[Tutorial] Making a game video Part 1/3: Using Fraps

[tschoerk]

Video Making – Tutorial Part 1: Getting the raw footage using fraps

First off, I know there are already some tutorials on this topic, but still many don’t know how to make a video, from capturing, over editing and finally compress it. This tutorial is the first part of a step-by-step instruction on how to record videos in games and to give a good overview over the program called “Fraps�(which is THE best; always use this since all those other recorders, like gamecam suck). Well I hope you’ll like the first part. I will post the second part on editing as fast as I can.

1.Overview
1. 1. Requirements
1. 2. Download
2. Fraps
2. 1. Getting started
2. 2. General
2. 3. FPS
2. 4. Movies
2. 5. Screenshots
2. 6. FAQ
3. Capturing
3. 1. How to
3. 2. Some tricks for WC3 and WoW
4. Final Word

1. Overview

1.1. Requirements

Those requirements are for newer games. You won’t need those requirements for older like WC3. Most computers bought in the last years will be able to make videos on older games.

• a good video card(Radeon X700 and up)
• about 1 GB Ram
• about 3 GHz
• Windows Vista/XP/NT/2000
• a game, of which you want to make video of

In this tutorial I will use a replay from a Warcraft 3 game(DotA), but it doesn’t matter what you are recording, it’s the same procedure with all games.

1. 2. Download

You’ll have to register at this forum if you haven’t already. Here’s the link to post, where you can download the full version of fraps.
http://www.warez-bb.org/viewtopic.php?t=278687

If you don’t want to download warez, you can take the test version, which has a maximum record length of 30 seconds and on top of the video there’s a watermark saying “www.fraps.com�
http://www2.fraps.com/setup.exe

2. Fraps



2.1. Getting started

After you finished downloading it, install it, go to the folder where you installed it to and start it with a double-click on fraps.exe

2. 2. General



In the general tab you’ll see information on the registration, version number and build. You have also three options you can choose from here:

• Start Fraps minimized: This will, whenever you start Fraps, minimize in the system tray. If you want to change settings, you’ll have to open it from the tray.
• Fraps window always on top: When Fraps is opened, it will always stay above other windows. For example, if you are running the explorer and open fraps and then switch to word, Fraps will still be on top, without getting minimized.
• Run Fraps when Windows starts: Self-explanatory I think

2. 3. FPS

• Overlay Display Hotkey: With this assigned hotkey you can toogle the fps counter between the four corners and off. If you click the disable button, it will delete the assigned hotkey and will change it to none.
• Benchmarking Hotkey: With this assigned hotkey you start a benchmark test(average frame rate). If you press the hotkey again it will stop the benchmark and between start and stop it will determine the average frame rate. If you click the disable button, it will delete the assigned hotkey and change it to none.
• Overlay corner: Here you can assign a spot where the fps-counter will be, if you start a game. With the overlay display hotkey you can change to spot anytime. If you click disabled, there won’t be any fps-counter if you start the game(you can turn it on with the overlay display hotkey though).
• Only update overlay once a second: Updates the fps-counter only every second.
• Stop benchmark automatically: Here you can assign a specific time after which the benchmark will stop. The time is in seconds.
• Save detailed benchmark statistics MinMaxAvg/FPS/Frametimes: Here detailed statistics will be saved in the benchmark subdirectory. The files will be saved as CSV-files and are automatically named. MinMaxAvg contains the total frame count, benchmark duration, minimum, maximum, and average frame rate values. FPS contains the frame rate value for each second of the benchmark. Frametimes contains the total frame count, benchmark duration, minimum, maximum, and average frame rate values.

2. 4. Movies

• Folder to save movies in: Here you can assign a folder, where the movies will be saved to. If you click the button change, you change the folder and with view you open the folder in the explorer.
• Video Capture Hotkey: If you press the assigned hotkey in the game, it will start recording. If you click disable it will delete the assigned hotkey and change it to none.
• Half-size/ Full-size: Either you record with full resolution or only with half. You can record Full-size up to a resolution of1152x864 on single core CPUs (2560x1600 with dual core CPUs), after that it will automatically switch to Half-Size.
• 25/30/50/60/xx fps: Here you can choose the frame rate of the output. I would choose 30 fps, since you won’t need more.
• Record Sound: Either record the sound in the game or not. Most videos use custom sounds, so most of the time there’s no need of recording the sound too.
• Detect best sound input: Fraps will determine the best input to record the game sound on. I would always choose this option.
• Use Windows input: The default Windows recording input will be used.
• No cursor: That option will hide your cursor in the video, but the game has to support hardware mouse.
• No sync: Disables the frame skipping that keeps the audio and video synchronised. This is useful for non-realtime video capture (for developers).

2. 5. Screenshots

• Folder to save screenshots in: Here you can assign a folder, where the screenshots will be saved to. If you click the button change, you change the folder and with view you open the folder in the explorer.
• Screen Capture Hotkey: If you press the assigned hotkey in the game, it will take a screenshot. If you click disable it will delete the assigned hotkey and change it to none.
• BMP/JPG/PNG/TGA: Sets the format in which the screenshots will be saved.
• Include frame rate overlay on screenshots: If the fps-counter is on, this option will include the counter in the screenshot.
• Repeat screen capture every XX seconds: With this option you can make a screenshot every XX seconds until you press the assigned hotkey again.

