For those using 64-bit Sony Vegas to encode the raw fraps files, what codec are you using?
None of the codecs I've installed shows up on the video format list, presumably because the codecs are 32-bit. I've also read somewhere that it might be cause the codecs are in Program Files as opposed to Program Files (x86) or vice versa, but there's nothing in Sony Vegas to redirect where it's finding its codecs.
I'm starting to regularly fraps fights to learn more about the fight as well as cleaning up my ui.
Anyway, what I wind up with is a ton of space-hogging fraps movies. I'd like to implement this workflow:
1) fraps freely
2) after the raid, add all the new raw videos to a queue to compress
3) delete the raw movies
4) upload them somewhere for archiving and later review
I am tentatively trying virtualdub to encode into h.264. Anyone else have suggestions for encoding software? How about for batch encoding? Anyone use any other software or automated workflows to keep this easy to maintain? My end goal is to click one button/run one batch file to take care of steps 2-4 after I'm done with my raid.
FFCoder is fairly easy to use to batch encode files to plenty of different codecs and container formats, including h.264. Drag and drop your FRAPS files in, set your codec options and hit start.
4) upload them somewhere for archiving and later review
I've started using youtube to upload and archive my videos and it seems to work nicely enough as a personal repository. I just go through later and delete off videos that don't hold any significance to me. Since I had been away from the game for most of ICC, I'm using the videos to 1) determine what UI elements to keep/get rid of and 2) learn to improve on each fight.
I came up with a series of questions that hopefully can be clarified.
This is my issue: As soon as I record, fraps drops to 17 fps. Tried it in a raid, 17 fps. Tried it while idleing with 60 fps, dropped to 17. Dropped everything to minimum and faced the floor with vertical sync off, had 385 fps, started to Fraps, 17 fps. I've been frapsing since late TBC with a smaller monitor and a complete different rig so it's safe to exclude issues like: not recording with windowed mode, not having Fraps and WoW run on the same disk and so on and so forth.
From the average hardware knowledge I have I concluded that my HDD's writing speed was insufficient. I've tried all possible combinations between WoW + Fraps location between the 2 disks.
I also have no RAID setup as I haven't had the time to read and comprehend it lately.
I'm thinking on buying a Solid-State Drive as I'm convinced my HDD's are my system's bottleneck, the writing speed will be either 490 MB/s, 690 MB/s or 720 MB/s, I haven't decided yet.
Allow me to enumerate my questions for better reply organization:
1 - I would like to know from someone with more knowledge than me if indeed the problem seems to be my HardDrive.
2 - I was told that WoW and Fraps shouldn't share the same HDD so when Fraps is capturing the video it won't pull performance away from WoW. But what shouldn't be on the same HDD that WoW is on? The Fraps installation or the Location where I'm sending the recorded file to?
3 - I was told that if possible, I should keep my OS on a separate HDD for the same principle as above. So where should I install my OS, Fraps and WoW assuming I have the 3 disks (Storage HDD, current main HDD, SSD), partitions are an option and so are RAID Arrays. What would be the best combination to maximize my performance?
I've looked and I can't find a more suitable forum or thread(given that this one was already created) to answer such questions.
Regarding your questions:
2) Your WoW hdd and the disk you're writing to shouldn't be the same.
3) With an SSD it shouldn't matter if your OS and WoW is on the same disk. They don't have any moving parts that have to work in sequence, so reading in different 'regions' of the disk doesn't pose a big problem. Just don't use your SSD for saving your FRAPS material, the lesser you write on it, the longer it will work with optimal speed (although with newer SSDs you really shouldn't see much degration anytime soon).
As for 1) you shouldn't have any problems with your system really. Make sure you have the latest version of FRAPS and that your FPS setting for recording is actually set to above 17. Your FPS in game will always be ceiled to what that setting is within FRAPS, i.e. you can have less frames if your PC can't handle everything, but never more.
You could also try to record with half size instead full to see if there's any improvement in frame rate.
