How do you store your fraps recordings?

Curunen

Curunen

Curunen

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This is aimed at PC users using fraps to record gameplay footage.
I've spent a the best part of three weeks messing around with different methods (and hair pulling!), but not settled on any conclusion, so felt it best to open this up to the community.

Emphasis on storage, not on making videos. Do you suck it up and buy some 1tb hard drives (pain for backing up I imagine), or do you shrink the raw avi's before deleting the originals (need to be satisfied with the quality to let go of the originals)?

What framerate do you record at?
-- 30, 60, other...

What resolution?
-- Half size, Full size, custom (playing the game at non native resolution).

What method do you use to convert the original files?
-- What tool(s)? - virtualdub, avidemux, megui, any video converter (free version)... etc. Free or paid for?
-- What encoder? - x264, h.264, xvid... etc.
-- Do you also convert the audio, or leave that alone? If so what - aac, mp3... etc?
-- What container? - avi, mp4, mkv...
-- Any other things? - resizing, merging, batch conversion, what bitrates... etc.


One peculiarity I noticed, and I know I'm deviating from the subject of this thread:
Specifically using the free version of any video converter and converting the avi to an mp4 using x264 produces great quality, with the only odd issue being powerdirector (which I already own) doesn't like it - it completely distorts the image. The weird thing is if I instead (again using the same software) either use x264 in an avi, or mpeg4 in an mp4, it is totally fine. So for some odd reason that combination of codec and container as created using AVCFree is messed up. Anyone else using this combination (any video converter and powerdirector) with this issue?
Other tools have worked fine when using x/h.264 in an mp4 although there have been other issues such as colour distortion.

Anyway I digress, and bringing it back to the topic in the title please share what you do to store your gameplay footage.
:)
 
normally i do 60fps, 720p , i think it roughly works out at about a 1gb per 30 seconds or something.

then just plonk it straight into vegas 10 and convert into 6mpbs wmv's and delete the originals.
naturally the fraps needs to be recording to a different drive then the game is running on.

i used to use AVS but managed to get a cheap license of vegas 10 so switched and its much better.
 
30 FPS Full Size 1920x1200 captures, streamed to and stored on another HDD. Edited in Vegas, rendered with Vegas into XviD AVI container at 1280x800 resolution. Audio converted to an acceptable MP3 rate.
 
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frapsm.jpg


Then I drag into windows live movie maker. 720p widescreen for publishing to youtube. It saves my movies at about 70mb per 2 minutes footage. The 2 minute movie in this screenshot was compressed by WLMM from 1.3GB to 71.5mb with not much loss in quality at all.

wlm.jpg
 
There is a guide on Recorded Amiga Games forum that I used to use. Although this is pretty labour intensive so the Vegas 10 option sounds like a better choice.

The above method did dramatically reduce file size while maintaining good quality. But no idea if the new versions of each piece software has since bloated process as not done for over a year.

Recorded Amiga Games; NoX1911 said:
Tools you need:
- x264 encoder (http://x264.nl)
- MeGUI (http://x264.nl) (needs .NET Framework)
- NET Framework (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/de ... 62-4b0d-8edd-aab15c5e04f5)
- AviSynth (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57023)
- Nero AAC Encoder (http://www.nero.com/nerodigital/eng/Nero_Digital_Audio.html)
- YAMB (http://yamb.unite-video.com)
Click to expand...

Largest I've captured is 720 due to performance hit, and not having a 1080 monitor.
 
I failed on fraps..... For some reason my record button kept defaulting to my Push to talk button, my HDD was at 98% and i couldn't work out why.... Felt a plumb when i realised!
 
^I've had a play around with dxtory, and it is a great tool, although I was having trouble getting the resize to work.
Thing is I've already got a full version of fraps, and as dxtory is close to £30 I'll pass on it for now, though I will keep watching its development.

I'm still curious about containers. Random googling suggests not to encode to x264 in an avi - causing problems like audio/video not in sync, and generally not recommended; but is this really a problem? I admit I have no clue what this is about, and haven't experienced any problem myself. Is it necessary to have it in mp4/mkv, or not really an issue?
 
For straight capture and conversion I take my Fraps output and use staxrip to encode into an x264 .mp4 file. If I need to make a few edits/cuts then ill load the fraps output into VirtualDub and save without recompressing (saves faster), then into staxrip for the conversion.

Does dxtory do lossless compression ? (Important feature of fraps) I cant tell from the webpage.
 
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Record at 30FPS full screen at 1680x1050, then just throw them in to Windows Movie Maker and render them for 720P because I've never been fussed about special movie effects from the likes of Sony Vegas, etc. Seems to do the trick most of the time although I hardly make gaming videos any more.
 
I record full frames, 60fps onto an ssd drive. I use vegas or after effects for post processing.
Click to expand...

Have you experienced any performance increases on your computer recording to an SSD? I'm planning a new system soon and just wondering whether it's worth dedicating an SSD for short recordings.


As for me, I usually record at half size @ 60fps on 1920 by 1080 for newer games. (usually a near perfect resolution for 720p youtube uploads)
For those games that are a few years old and don't really require to much power then I switch to 75 fps, full size at 1920 by 1080. (I'm a fan of super smooth footage, specially on racing games)
 
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