2. 6. FAQ

I downloaded the full version but I can’t install it!

You probably already had the demo version installed or still have it installed.

1st method:
1. Uninstall the demo or the retail versions of fraps.
2. Close any application that YOU (not necessarily your computer) might be running.
3. Open Regedit.
4. Press Ctrl+F to bring up the searching tool and ask it to search for “nZgFQGQhfU� exclude the quotation marks. The reason why we need to perform a search trough the whole registry is because this value gets installed into different paths depending on the computer it is running on. But I’m pretty sure it’s name remains always the same.
5. When it finds that value, delete it. DO NOT delete the Key/Folder that contains this value.
6. Now delete “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Licens es".
7. Close Regedit.
8. Now click Start/Run: CMD (Open the DOS command prompt) And type del /s /q *.tmp
9. Exit the DOS prompt once it has finished doing the instruction described above.
10. Install the retail version of fraps (make sure you are not installing the demo)

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2nd method:
1. Uninstall fraps retail and/or demo
2. Delete the files in your temp folder (eg: C:\Documents and Settings\yourname\local settings\temp)
3. Delete the file frapsvid.dll located in your windows\system32
4. Open up regedit, do a search for {06D25F1D-4E4A-614E-267F-6AE746520B43} (ctrl + F)
5. Once you have found your folder, press on the + beside it, that should bring up its subdirs. delete all subdirs except for "InprocServer32"
6. Move on to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Licenses, delete it.
7. Now locate HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\RFC1156Agent \Currentversion\parameters and delete the "parameters" directory
8. After deleting "parameters" dir, goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Cryptography \RNG and delete "RNG" dir also.
9. Lastly, close regedit and reboot your pc

Now try to install fraps, if all goes well then fraps should boot up.

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3rd Method:
1. Uninstall fraps.
2. Run regedit and search for (ctrl+f) and delete "nZgFQGQhfU." (if it exists)
3. While in regedit, delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Licenses.
4. delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Fraps (if it exists).
5. delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Fraps2 (if it exists).
6. search the registry for "fraps" and delete anything that looks like it has to do with fraps
7. Jump to your C:\Documents and Settings\*username*\Local Settings\Temp folder and delete
EVERYTHING that it will let you delete.
8. Delete C:\Fraps (or wherever you installed fraps, in my case, C:\Program Files\Fraps) (if it exists)
9. Search for "fraps" in your computer, and delete everything it pops up (unless you recognize something as not part of the program)
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4th Method:
Right-click/Save under

Well more question will follow if you have any

3. Capturing

3. 1. Getting started

You probably want to test recording a video first. Start your game and then start the game itself(like WoW after loading screen or Wc3 after you started a normal game). Press the hotkey so you see a fps-counter. Now press the hotkey you assigned for capturing videos and if the counter turns red the video is recording. It will probably start lagging a bit depending on the game and how good the PC is.

After you finished making something press the hotkey again so the counter turns yellow again and the recording is off.
Open up your folder where you saved the video too and open it. Now watch your nice little movie. Congratulations!
Maybe your noticed, even if your video is very short, it’s still very large. This is, because fraps doesn’t have the time to compress the video while recording. It does actually a little but not a lot. So you have a really big file with quality which is nearly like the game itself. You’ll have to compress it finally but we’ll get to this later another time.

3. 2. Some tips for WoW and WC3(not many though )

Generally:

• If you record the videos to another partition, the game won’t lag that much any longer.
• If it lags to much, reduce the resolution to 800x600. This will also give you less lag.
• Always turn Record Sound off, if you are planning on using custom music afterwards, since ittakes up a lot of space too.

WoW:

• You can set a hotkey to hide the interface. Without interface, you can’t really fight but you can make better videos about environment and stuff like that.
• The problem with WoW is, that if you want to kill somebody and record that, you only have one chance to make a good video, because you can’t replay or stuff like that. But to save diskspace alt-tab out and delete the video, if it’s crap.

WC3(mostly you will make videos of custom games):

• Always record from a replay. There’s not much sense in recording a whole game or start recording randomly and hoping for something special to happen.
• Try to write down the time, when something special happened in the game(if it has a time counter), since you can’t rewind in the replay.
• Don’t use the mouse in games to move the camera to the side. Use the direction keys since a mouse moving from side to side, is pretty annoying. (But maybe you can try the option “Hide mouseâ€ÂÂ�. I don’t know if it works in WC3)

4. Finalword

I hope you like my first part of the video making tutorial. I will start right away on writing a tutorial on editing and hopefully I’ll be finished in a day or so.

tschoerk

[hendricius]

Awesome Work. Great Guide. Thanks alot.

+ Reputation

[Bendik2]

Hey, it's one thing ive wondered about for ages, i recorded a video on CS;S for about 8 seconds,it was like 250 MB in size, how can i reduce that alot.. ?

[hendricius]

That's the movie Editing Part which he will post later =).