Another tip is to use the task manager to set FRAPS to one dedicated core, and the rest to WoW (or another core to some other programs first, etc).
And lastly make sure that your graphic driver is up to date. And if you're using Crossfire et al., there have been reports that FRAPS isn't really working well with it.
Your statment that my FPS in game will always be capped to what I set on fraps is incorrect. With the latest (or 2 versions ago) you can now play at ie. 60 fps and record at 30. My Fraps's version is the latest, I can record up to 50 fps with half-size in Orgrimmar but full-size drops me to 10-20 fps. Graphic card has the latest driver, there's no crossfire and I've tried dedicating 1 core to Fraps before, no change.
Ah I see. Did you try to disable the unlocked FPS option?
And what is your recording FPS set to? Remember, the more you enter here, the more has to be written to the disk per second. I don't know exactly how much the FRAPS codec does compress, but an uncompressed video of 1920 x 1080 x 32bit depth x 30 fps would be 1990656000 bit/s = 237 MByte/s that would have to be written to disk.
Obviously this is hard (if not impossible) to achieve for about any drive, but even with FRAPS' compression it can stress out a disk pretty much.
You could try to measure your disk throughput (I think HDTach worked for that, but I'm not sure) to find the best drive in your setup for writing speed.
Another issue that is often overlooked is to update the chipset drivers and/or disk controllers. If they're not working correctly, your overall (hdd) performance will suffer as well.
Also you may check out tools like CPU-Z and GPU-Z to monitor your CPU and GPU load and clock while frapsing. Maybe one of them is downlclocking due to heat issues (though that's a bit far fetched).
The result is the same locked or unlocked.
Fraps is set for 30 FPS so that's not the issue either. I ran a program to determine my HDD's min max and average writing speed and its not higher than 70-80 mb/s so I'm pretty sure that's as good as it will get.
I managed to find a SSD OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB with 285 MB/s reading speed and 275 MB/s writing speed for 110 euros so I've ordered 2. I plan on putting a clean install of Windows 7 and WoW on 1 disk (WoW takes between 23.5 to 25 GB after removing the Patches folder, the Update folder and any downloader or patch file you might have laying around and Windows can go from 9 GB install to a 12 GB install) and then dedicating my other SSD to Fraps. It seemed like a good deal and with the resolution I'm using, settings on max and fps recording demand I felt like the right thing to do. If by any odd chance I don't manage to get the desired FPS, I can put them in RAID0 for a stupid amount of writing speed.
Well, 70-80 MB/s should be plenty enough with Fraps' compression, I know it is for me and I'm using a 5400 rpm hdd to record my fraps, which I do in 1920x1080 as well. Although my FPS does drop to around 14 or lower in intensive fights, not due some unidentified bug but due to sheer missing CPU power (overclocked dual core E8200).
(Of course the video footage itself is still 30 FPS, there'll just be some repeated frames to get to 30.)
Anyway, I wouldn't neccessarily except your problems to go away if you update your hdd to SSD. Your problem doesn't seem to the hdd itself if it does reach 80 MB/s.
Hey, I've been playing around with Sony Vegas 10 and fraps recently... got the coloring, rendering and uploading and everything else down. Just one thing, when I upload my vid
as you can see the 720p and 1080p options are available however doesn't make much of a difference, any ideas?
specs:
CPU AMD Phenom II X4 955
Radeon HD 6800 Series
4GB Ram
AM3 Gigabyte 770T-USB3
1920x1080 resolution
EDIT: the vid was rendered with Mainconcept AVC/AAC type codec if that's relevant
Hey, I've been playing around with Sony Vegas 10 and fraps recently... got the coloring, rendering and uploading and everything else down. Just one thing, when I upload my vid
I have everything on Ultra and all options as high as they go with Vertical Sync off. I have no Max Foreground FPS and 50 max background FPS. I snag about 50-80 FPS with people running around Orgrimmar. I get upwards of 140 FPS in Arenas or low populated places and like 100 FPS in BGs.
