Digital Capture

Capturing a PC game is both easier and harder than capturing a console game. Unlike consoles, a PC game is already transmitting its video information in digital format; the only thing that is needed is for this signal to end up in a file as well. However, doing so will require running a recording program alongside your game, which may or may not cause problems.

Fraps

Fraps is probably the most utilized gameplay recording program for PC, using its own codec to make very high quality recordings. It must, however, be purchased (for $37) in order to make videos of any appreciable length. The program doesn’t work equally well with all games and systems so you might run into problems no one else have run into, so you have to be prepared to do a little trial and error when using Fraps.

The Recording Process

While you run the game you want to record you should run Fraps in the background, otherwise you won't be able to record anything with it. Fraps will save your recording as an AVI file with PCM sound at 1411kbps and a near to lossless quality for video. Technically the quality isn’t lossless, but it’s so good so the human eye can’t spot the loss even if you take snapshots from the movie and compare side by side with in-game snapshots.

The size of your recordings will vary depending on how graphically intense the game is and the frame rate you record at, this is because Fraps will adjust the bitrate for the video depending on how much it actually needs to keep the quality.

When choosing frame rate to record at you should check what your computer is actually capable of handling in the game you want to record, while Fraps is recording. For example, if you try to record at 60 frames per second but your frame rate constantly dips below 40 frames per second it’s a clear sign that you shouldn’t record that game at 60 frames per second on your computer. Having such huge frame rate drops will make the video appear choppy, and recording that game at 30 frames per second will probably give you a smoother recording.

When choosing resolution and image quality settings you should check for the same thing as when choosing frame rate. Just keep in mind that the more graphical details added the harder it will be to get a good quality once you encode the video, because more graphical detail requires a higher bitrate to keep the quality.

For synchronization purposes Fraps limits the frame rate of the game to the frame rate you have set Fraps to record at. This means that if you have set Fraps to record at 30 frames per second, your frame rate won't go higher than that when you record your playing.

To prevent issues with large files Fraps begins to record to a new AVI when the first one has reached the size of 3.9GB (binary system), and then it just goes on like that. Look carefully at the recordings if you make several recordings in a row, so you don’t delete files you want to keep.

Games You Can Record Using Fraps

Just about any game that uses Direct3D or OpenGL API to draw the image you see on the screen can be recorded using Fraps.

A Few Words of Wisdom

For best recording performance you should always turn off things like antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. If you have more than one hard drive in your system do not record to the drive where you run the game, note that partitioned drives do not fall under this category, it has to be two physical drives. Also, if you record to a drive where you have a lot of other files make sure you have defragmented that drive before you record. If you think that the recording performance is worse than it should be it can be the result of you using the wrong graphics driver for that Fraps version. The graphics driver you should use for that Fraps version is always specified in the readme, if you're using third-party drivers like DNA you should uninstall those and use official drivers from Nvidia or ATI, depending on what chip manufacturer it is.

Common Problems

The Fraps Chop: This thing occurs on random, and it causes a very severe audio/video desync in your recording. The amount of desync will also change back and forth, which in almost all cases makes it impossible to repair. You notice it by that the last sound is played twice and the game seem to freeze for a short period of time.

Choppy recordings: These can be caused by a variety of factors, and mostly occur in first person shooters. Very fast mouse movements, generally demanding games and low frame rates are some of the things that can cause a choppy recording. This problem can be very specific in some games and only occur in a certain level in that game.

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