Today I started to make a movie. I did my first scene and wanted to see how it looks. When I looked at the size of the video I almost fell off my chair. Size of eight second video was 250 MB. What should I do to minimize size of this video. Please help!

Ps Iam using Frap program to do the videos.

after you did the fraps clip. did you edited it in virtual dube or somthng like that and adobe premire /movie maker? if you use only the fraps clip it can be huge but if you edit it with some programs it will lower the size

Hi!
I used AVI to MPEG Converter (http://www.FlyDragonSoft.com) for converting what I had recorded with FRAPS (.avi).
It reduces size about 20 times :-)

Use windows movie creator to resave it, and it usually drops to around 15mb.

You need a compressor to reduce the file size. Fraps makes silly sized files because it would give your poor computer far too much to think about to run your game, capture it and compress it at the same time.

Most video editing softwares render a final "cut" when you're done editing, at this point you select your compression codec. It depends what software you're using and what video codecs are installed on your machine as to what choice you'll get.

I'd recommend Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, and a decent codec pack, since that will enable you to compress your film down to a much smaller size, by using something popular like DivX etc

If you don't know anyone who has Premiere you could try this compressor instead, but as far as I know it's just a compressor, not an editing tool...
anyways the link to it was posted here http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=2082#post2082 [reply 4 by zockmachine]

Fraps makes just umcompressed, plain .avi, which is pretty much capturing 15/25/30/whatever images per second and saves it in a row... Just imagine there are 8 * 15 = 120 Bitmaps on your harddisk... That's making the big filesize... Take one of the video editing tools listed above and compress it with a codec... Mostly, any MPEG-4 codec will do...

Thank you very much.
I will post my movie soon.

Unfortunately I have another problem . When I am doing a video "Fraps" is missing some frates. Then when I compress the video it looks really ugly.

Do you get a decent FPS all the time when recording? 25/30 fps is OK for a smooth video.

Adjust your max fps in LFS to whatever fraps is running at or maybe just over, I suspect what's happening is that LFS is running quite a bit faster than fraps can capture it, hence missing frames on playback.

If the frames are being dropped on compression then check the output settings in the compression software. One of the ways in which compression softwares achieve that magic small file size is by setting a maximum number of frames per second, and dropping frames or merging them together ensure the output stays below that maximum rate.

Quote from Smax :

Adjust your max fps in LFS to whatever fraps is running at or maybe just over, I suspect what's happening is that LFS is running quite a bit faster than fraps can capture it, hence missing frames on playback.

FPS should be limited in LFS to same FPS than you're recording.

Also fragmented hard-drive can cause "choppiness" on recorded movies. I recently found out this myself. Try to defragment (using the Disk Defragment tool) your hard-drives just in case, it's good to do it anyway once in a time.

When I am recording I get only 15-19 FPS. I limited the same number of FPS in LFS as in "Fraps" but I'm missing frames while recording anyway.

LFS can be a pain in the ........... when capturing clips. What i do is simply turn off AA/AF and put the resolution in 800x600x16, works fine then!

Quote from YUGO45 :

LFS can be a pain in the ........... when capturing clips. What i do is simply turn off AA/AF and put the resolution in 800x600x16, works fine then!

Pain in the ass? How come other games are better when recording? In LFS it's actually very easy to make movies because have free camera mode (shift+U) etc. Only thing missing is rewinding replays.

If you don't have a super computer the whole point is to turn off AF/FSAA and use a minimum resolution when recording. It's quite logical...

I use to do clips in FS2004, and boy did i get nice frame rates!

Now compare the velosity in graphic between these two games!

And yes, LFS badly needs a option to rewind replay.



btw, in nearly all movie-friendly games you have the option of "free-view", tho some of these programs are payware.

Quote from YUGO45 :

btw, in nearly all movie-friendly games you have the option of "free-view", tho some of these programs are payware.

I compared it to other sims and their movie-friendliness. E.g. GT Legends which pretty much lacks in this aspect.

IF your FPS is that low when recording then, it's time to start winding down the graphics options, and maybe checking the number of system processes you have running to shut down anything that's not really necessary and free up some resources.

Sounds to me ultimately as though a faster machine may be the answer.
To be honest I've yet to try making LFS movies, but wouldn't mind giving it a try, if you still have my e-mail then look me up and I'll help you out. If not leave me a post and I'll pm you the address.

I dont have super duper computer but I think it is pretty good.

Pentium 4 2.4 ghz
256 ram-(thinking of buying more)
Geforce 4200 titanium

For video editing purposes you need more RAM, other than that what you have is fine.
I have 1024mb, a 3400 64bit AMD chip and a pair of 200gb SATA hard disks on a striped raid array, and Adobe Premiere will still run slowly when I'm working on really big files. My system's not the world's fastest, but it's not slow either, so you get an idea of how resource intensive video editing is.

Quote from Smax :

For video editing purposes you need more RAM, other than that what you have is fine.
I have 1024mb, a 3400 64bit AMD chip and a pair of 200gb SATA hard disks on a striped raid array, and Adobe Premiere will still run slowly when I'm working on really big files. My system's not the world's fastest, but it's not slow either, so you get an idea of how resource intensive video editing is.

Kajojek wasn't talking about video editing but video recording.