Question about FRAPS.

[Indiglo]

Slight background, have a Radeon HD 5770 video, which runs WoW about 150 FPS which is perfect for me. Anyways, everything goes fine, but when I try to record with FRAPS, my FPS always drops to ~30 regardless of where I am, and if if makes a difference, the videos it makes are only 2 or so minutes in length (it creates more files if I record longer then that) and are roughly 3Gb.

Yes I have the legal, registered version of FRAPS, so a torrented version is out of the equation. Any idea how to remedy this problem?

[Hadard]

its just fraps slowing you down, you'll get used to it.

[Jophess]

Fraps will lock your framerate to whatever you have set in the movie options.

[Tokas]

make it 60 fps if 30 hurts your eyes, but videos will consume 2x hdd space

[klaps_05]

make sure your fraps is registered. also fraps creates a new file roughly every 4.5GB. when you convert it it goes down to a normal size

[Deleted]

I've heard somewhere, that if you use another drive to record your fraps files, it can higher your fps while recordings.

[vesseblah]

Slight background, have a Radeon HD 5770 video, which runs WoW about 150 FPS which is perfect for me. Anyways, everything goes fine, but when I try to record with FRAPS, my FPS always drops to ~30 regardless of where I am

Yes I have the legal, registered version of FRAPS, so a torrented version is out of the equation. Any idea how to remedy this problem?

Two possibilities. Either you have fraps locked to 30fps, or you have too shitty computer to record at higher speed. Video capture needs rather high end CPU and fast HDD, video card makes no difference whatsoever.

Give some details about the rest of your hardware and where you're capping the videos, and we might be able to come up with some solutions.

[Indiglo]

Two possibilities. Either you have fraps locked to 30fps, or you have too shitty computer to record at higher speed. Video capture needs rather high end CPU and fast HDD, video card makes no difference whatsoever.

Give some details about the rest of your hardware and where you're capping the videos, and we might be able to come up with some solutions.

Welp, its my HDD then, when I bought it I didn't look at the important part, the RPM. Anyways, I have a WD Caviar Green, which is the low end of the Caviar series in terms of RPM. Plan on buying a Black when I get the cash, if WoW didn't take up so much space I'd send it to my SSD.

Messed with some settings, have it up to 50FPS, im assuming to get that last 10 I would need a faster HDD.

[Deleted]

You've still not stated two extremely important metrics:

Resolution, and Processor.

Bandwidth demands (raw) can easily be calculated as follows:

X-Resolution * Y-Resolution * Bitrate (24) * Framerate (30/60)

For example, recording at 1920x1080 at a bitrate of 24 and framerate of 60 requires ~3 gigabits of bandwidth, or around 375megabytes per second.

Note that FRAPS etc don't usually record raw however, and use compression. This does reduce bandwidth (often dramatically), but it increases CPU demand - which in turn results in reduced game performance, particularly in a CPU dependant game like WoW.

[llDemonll]

What version of Fraps are you running?

[soapy]

You want 60 FPS? Set the frame rate on fraps to 60 FPS. It's not bogging your system down. It's how it records...
I am an official beta tester for fraps. Been using it for over 5 years.

If you want to record HD video at 30 FPS... Then it will be 30 FPS while recording.

You can change this manually. In fraps set the framerate to 60FPS or in the custom box set to 100. Your video file will be stupid large. But if your Epeen suffers by seeing 30 FPS, then go for it.

But Honestly. 30 FPS is normal and expected. 29.97 FPS is NTSC, the US standard.

[llDemonll]

You are a beta tester...and yet you don't know of the locked/unlocked framerate that 3.1.0 brought about?

[vesseblah]

You want 60 FPS? Set the frame rate on fraps to 60 FPS. It's not bogging your system down. It's how it records...
I am an official beta tester for fraps. Been using it for over 5 years.

You can change this manually. In fraps set the framerate to 60FPS or in the custom box set to 100. Your video file will be stupid large. But if your Epeen suffers by seeing 30 FPS, then go for it.

But Honestly. 30 FPS is normal and expected. 29.97 FPS is NTSC, the US standard.

You being official tester of fraps, trashcan lids or childproof scissors or anything does not change the fact that recording with fraps is very dependant on HDD speed when you're doing high resolution capping. Around 40-50fps is the absolute maximum you can do at 1080p resolution on single mechanical HDD because sustained write speed is not high enough. To get speeds above that you need to be capping to RAID0 array, SSD or 10k RPM disc.

Also, 29.97 speed is totally useless for digital age unless you're planning on transfering the captured material on DVD or even older media. 1080p material on BluRay is almost always 24fps, and the player scales it to whatever speed your TV prefers.

[soapy]

I'm recording 60 FPS, to a mechanical HD right now... So I'd saythats about standard for a single 7200 HD thats not a "green" model (actually, its a10k RPM raptor..)

And your argument is Moot... This guy is wondering WHY its 30 FPS... I explained it. And how to rectify it.
He should just make it 24, like you sated, and keep it uniform across the editing process.

---------- Post added 2011-03-08 at 06:54 PM ----------

Hmm, I had it save to my OCZ RevoDrive (Raid 0 SSD on 1GBps Bus) and it is no faster nor slower than the Raptor... I wonder if the fraps codec has issues recording any faster than 60 FPS.

[llDemonll]

7200rpm v 10krpm. they have different read/write speeds.

either way, if the computer wants to run at 30fps while recording, it's because lock framerate (maybe it's unlock framerate?) is set to lock at the fps you're recording at unless otherwise changed. if the computer cant handle recording at more than 30fps while playing, setting to record at 100 fps will do nothing but make a crappy video

[soapy]

^

He should just set it to 24, like Vess stated. And just ignore the Framerate while recording.

[vesseblah]

24fps is good sane choice because that's the standard for commercially released BluRay and HD DVDs. 25 and 29.97fps are needed only if you plan to release anything for TV broadcast. I usually cap locked to 30fps because that's the maximum what youtube supports and produces slightly smoother video than 24fps out of WoW.

[Asera]

29.97 is mostly a good framerate to use not because of the NTSC standard (though it's nice anyway), but because it's a comfortable point to balance smoothness of video and size of video. A 60FPS movie is going to be massive unless you compress the crap out of it. 24 and the lack of motion blur in 3D games will really show.

[vesseblah]

29.97 is mostly a good framerate to use

29.97 is retarded framerate, was already 50 years ago when NTSC came up with it. Just always use 30 with video capture from games. 30 because it's very easy to scale down to both standard 24 fps or european 25 fps by dropping off 1/5 or 1/6 frames without any complicated conversions for much better performance and visual quality, and if you want to convert it to 29.97 broadcast speed for some perverse speed, it's relatively easy with bit of tempo shifting.

[Asera]

I always get weird studdering with 30fps when I encode it.