Since this little program seems to confuse a lot of people, I decided to do a little “guide” on how to use it.
Ok so, first thing you need, obviously I hope, is… You know… The actual program… Fraps. This program is free to use (although the free version is somewhat limited), and you can find it at the conveniently named www.fraps.com. Download it, install it and run it.
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.
