Issues with FRAPS

[Tragic Hero]

Ok so I got the full version of FRAPS so that I could try to record some of my Street Fighter matches.  I have all the video settings set to high (60fps) and at full screen.  When I hit the button to record the gameplay slows down terribly.  Then when I go to play it back my video players won't play the file back.  When I use my Nero Showtime Essentials it tells me that there is an issue with the resolution set that will probably cause errors.

So my questions:

Is there a way to record gameplay video without suffering slowdown?
Do I have to set the video at "half-size" in order to get the video to play back?
Does god have feet?

Thank you for your time.

[Sponson]

1. I dunno
2. I dunno
3. God has like, a million feet, or none, it changes like, every space time particle moment.

[ToiletDuck]

Have you tried lowering your game's resolution settings? At a decent resolution while recording at 60FPS while running the game, I think it'd take a Godly computer to handle that.

Shouldn't be as bad at a lower resolution.

[Tragic Hero]

Have you tried lowering your game's resolution settings? At a decent resolution while recording at 60FPS while running the game, I think it'd take a Godly computer to handle that.

Shouldn't be as bad at a lower resolution.

Well I thought my computer was Godly (Intel i7 Quad Core, Geforce 295x gtx, 6gig RAM, etc) but at 1920x1200 it still might not be enough.  Guess I could lower the resolution for the sake of capturing video...

And thank you Sponson for handling question 3

[KorJax]

First of all you set the FPS to record way to high.  The standard video playback speed of all video is 24-29.97 FPS (you can round up to 30 though for all intents and purposes).  Older movies were done at 18 FPS, with the help of a lot of motion blur to seamlessly transition the frames.

In other words, don't set it to record at 60 FPS.

1920x1200 is a very VERY VERY high resolution to record video.  Remember that HD video is consider 1280x720, and the highest definition video commercially avalable is the blu-ray crazyness which goes up to 19??x1080, and even then the video is compressed to fit it on the disk.  And to make that kind of video there are some serious server farms with giant tera-byte arrays used to process, edit, encode and store the video data.

Honestly I'm more surprised you didn't run out of disk space more than anything.  Recording at that resolution and at 60 FPS is basically encoding video at 1GB per 10-20 seconds.  That's insane.  It's probibly going so slow because you're trying to encode data faster than your HDD supports... well, okay maybe not but regardless it's a very large amount of raw data you are working with that pretty much will put any PC on it's knee's unless you're working with on a $15,000 server farm.

[Tragic Hero]

First of all you set the FPS to record way to high.  The standard video playback speed of all video is 24-29.97 FPS (you can round up to 30 though for all intents and purposes).  Older movies were done at 18 FPS, with the help of a lot of motion blur to seamlessly transition the frames.

In other words, don't set it to record at 60 FPS.

1920x1200 is a very VERY VERY high resolution to record video.  Remember that HD video is consider 1280x720, and the highest definition video commercially avalable is the blu-ray crazyness which goes up to 19??x1080, and even then the video is compressed to fit it on the disk.  And to make that kind of video there are some serious server farms with giant tera-byte arrays used to process, edit, encode and store the video data.

Honestly I'm more surprised you didn't run out of disk space more than anything.  Recording at that resolution and at 60 FPS is basically encoding video at 1GB per 10-20 seconds.  That's insane.  It's probibly going so slow because you're trying to encode data faster than your HDD supports... well, okay maybe not but regardless it's a very large amount of raw data you are working with that pretty much will put any PC on it's knee's unless you're working with on a $15,000 server farm.

Well it looks like I've got some settings to change.  Thanks KorJax

[Fail Medic]

^ Same advice would apply to recording in Source engine.  Set your resolution to something reasonable, like 1024 x 768, because those tga files are going to add up quick.

[CaffeinePowered]

Have fraps record at 30 fps (TV is like 32 FPS), and have it do half-size resolution. There's not a whole lot you can do other than having a faster computer. Also FRAPS will _FIX_ the frame rate of whatever you are recording to what it is, so be prepared for the game to slow to exactly 30 FPS if that's what you record at.

