Setting up.

First thing you might want to do is to make sure all of these boxes are unchecked. They’re unnecessary, they get in the way, and they slow your computer down… When you know how to use it better, you can decide if you want them on or not, but for now, keep them off.
Don’t mess with the rest for now and skip straight to the Movies tab.

First thing to do here is to set up your movies folder. Do note, you’re going to need a LOT of room… Like, a LOT… Seriously… At least a few Gigabytes… One of the reasons fraps generally runs smoothly and doesn’t disturb your gameplay much, is because it does not compress your movie files automatically, it records them “raw”, and while this gives you good quality and performance, it means a simple 30 second clip can go up to 800mbs – 1 gb of space.
So set up the folder you want your movies in, and then setup your “Video Capture Hotkey”. This is the key that, when pressed, will start and stop recording with Fraps. Keep in mind, that if this key overlaps an in-game key, this might cause some issues as you’ll need to press it in-game whenever you want the recording to start or stop. Keep that in mind and set it to a key that does nothing in-game.

After that, set Fraps to record in either Half-size or Full-size. Which to pick? Honestly I think Half-size is more than enough in most situations, and it means your clips will be a bit smaller and easier to handle. If you’re some quality fanatic, go full-size, otherwise, half-size has a pretty good quality as is and it saves space.

And finally, the fps. This sets up how many frames Fraps will record per second. Ideally, you want to set this up to whatever frame rate you have normally in-game (Fraps will show you this when it’s on). So if you get, say, 80-ish fps [average in most of these games is 60, by the way] choose the last option and write “80”. For S4, fps is, as far as I noticed, capped at 60, so we’ll check option “60 fps”.
Now that we’re done setting up Fraps, time to use it.

Recording.

First thing you got to do, is to make sure Fraps is working with your game. By default, if it’s on, you’ll see the fps counter in a corner of your screen [top left corner by default I believe].

When you’re ready to go, just press whatever key you assigned above as your Video Capture Hotkey  to start and stop recording. Easy.

Post Production.

But wait, your movie isn’t ready yet… Mostly because it’s in a raw format most players don’t recognize, and also because it’s this unnecessarily huge file.
For this part, you’ll need a video editing program… Almost any will do, but the most commonly available and easy to use would be Windows Movie Maker, which comes free with Windows. It’s a rather bug ridden memory hogging piece of crap, but it’s easy to work with and readily available so we’ll go with that.

What we’re going to do now is open the massive raw files and save them as a more manageable type, like avi, for instances.

After your file is in the storyboard (or timeline), just press “Save to my Computer”.

Choose a name, a location to save your new file to and press Next. After that you’ll be asked to choose a file type.

Personally, I tend to pick the 2.1 Mbps NTSC. Good quality at an acceptable size. Usually I never record or even compile so much in-game footage that 2.1Mbps just makes it too big, and this way I get good quality out of it.
Keep hitting next till it starts encoding, wait till it’s done, and there you go. You can now delete your massive raw file and keep your in-game footage with good quality in a file about a hundred times smaller.

(Return to main)

The search was on! After an hour so of google searches I found very little on the net about free programs that I wanted to use.. Most of them looked sketchy (like they would have spy ware and such embedded in them) I was soon to come across this gem named WebcamMax. From the initial look at the screen shots from their site, I was a little iffy, but I thought I would give it a try.

After downloading the 7.5MB file, I was ready to install, The setup went quickly and was a Simple point and click next installation (something even your mother can do). Now that the program was installed, it was time to load it up.

The initial layout seemed very professionally laid out and might I say, almost beautiful. The brushed aluminum look that is put on by default was not to my general taste, but I was completely surprised and happy to find the 14 other skins that came pre-installed with this program. You can change the skins by going to View > Change Skin > And select one of the 15 pre-installed themes. (My favorite happens to be the “Simple Dark” theme)

Again after speaking of the interface, I must point out the small other factors I almost instantly noticed with this program, The menu’s actually had animations, the buttons themselves had smooth fading and clicking animations that made it aesthetically pleasing to go through when changing options. Another note was the neat effect of the window itself “Sticking” to the sides of the screen when you moved the window close to the side (I am a big big fan of this and I thank the makes of this program for putting it in!)

Using the program itself was as simple and straightforward as it looks! It took me a grand total of probably 25 seconds to get the Picture in Picture feature working. The even cooler this about this is that you can move, resize, stretch and do all sorts of things to the screen in real time! Here is a screen shot of the program running after the initial setup and 25 seconds of fiddling around..

As you can see, the program is working flawlessly with my Video Capture card and Web cam together with the PiP (Picture In Picture) Very impressive if I must say so myself!

There are so many uses and applications that this program could be used for that would just take too long to explain here! You may as well go try it out yourself here:  http://www.webcammax.com

And if you’re like me (weary about spending a lot of money on a program, you can try out thier different tiers of the program From 6 months all the way up to a lifetime of license support (for ~$49 this is not that bad! Think of how much the last game you bought was!) 

Overall I would Highly reccommend this to anyone who is looking to have a little fun with thier webcamming experiance! The pricetag is not that bad at all for all of the features and ease of use. My only dislike so far is that I cannot figure out how to save presets (so the picture and picture defaults back everytime) but once you know how to set it up, it takes no more than 15 seconds to get things working again.

Again, I hightly reccommend this product to anyone looking for a Picture in Picture effect with a webcam and or multiple video devices or inputs.  Check it out for yourself http://www.webcammax.com

Anyway a quick look at it is to the right

Information by Map

For everyone who might have this problem.. these were the symptoms I was having

•  Everything Worked Well
• After trying to edit a page (saving it) the site would crash and return Internal Server 500 Errors
• Rebooting the webserver did not fix this
• Backing up to the current day’s database brought the site back onlike, but again, once I tried editing a page it would kick back the Internal Server Error 500 and bring the entire site down
• Replacing the WordPress directory with a backup did not fix the problem
• Disabling any newly added plugins yeilded nothing; same problem
• Deleting all of the eAccelerator tmp files yeilded nothing

At any rate, now its time for me to start adding tutorials on a regular basis.. :3  ( Hopefully some free time will appear in my schedule sometime soon.. {Yeah..right..} )

Since I figured you might be a little lazy to click on the tutorial button up there.. here is a sample of what it looks like.