Recording Game play

[DrChaos]

ok, Im a fan of Fraps. If its not able to be discussed here then please edit my post. But I have a questions that I just cant find an answer to or figure out....



1. I see vids of wow all the time on youtube, and recently on tankspot that are well into the 6 - 8 minute mark and streaming from youtube.

2. Youtube only allows uplads of 2gigs per cycle.

3. Im frapsing a 4 minute boss fight and its over 8gig. I fraps a boss fight that was just over 6 minutes and it was 10gig on my hd.



how the hell do I change "something" to get what im seeing every one do? Ive asked on several forums, even on the fraps site and got no answers. on guy said to turn the quality down to the lowest setting. i did that and the screen was a blurr and still only dropped a feew mb's from the recording.



anyone here have a clue about what im talking about?





edit, maybe this should have went into off topic. sorry....

[Diwa]

As much as possible avoid uploading raw AVI files in youtube. You need to convert the file into a different format like MPG, WMV or other youtube supported video formats. There's a freeware called DVDVideoSoft for that or you can simply import the AVI file in Windows Movie Maker then do some revisions and save it as WMV. You may also try using other high end video editing software like Vegas, Final Cut Pro, Aftereffects..etc but you need to purchase them.

[DrChaos]

im guessing that converting them is the key to making it smaller but not lose quality.



thanks for the info :)

[Sam DeathWalker]

http://www.badaboomit.com/

[Ellay]

Aye, when I first started making movies it was crazy to me the file sizes you get. You stick them into a video editing software and render it which drops the file size down a nice chunk while hopefully maintaining a decent quality depending on your settings. Then you can further reduce the file size and slightly reduce the quality by compressing it with something like DivX.

[Siaea]

I got Vegas a little while back, and there's an option to upload directly to YouTube, no other input needed. But yea, you can also use Windows Movie Maker to save them as a lower quality file to make them fit (.wmv, etc).

[Duese]

It's all a matter of finding a happy medium between the file size you want, the quality you want and the resolution you want.

Fraps has only really 3 factors in filesizes.

Half Screen vs Full screen
Record Sound vs No Sound
Lower Frame Rate vs Higher Frame Rate

After that, I usually toss it into my video editor and add music or toss in some lighting effects or something. I've been using anything from Windows Movie Maker to Camtasia Studio for this and only recently started digging into Adobe After Effects and whatnot. But after I render the video using either of those, I check the file size. If it's still huge, I run it through Prism Video Converter and that usually drops the video down to the size and quality that i like.

I probably went through 10-15 different video converting softwares until I was finally happy with the results of the output.

[DrChaos]

update....
fraps is recording in "chunks" so my 6 min boss fight turns out to be 4 files. i converted each file using badaboom to mpeg-4 (youtube allows that for uploads). I set the settings to Highest Quality and the playback is less then terrible. Its very blurry and not usable.

fraps was set to record at Full size and 60 FPS with no sound. Ill add music later. The quality is exactly like the game play with all game settings set up to max. this is a screen shot after the video was converted so i could load it to you tube. Remember, all i did was drop the video into the converter and set it to high quality and converted it.
there has to be a better way to get the quality, and in not looking for epic videos here, and be able to host it somewhere


http://img6.imageshack.us/img6/9082/aftercrf.th.jpg ('http://img6.imageshack.us/i/aftercrf.jpg/')

[gitcho]

I use fraps (paid version) to record all my stuff too ... here's what I do to automate my video encoding to a good quality .wmv:

1. download and install windows media encoder (free) from here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx
2. created a directory for all my videos (i used <d:\media\fraps>;) and set fraps to record movies there
4. I created the following "encode.bat" batch file in <d:\media\fraps> to automate the encoding:



@echo off
REM Get bare directory listing
@FOR /f "delims=" %%? IN ('DIR /b *.avi') DO CALL :ENCODE "%%~n?"
GOTO :eof

:ENCODE
REM Skip file if it's already been processed
IF EXIST "%~1.wmv" GOTO :EOF
ECHO ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ECHO Encoding "%~1.avi" ...
ECHO ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
SET "currentFile=%~1"

cscript "c:\program files\windows media components\encoder\WMCmd.vbs" -input "%currentFile%.avi" -output "%currentFile%.wmv" -v_mode 1 -v_bitrate 5000000 -v_keydist 30 -v_buffer 10000 -v_quality 100
GOTO :EOF

:EOF
@ECHO All done!


Every time I run "encode.bat" it crawls my <d:\media\fraps> directory and encodes any .avi file that hasn't already been encoded. I use a decent bitrate to encode the video at the original recorded resolution. 4GB files encode to roughtly 80-90MB, and you can still read all the text quite clearly. You can adjust the quality as needed (use cscript WMcmd.vbs /?" from dos to get usage).

It took me awhile to find the right encoding settings to use, but now that i've got it down, It's taken all the tedium out of encoding my videos (did i mention it's all free?). Hope this helps someone.

[DrChaos]

ok, im gonna try your way now. Im using a paid version also just to be clear.



I just tried VirtualDub and it works to a certain extent but again, The quality drops alot. Its also taking 4gb to about 90mb. Ill post after I try your suggestion. I will bow to you if it works. Ive been tring to get it right for 2 days now. lol

[DrChaos]

ok. I have 4 files in the folder. I created the .bat file and ran it. It ran pretty fast too. But it only decoded 1 file. the other 3 it gave an error.

"Start encoder failed with error -1072882806 One or all of the specified sources are not working properly. Check that the sources are configured corrrectly".
any thoughts?



EDIT: ran it a second time and worked like a charm. /BOW /BOW now if i can get fraps to record in one files instead of 4 or 5 ill be doing great!

[gitcho]

ok. I have 4 files in the folder. I created the .bat file and ran it. It ran pretty fast too. But it only decoded 1 file. the other 3 it gave an error.

"Start encoder failed with error -1072882806 One or all of the specified sources are not working properly. Check that the sources are configured corrrectly".
any thoughts?

EDIT: ran it a second time and worked like a charm. /BOW /BOW now if i can get fraps to record in one files instead of 4 or 5 ill be doing great!Glad it worked for you. I'm pretty sure fraps will split files at 4gb because it was written for a 32bit OS which can only logically adress 4,096mb of memory at any given time. Because fraps buffers parts of the video to memory before writing it out to disk, you may not be able to get around the file split until a x64 version of fraps is released, or you find another program. The good new tho, is that windows movie maker (also free) can easily join the 2 wmv files together.