive here in norway, so I've thought about the Samsung SpinPoint F3 250GB, is this a good choich?

I know its not as fast, but I hope its fat enouigh...

If anyone wanna know I've got a 950 processor and a 6879 grapich card

I've though about recording some cod4

What kind of frames do you get with 6870 and no fraps?

 

[Sharp]

stabile 90... never goes down

 

[zak4994]

Thanks for all feedback!

I've been checking around and the velocity raptor is much more expensive here in norway, so I've thought about the Samsung SpinPoint F3 250GB, is this a good choich?

I know its not as fast, but I hope its fat enouigh...

If anyone wanna know I've got a 950 processor and a 6879 grapich card

I've though about recording some cod4

Samsung's F3 drives are some of the best in the world. Your best bet.

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

stabile 90... never goes down

In COD? & thanks

 

[JCBenton]

Just remember that fraps footage takes up a LOT of space.

Consider what you're wanting to do.

The user recording his entire Left 4 Dead games in case something funny happens or is said, to convert (for example, via Sony Vegas) to a smaller format and upload to youtube will want 1tb or more space purely for frapsing.

The user wanting to record entire playthroughs for let's play-style videos will want more of the same.

The user wanting to record a very few select moments and nothing more than that can go as low as 250-ish, really. (MMO Raiders, people wanting to make PVP videos in MMOs or FPS)

But yeah each file would take up 3.9gb of space, for me.

 

[BigIan88]

Although FRAPS records gameplay with segmented output files of around 1.5GB/Min the quality isnt as great as you would think for a file that size however the alternatives to FRAPS are even worse

 

[I Hunta x]

250gb will fill up pretty quickly, recording full size 30fps @ 1080p it can be pretty easy to go over 1.5-2.5gb per 60 secs of recording as bigian said but i find the quality is actualy fairly good aslong as you record at full size for the 1:1 pixel ratio unlike half size were it has to squish it, aslong as your recording to a seperate drive pretty much any newish sata drive should be fine speed wise tho so just go for the largest drive you can get for your budget,

 

[BigIan88]

I was testing recording quality on company of heroes last night with my 1100t and I was able to get 45fps whilst recording @ 1920x1080 (60fps) and the recording wasnt too bad but didnt impress me or look as good as the game itself does - 35 seconds of gameplay came back as 1.3GB though!

plus side was it was only 27mb when rerendered to an HD mp4 @ 720p

 

[I Hunta x]

1.3 for 30 secs of 45fps sounds about right, 60fps would be about 2 for 30 secs, tho any more than 30 isnt realy that noticeable in video's even less so if its on youtube due to YT butchering it.

 

[BigIan88]

its very noticeable on fast paced games (action, adventure and fps), i dont think it'd make a huge difference on an RTS though

 

[Sharp]

its very noticeable on fast paced games (action, adventure and fps), i dont think it'd make a huge difference on an RTS though

Damn I'm gonna make a good recording program when I get good enough, lol.

Do anyone know why they get saved in such big files?

 

[BigIan88]

uncompressed video I think

 

[SmoulderingCircuits]

its very noticeable on fast paced games (action, adventure and fps), i dont think it'd make a huge difference on an RTS though

RTS clog up very quickly as you put more objects on the map, so faster ram would make a difference there

 

[JCBenton]

Damn I'm gonna make a good recording program when I get good enough, lol.

Do anyone know why they get saved in such big files?

As aforementioned: Uncompressed video. Still, Fraps is perhaps the best recording software available. It depends on your usage. If you upload to youtube, the quality will degrade anyway, hence why 1080p gaming videos are normally no better than 720p ones. If you fraps at 1280x720 the file sizes will be smaller, obviously.