Heya people

I'm going to start doing some gameplay videos and I have the latest version of FRAPS. However when I record videos of gameplay the file is often huge, around 3 to 4GB for just 5 minuets of video.

Is there anyway to set up FRAPS so it will still record with good quality, but be less than 1GB?

If not, how ells do I get the videos down to a manageable size?

System Specs (if it will help)

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8300 @ 2.50GHz
ATI Radeon 5750 1GB
4GB DDR2 Cross-hair Dual Channel ram
640GB SataII Hard Drive

Fraps creates huge files, you can't change that. Open the clips in a video editor program, then render the video in avi/wmv/mp4 or whatever you want.

Also, you could try Game Cam, but it leaves a watermark on the screen. No idea about the recorded files' size, but I guess it's way too less than Fraps.

Fraps does not have time to compress the files when recording so you can't really change anything about this.

What you can do to avoid huge files:

- lower resolution, going down from 1920x1200 to let's say 1440x900 helps
- record at half-size
- record without sound and add some music afterwards
- use another program

limit framerates to 30fps also helps. i either record at half framerate, or just screen res to 720p and record full res.

Just record the movie how you like it, then open in moviemaker or something similliar and save it as WMV..

Quote from Gabkicks :

limit framerates to 30fps also helps. i either record at half framerate, or just screen res to 720p and record full res.

I'm not a pro at this but from my experience with encoding video files for my mobile phone I know that the framerate doesn't influence the final file size (maybe a few % up or down). But bitrate does. Sorry but I'm too lazy to explain this.

Thanks for your help people I'l give all the suggestions a go.

Quote from Takumi_lfs :

Just record the movie how you like it, then open in moviemaker or something similliar and save it as WMV..

probably the easiest and most reasonable way.


edit* lowering framerate and size does still leave you end up with lower quality viodeos with unreasonable big size.

Well, just in case anyone ells is interested I managed to get 5 minuets of gameplay under 1GB. I limited the FPS to 29 and recorded at half size. This seemed to do it. Then I took the video file into after effects and managed to get it to around 500MB, whilst keeping it good quality.

Thanks once again for the suggestions they worked

well you could still make it alot smaller with moviemaker...i did mine 2gb 3min movie into 60 mb movie with few klicks like that.

/edit i think i had framerate limited to 60 and full resolution (if i remember correctly).

I like to record at 1280x720@30fps, edit the raw files then compress using h264 afterwards.