I set Fraps (first time ever using) to Full Screen and 30 FPS. In arenas, my FPS drops from ~120 to ~60 when I record at 30 FPS. Are there any options in WoW or in Fraps that I can switch up to not get as much of a drop (Staying on Ultra)?
Right now I have 1 Hard Drive (1 TB) with 2 drives. When you are speaking of separating your Fraps and WoW Drives to increase performance, are you simply saying "Put WoW on C:/ and put Fraps on D:/" or on 2 physically separate Hard Drives? And if so, does it matter where I am saving the file to as it records?
Last thing, there is an option in Fraps to sync audio; I wan't to be able to separate audio from video (in cases where I would put music or something If I were to make a video) but also have it "synced" for when I want it as it sounded live. Also I want my voice recorded as well; is that the "input" option on Fraps?
Thanks for any help anyone could give to a new Fraps User.
You will get no benefit from going from 60 fps to 120. This is no first person shooter where you want to come up with some magical fps number. 60 is more than enough for about everything
When you say you have "1 drive with 2 drives" I assume you mean 2 partitions. To achieve best performance, it is advised to place the recording directory of Fraps (not the installation directory) to a physically separated disk.
As for the audio, leave the option as is. Your recording is already seperated in a video stream and an audio stream, both saved within the AVI container. Use any tool to edit them.
For recording your own voice, that's actually something I still haven't figured out. You can do it (but I have forgotten how by now and am not on my gaming PC), but you will be (or at least I was) recording everything your microphone listens to, instead of utilizing Teamspeak's/Ventrilo's push-to-talk or voice activation. You could however directly record voice through those programs and mux the different audio streams later on (which you wanted to do anyway according to your description).
If anybody knows of an easy way to record game audio + Ventrilo audio including your own voice, and with using push-to-talk, by all means, please share it. It like my own voice in my videos as well.
For recording your own voice, that's actually something I still haven't figured out. You can do it (but I have forgotten how by now and am not on my gaming PC), but you will be (or at least I was) recording everything your microphone listens to, instead of utilizing Teamspeak's/Ventrilo's push-to-talk or voice activation. You could however directly record voice through those programs and mux the different audio streams later on (which you wanted to do anyway according to your description).
This is built into the latest version of Fraps. It joins the audio to one track still but it's supported. It can even be tied to a hotkey kind of like vent, so it only records your mic on top of the regular sound when you hit the key. Assuming you're a member you get free updates so just get the newest version:
This question was asked earlier in the thread but I didn't see an answer to it so I will ask again.
Running dual monitors: Main: (1900x1200 in windowed mode for WoW), Second: 1280x1024 on 2nd monitor for vent, browser, etc.
Would the latest version of Fraps allow me to record WoW on my main monitor (in windowed mode), while disregarding my secondary monitor?
Of course, I've been never doing anything else, despite of the version. I do run WoW in windowed mode and manually maximize it (so that the task bar and menu bar is still visible).
I actually use the Newest Window Movie Maker to encode my WoW fraps....It's free and has decent enough features. The built in Youtube and other uploading devices are nice too.
This question was asked earlier in the thread but I didn't see an answer to it so I will ask again.
Running dual monitors: Main: (1900x1200 in windowed mode for WoW), Second: 1280x1024 on 2nd monitor for vent, browser, etc.
Would the latest version of Fraps allow me to record WoW on my main monitor (in windowed mode), while disregarding my secondary monitor?
Hey there, actually Fraps only records from your main monitor so it will disregard your 2nd attached monitor. So its cool, however some players complain that they would like to record both of their monitors screen, but that is not possible at the moment.
I've noticed today that Fraps records with 650,000 kbps instead of the usual ~360,000 kbps on my PC after switchting to the 64 bit client of WoW.
I can't view the video files without lag now on my computer without encoding them.
04/15/10, 12:05 PM
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