FRAPS and PC recording overhead

[Merlin]

Hey everyone,

I'm actually posting on here for a work question for once. We have a skype interview this Saturday with a film maker for a showing of their film. The presenter would like to record the skype interview for playback on Sunday when they show the film again. We can probably record the actuall screen but we are using projector and i'm not sure how well that will work with refresh rates and screen scrolling.

I'm looking at trying FRAPS. How much overhead will that add and has anyone tried other Skype type plugins and how well do they work? The laptop we are considering using is an Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2 Ghz, with 4GB Ram.

I'll plan to do some testing today, but any settings, tricks, tips etc would be appreciated.

I also have my laptop I can use, but would prefer not to unless needed, but it's an Intel I7 with 8GB Ram and shouldn't be an issue. But again would prefer not to use that if I can help it. Read that as I want to be able to use it during the boring movie to play STO.

Thanks,
Merlin

[Husker]

Well Fraps usually won't slow down any video playback unless you have a really underpowered computer running it. The problem is hard drive space. Fraps records unprocessed (can't find the right word. lol) video so a short video can be hundreds of MB. Lowering the frame rate will help but it'll still be a large file at the end of it. I remember Patrick recording our NWS run when we first completed it and the file was massive. Can't remember the exact size but it was probably getting on for a TB which is pretty normal for a 20 min video. If size and power isn't an issue then Fraps will do fine, you can always use a program like Handbrake to render (that's the word. lol) the video and shrink it from a few hundred MB to literally a few MB.

As for recording a projector, i have no idea. Fraps will only record what is on the screen so if it's only showing that picture then it should do fine.

[cmdraftbrn]

uncompressed is the word husker is looking for. or unformatted

[Husker]

Yes, what he said

[Framesplicer]

or raw.

[[D010 - Primar13]]

I highly Suggest Open Boradcast Software...

It works Double Duty for Streaming HD to Twitch/Youtube while also Recording a Copy for your PC.

You can however set it up to Record only. It is really eacy to use, and you can actually tell it to Capture a Program, (STO for instance) if you then are running STO in Windowed mode and it only take 1/3 of your screen, it will only record STO and not your entire Screen. Which is Nice.

You have Full contorol of the Video/Audio Settings/Codec and can control the Video Dimenstions, its a Pretty awesome software for being open source.

and Best part... Its FREE https://obsproject.com/

There are lots of Plugins, our favorite being the Twich chat one, that lets us put the Twitch Chat on the Screen in Realtime.

[Husker]

That sounds pretty good.

[Patrick]

Husker is correct, FRAPS records using a proprietary codec in a relatively low compression format, which means low overhead (no compressing as it records) but HUGE amount of hard drive space. 4 GB for every 2 minutes of video for 1920x1080 resolution.

So if you record an hour worth then you are looking at 120GB of space. Now you can get this much smaller in post processing if you apply an H.264 codec to it.

[cmdraftbrn]

I highly Suggest Open Boradcast Software...

It works Double Duty for Streaming HD to Twitch/Youtube while also Recording a Copy for your PC.

You can however set it up to Record only. It is really eacy to use, and you can actually tell it to Capture a Program, (STO for instance) if you then are running STO in Windowed mode and it only take 1/3 of your screen, it will only record STO and not your entire Screen. Which is Nice.

You have Full contorol of the Video/Audio Settings/Codec and can control the Video Dimenstions, its a Pretty awesome software for being open source.

and Best part... Its FREE https://obsproject.com/

There are lots of Plugins, our favorite being the Twich chat one, that lets us put the Twitch Chat on the Screen in Realtime.

was messing with it on and off. its a little confusing at first but its not as hardup as fraps

[Merlin]

Thanks all, will try this out today as a test