Trying to capture gameplay footage


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I am trying to capture footage of a videogame I am playing on my laptop. Its a fairly old Japanese freeware gamecalled Fate Axis: Omega Edition, so its not very taxing on any modern system, evne my old Pentium 3 desktop can run it well. ( http://www10.plala.or.jp/T-Riam/FateAxis/index.html )

The game runs windowed at 640x480.

At first I was using programs like Camtasia or or CamStudio but they were doing a terrible job, then I was told that these were not really meant for 3D gameplay recording and to try Fraps.

However, Fraps makes the game run at about 75% to half speed when I start recording, but it only does this on fullscreen.

FPS dosen't matter, anything I try from 60 to 15 FPS slows it down, but even at 60FPS the game runs smoothly at half size.

320x240 is just too small however, especially since the game uses a tiny font, so I want to record in 640x480.

At first I thought it was my laptop, since it's 3D hardware is rather lacking, a friend let me try to use his much more powerful laptop for this, it has a better CPU and it's GPU was far beyond mine, but the EXACT same thing happened!

Then I thought it may be disk access times, since once when I was trying to record to a fragmented portion of my drive it ran extremely slow. So I setup a ramdrive.... but still the EXACT same thing.

So what could possibly be causing this?

Its not the FPS, its not the CPU, its not the GPU, its not the disk access speed.... why does it only record at half-size without slowdown? What can I do to make it record full-size?

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  • 3 weeks later...

Although you tried different computers with greater hardware than your own, I'd still put my money on CPU.

Fraps is _extremely_ CPU intensive when recording in full screen. Before one of the later versions Fraps wouldn't record full screen unless you had a dual core processor.

What CPU did you/your friend have?

Have you tried recording with no sound and no sync, that might help a tad?

I know you went as low as 15FPS and it still happened, but if you get this working or switch PC's set Fraps to record at 24FPS unless you have a need for higher, 24FPS is fine for most and the video will still look very smooth.

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Another thing with Fraps is that it writes video in raw AVI format that is practically uncompressed, so it also utilises your hard disk a lot, and this is a problem that is generally a lot more evident on Laptops than desktops.

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