[copulatingduck]

Isn't there a way to record demos or something, and then fraps them during playback. Fraps is already crap, I can't imagine trying to actually play while it's running

[Tragic Hero]

Isn't there a way to record demos or something, and then fraps them during playback. Fraps is already crap, I can't imagine trying to actually play while it's running

Now theres a thought.  Unfortunately I don't know of any way to record a demo during SF4

[CaffeinePowered]

Isn't there a way to record demos or something, and then fraps them during playback. Fraps is already crap, I can't imagine trying to actually play while it's running

Not all games/engines are as good as source at this, most IIRC don't even have the ability to record in game, so your best option is FRAPS

[Squishy3]

[quote author=CopulatingDuck link=topic=3385.msg103388#msg103388 date=1249279082]
Isn't there a way to record demos or something, and then fraps them during playback. Fraps is already crap, I can't imagine trying to actually play while it's running

Not all games/engines are as good as source at this, most IIRC don't even have the ability to record in game, so your best option is FRAPS
[/quote]SF4 has the ability to record inputs and play it back in the engine, one of the game modes allows for this so you can upload it online, I don't think Capcom has released this to the public so anyone can do it but maybe with the modding community SF4 has already gathered someone may have unlocked it.

edit: with a quick look nobody has unlocked it, as the files seem to be hidden in the EXE itself. so unless capcom releases it for everyone instead of just being an option to save the last championship mode match I don't think we'll be seeing the SF4 replay option being for anything other than championship mode

[Tragic Hero]

Ok so I kind of went with Cducks idea and recorded a demo of one of my tournament matches.  First time I ran it at full resolution at half size and 30fps my media players still wouldn't play it.  Then I brought it down to 1020x720(or whatever that resolution is), half size and 30fps.  My Nero essentials player would play it but it stuttered a great amount.

Is there a better media player I should use when playing a file from Fraps or do I need to convert the file to something else and/or get new codecs?

[CaffeinePowered]

Ok so I kind of went with Cducks idea and recorded a demo of one of my tournament matches.  First time I ran it at full resolution at half size and 30fps my media players still wouldn't play it.  Then I brought it down to 1020x720(or whatever that resolution is), half size and 30fps.  My Nero essentials player would play it but it stuttered a great amount.

Is there a better media player I should use when playing a file from Fraps or do I need to convert the file to something else and/or get new codecs?

I can't remember what FRAPS encodes to, but if the source stutters it doesn't matter what you re-encode to

[ToiletDuck]

http://www.gamecamportal.com/

give this a shot, the demo does not record audio though which is OK i guess if you want to add music to it anyway

[shadowcast]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraps

Fraps records into it's own AVI wrapped format.  It should be playable on any media player that can play AVI files.  They are lightly compressed so not completely RAW avi format, but it is damn close.

Here is an example:
I record @30FPS and 1680x1050.
In FRAPS format this comes out to approximately 4GB per 1 minute and 45 seconds of video.  You can easily do the math and see the sizes involved.

Not having SF4 I cannot say anything about the stutter correction as I do not know how graphically demanding the game is, but if it is a situation where you have a beast of a PC and cannot get rid of the stutter while recording then you may want to look into a cheap video capture card and grab the video that way (it is highly recommended you use a 2nd PC for this if you really want top quality, but as powerful as your machine is, you should be fine).

I have yet to try it, but Taksi is another alternative and it is Open Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taksi_%28software%29

[Tragic Hero]

Well it doesn't so much stutter but more o
like it's trying to buffer.  I couldn't even watch a full video.  Maybe I'll try800x600 and if that doesn't work well ill go with another program

[Tragic Hero]

Well if anyone seems to care it's all been solved.  All I simply had to do was run the videos in VLC media player.  Yep, thats all there was to it

...

Thank you again though for all your input