Any other program than Fraps?

December 26, 2010

Just as the title says. For some reason, I have a lot of problems with that Fraps.

The fact that a one minute video footage, means 2 GBs of disk space!!

This is pissing is me off. I want another program that can record video like Fraps, but never spend GBs in a short video.

Anyone knows one?

December 26, 2010

Fraps encodes in full quality. The idea is that you film clips and then put into a movie editor such as Adobe Premiere or Vegas and after rendering it will be much smaller.

But you can set it to film in 'half-size' and at 25fps (looks smoother on smaller videos) to save some space.

December 26, 2010

I personally use VirtualDub to reduce the size of FRAPS clips. I re-encode the clips using the Xvid Codec. It can turn a 2GB file into a 200MB one usually (Possibly even less).

Setting FRAPS to record at Half-Size will greatly reduce the file size.

December 26, 2010

I use the technique described in this tutorial:

http://generaladmission.home.comcast.net/~.../vdubguide.html

It works really well, no watermarks or anything and with VirtualDub, you can add your logo on the fly if you need to (like I have on my videos (but not on this one)). 10 minutes of 1280x720 footage with the quality settings like in the tutorial give about 2 to 3GB in file size.

First video uploaded with it.

Edited December 26, 2010 by Edmachine

December 26, 2010

I said "any other program", not "how to reduce video size"..

Is that Xvid Codec something that needs to be downloaded? I have never got VirtualDub to work well.

Anyways, shall I get Adobe Premier/Sony Vegas?

Anyways, I want a size that ain't tedious in uploading. My upload speed is around 10KBs. And don't tell me to get a better DSL. See my flag to know why.

Still, 2 GBs for ten minutes of footage is......

December 26, 2010

Well, if you're okay with smaller videos, you can record at original size and then re-size it smaller to get the size you want. You can set it to lower quality. It's still watchable.

The codec isn't absolutely necessary, but it works very well, compresses very well. You can try other codecs if you want.

December 26, 2010

I think you're missing the point.

The reason why FRAPS records videos the way it does, in more or less a raw codec is because it's stressful enough for your system to be playing a game while capturing the video and writing that video to your drive. Now you want to throw in video encoding at the same time to make the file smaller. That would be 10x the work. It would still need to capture in the raw format so it can convert that using whatever codec you wanted it to use. And that there is another issue. Many different people want the video to end up in many different codecs and for FRAPS or any other program to use those codecs it had to license them in many cases. Also these capture programs, and their makers, don't know what video editor is going to be used later on, and while VirtualDub is fine for some it's not enough for others. What about Adobe Premiere which would/might get a bit upset if you tried to import some files that were already compressed using a codec like Dvix/Xvid.

I'd also like to point out that in these days of large HDDs being so cheap I don't see what the big deal is to having some files being 2GB that you're just going to edit and/or convert to a smaller, more manageable size that can be shared online to after which you would then delete the larger, raw, original video.

December 27, 2010

Well, if you're okay with smaller videos, you can record at original size and then re-size it smaller to get the size you want. You can set it to lower quality. It's still watchable.

The codec isn't absolutely necessary, but it works very well, compresses very well. You can try other codecs if you want.

You mean YouTube's videos' quality? I want to record videos and have them in that same quality.

For some reason, I didn't got VirtualDub to work well.

I think you're missing the point.
The reason why FRAPS records videos the way it does, in more or less a raw codec is because it's stressful enough for your system to be playing a game while capturing the video and writing that video to your drive. Now you want to throw in video encoding at the same time to make the file smaller. That would be 10x the work. It would still need to capture in the raw format so it can convert that using whatever codec you wanted it to use. And that there is another issue. Many different people want the video to end up in many different codecs and for FRAPS or any other program to use those codecs it had to license them in many cases. Also these capture programs, and their makers, don't know what video editor is going to be used later on, and while VirtualDub is fine for some it's not enough for others. What about Adobe Premiere which would/might get a bit upset if you tried to import some files that were already compressed using a codec like Dvix/Xvid.

I'd also like to point out that in these days of large HDDs being so cheap I don't see what the big deal is to having some files being 2GB that you're just going to edit and/or convert to a smaller, more manageable size that can be shared online to after which you would then delete the larger, raw, original video.

So it can't record a game while not killing about 2 GBs after just 1 minute.

My laptop's hard disk space is about 300 GBs. I still have some free space, wether it's the drive C, drive E or drive D. Ok, but won't leave a 2 GB video that consists one minute of game footage for too long unless I compress the vid.

Will, if I convert a vid before compressing it, it will still stay in it's big size?

December 27, 2010

Let me put it like this.

Take a standard pocket digital camera. The highest setting not only gives you a huge resolution but also a higher file size. On some cameras it's possible to still get that huge resolution but lower quality setting which will result in a smaller file size this will also mean more time between taking pictures because the camera has to spend more time compressing it. The important part is the quality.

I know you might say that you can when you look at some DVD rips that are using DviX the quality is great. Question: How long do you think it took do that? How much CPU stress did it take? Now think of what little else was going on while it was doing that conversion. I'm betting little to none. Mean while you're talking about playing a game while capturing the video and then compressing that video.

Lastly you have to think, how you can compress something that's still taking place? Image it like this. You want to write a letter to someone and put it in an envelope and mail it. You can't fold the paper you're still writing on much less put it in the envelope.

The camera I mentioned before and how it handles the images it stores. It writes them to a temp area first, then compress it and stores that to the SD card and then delete it from the temp storage area. Because it can't compress at the same time as it's taking the photo.

Not sure how many other ways I can explain it.