Fraps question

[kirennia]

Well we're starting our GG again tonight (hoorah!) and with freshly formatted computer, fraps is able to run much smoother then before, thus more oppertunities to record our fights. The main problem is the size of files which fraps creates. I'm just wondering how to crop them when the guild group is over to take up less room. I don't want to reduce the quality at all, just want to crop them.

Windows movie maker for example will reduce the quality if I try and crop from there.

Any ideas which program can do this seemlessly and without reducing the quality at all?

 

[Nightchill]

Virtualdub is a pretty common one for just that. Mostly because it's free (and easy to use)

 

[kirennia]

Repped

 

[Aiteal]

Assuming that with FG fights you are pretty much recording non-stop
and once the night is over you want to cut the files into "interesting" bits

best to use something like aviedit
its wont compress the files in any way
just chop them up into files where all the guff has been removed

it's also quicker and easier to use than virtuadub for this purpose
virtuadub is great when you come to render the movie
but for simple chopping up aviedit is better

http://www.am-soft.ru/download.html

 

[Sorin]

I recomend Gamecam instead of fraps.
Much more functions and more reliable.

 

[kirennia]

Eek, it just made a 2.55GB file into a 10GB file even though I cut a minute out! Guess I'll have to work on that, hehe

 

[Septina]

What i do when people send me footage or the likes is i have them encode the clip with vegas,vdub or whatever and use newest DivX Pro, High Def profile with the Insane Quality settings preset. Usually tell them to encode the clip in ~5000kbps this way you get quite alot of reduction in size but the clips wont be horribly bad qualwise even when you re-encode them.
Did this with d3f1's movie among others and works quite nicely imo.

Best way tho when recording yourself is using a second computer to record.
When i had my tv-card operational on the other computer as far as i can remember 1 hour of recording was something around 10gb in size.

 

[Davejohnson]

you really shouldnt record an entire evening with fraps, it will cause your hd to lag after a while since its so big files..

much better to just have a convenient press-to-record key..

 

[kirennia]

Just tried encoding a 2min 30second fight using virtual dub with high xvid settings and it came out as 150mb. I thought uh-oh but when opening it no quality was lost. I'm gonna do 2 fights both compressed then make a very mini vid to test it, further compressing it in movie maker. I know it's a horrible program but should do for testing purposes.

Wish I had a second computer to record with but sadly I have very limited space at uni Maybe next year when I'm in a house I'll be able to bring a second computer along.

 

[kirennia]

Well movie maker sure doesn't like previously compressed files Crashed 4 times in a row, even when I stopped running other apps, gave it real time priority and didn't do anything whenever it was working. Guess I'll need another prog.

 

[Manisch Depressiv]

Working on a movie project atm too, here is my experience: I use Fraps/Virtual Dub/Edius and LAME/XViD. I usually try to hit the record button before a fight that could be interesting and delete it when it was not any movie material when I am at Snowdonia. I go over the recorded fights when I have longer down time from DAoC and delete the bad material further. The rest I just leave in Fraps size and use it in an editing program (Edius).

Once I am done with the editing I create a lossless AVI output from Edius and use Virtualdub to two-pass compress the video with XViD and to encode the audio with LAME (MP3).

I used to use a MPEG2 encoder on my WinTV card, but sadly my graphics card's scan converter only converts from 1024 x 768 and lower and better resolution (internal PCI) scan converters are quite expensive. This way I could perma record with just one machine, the files were smaller than from Fraps and the quality was still good. So if you play only with 1024 x 768 and your graphics card has a TV output you might be interested in buying something like a Hauppauge WinTV 250.

I have to try Gamecam, if I remember correctly it can record into a buffer and if you don't press a button to record after a time the buffer gets emptied. Sounds like a better solution than Fraps.

 

[Raven]

i used to run fraps all night pretty much, you can always just delete the files with nothing on. you will need at least 50g free space as the fraps files are huge.
use virtual dub to crop them down to the size you want (no compression) once you have got the footage you want, dont use moviemaker, use sony vegas or adobe premier (used vegas myself) you can add all your bells and whistles and it will render it in various different formats/codecs with little loss in quality.

 

[Nate]

Where are you starting the gg kirennia? ;o please make it dyvet!

 

[Davejohnson]

not sure about half-mode, but when i record full-mode each minute takes about 2.2GB ( :

 

[Rushie]

Where are you starting the gg kirennia? ;o please make it dyvet!

lol.... good one

 

[Nate]

lol.... good one

We shall meet again TT, just you wait! The plans are in action ;o