[Ramirez]

Step 1

First, download Fraps 1.9D from here. Then grab VirtualDub from here. Finally, get the latest DivX which is 5.0.5 from here. Install Fraps and DivX just like any other program, but for VirtualDub you will need WinZip to extract the contents of the zip to a folder (such as C:\Program Files\VirtualDub).

Step 2

Once everything is installed, open Fraps. You'll come face-to-face with this box:



Make 100% sure that the Enable video capture - Hotkey box is ticked, otherwise you won't be able to capture footage! You can change the hotkey to another key of your choice, but F9 is default so I'll stick with that. Change the Movie framerate to something appropriate for your PC, but I'll stick to 30 fps for mine.

Step 3

Now with Fraps still running, open the game you want to capture from, in this case, Vice City. There should be a little number in the corner of the screen (default = top left corner) this shows the framerate. Now once you are ready to capture footage, hit F9, when you are ready to stop capturing, press F9 again.

Step 4

Exit your game and open up your Fraps folder (where you installed Fraps, usually C:\Program Files\Fraps). Depending on the length of your footage, filesizes of your footage can be huge. Open VirtualDub and load your footage by going to File > Open video file. Once your footage is loaded into VirtualDub, play it and see how it looks. Don't worry if it's too fast or too slow because we can sort that out later. Now first thing is to get rid of the sound, because that reduces file size greatly, go to Audio > No audio.



Step 5

If the video is too slow or too fast, you need to follow this step. If it is just fine then skip this step. Go to Video > Frame Rate, click the Change to _______ frames per second radio button and choose an appropriate fps.



Mine is a little too fast, so I put it down to about 18 fps and it's perfect. Play it back to make sure it runs smoothly, and repeat Step 5 to adjust it to perfection.

Step 6

This is easy, all you do is encode the video with a codec. This will reduce the filesize dramatically. Go to Video > Compression and select the DivX 5.0.5 Codec from the list and select OK.



Step 6

That's it for the video editing. Now save it by going to File > Save as AVI, give it a filename and hit enter. Make sure it is quite small, my footage for this tutorial is 5 seconds and it is 730kb. To reduce filesize even greater, use WinZip to compress it to a zip file so that people can download it much quicker (and you can upload it quicker!)

Here is my finished product: http://members.lycos.co.uk/firestorm16/Sample.zip (It's just me blowing a Landstalker, noting incredible.)

Please note that I am not an expert at this type of stuff, this is just my simple method of doing this - I am no good at all the technical troubleshooting crap

Please note...again...that there is a very similar tutorial on my Tony Hawk website THLounge, it is written by me though under a different name; Firestorm. I am known as Firestorm on all other forums I attend (GTAGaming and PlanetGTA for most of you).

~ Ramirez

This post has been edited by Ramirez on Monday, Jun 7 2004, 09:38

[bomber007]

Hey nice tutorial Ramirez.I tried it out and easily captured the video.

[Baz63]

yeah - thanks Ramirez. I have spent the past hour scouring the internet and it is exactly what i wanted . Well presented and easy to follow. Respect.

[vonchong115]

QUOTE

go to Audio > No video.

Maybe you should cange that "no video" to "no audio"


Thanks for the great tutorial.

[big_bmuni]

ahh this is exactly what i was looking for, excellent tutorial man! thanks!

[vonchong115]

I can't find where to download virtual Dub. Can you put a direct link to the download.

[Demarest]

I remember it being available at dvdrhelp.com once upon a time. oldversion.com is always a good place to find software. And there's always google.

@Ramirez: Kudos. Looks like it worked out after all, eh?

[vonchong115]

I now have everything downloaded on my computer but when I try to open the files from the Fraps folder I get an error message saying that the file may be damaged. Someone please help me!!!!!

[Ramirez]

Not sure, try re-downloading it. Something might have happened with the original download.

@Demarest: Yep, thanks.

Thanks for everyone else's comments.

[vonchong115]

For some reason it's not working. I follow everything step by step. It all seems fine until I try to open the videos.

QUOTE

Here's the message I get when I just try to open the video by clicking on it: RealPlayer is unable to access this clip. It may be in use by another application, or the file loacation specified may incorrect or out-of-date. Bad data in AVI file More information is available at RealNetworks Customer Support Website.

When I try to open it with VirtualDub I get this message:

QUOTE

AVI: Index not found or damaged--Reconstructing via file scan.

Oh, and this has nothing to do with my problem (I think) but why are there 2 AVI files for each video I record.

[Jack_Knife]

@vonchong115: When you press F9 (Or whatever you have the record button set to), does a red "REC" message appear in the top-left of your screen? Does it stay there until you press F9 again? If not, then you have the same problem as me. It just starts recording then stops immediately. So you end up with a 1kb useless file everytime you press the record button. That would explain why you can't get anything to open your files, and why there are two files (you press it twice, once to start, once to stop).

And yeah, if anyone has any idea why this happens, any help would be greatly appreciated by me.

[Chip Douglas]

can u take videos outside of games like on your desktop?

[Ramirez]

Not to my knowledge. It was designed for games.

[high_tymez]

how do u put all your videos into one big video and put a song over it.. like a stunt video?

[BCspeed34]

Same question here also, and one with effects, i dont want to register windows movie maker

[fuckindumass]

QUOTE (BCspeed34 @ Oct 13 2004, 23:01)

Same question here also, and one with effects, i dont want to register windows movie maker

You'll have to use free plugins in virtualdub for effects, but you can put together clips using 'bink and smacker', get it here, it's free Rad Video
lol, sorry, I just joined this board recently, I would have posted this last year if I had been here

[Saget]

Sorry about bringing this topic back from the ashes, but I just wanted to tell you that there's a way to put several videos together using VirtualDub without any kind of extra plugins. Please note that I'm talking about the 1.7.0 version of VirtualDub, so I'm not sure if you could or couldn't do this with previous versions.

There are two ways of doing it:

1. Open the first video you wanna add (let's say, for example, stunt0.avi) and make sure you renamed all the other videos with a sequential filename (like stunt1.avi, stunt2.avi, etc) and keep the checkbox "Automatically load linked segments" marked. All your videos will be appended now =)

2. Open the first video, then go to File > Append AVI segment and look for the file you want. This also has the "Automatically load linked segments" checkbox if you choose to use it, but I like using this method when I only have a few videos to add, or when I don't feel like renaming them.

Hope it helps.

[Ring_of_Fire]

OK, so I upload movies by running FRAPS in the background and then hitting on the F9 key while during Vice City gameplay. I press F9 again to stop the recording and I play the [.avi] file, which I can't upload directly since because it's over 100MB. I get perfect video quality and I can see 6x Anti-aliasing / 16x Anisotropic filtering staring right in the face.

So where do I go from there? Should I use Windows Movie Maker's 512 Kbps [.wmv] compression method or VirtualDub's? I don't seem to get the quality good whenever I upload to Youtube (sometimes). Why is that the quality looks decent when running the file directly from the hard drive, and as soon as I try to upload the file, the quality gets worse? Is it because of filesize -> but I don't think so as I even tried uploading a 20+MB file, and it is still looks like crap compared to uploading a smaller file.

Can anyone tell me what resolution (320x240 or 640x480+), the bitrate, and file extension to get perfect video quality? Any special codec (DivX/Xvid) that might contribute to this factor? Any special settings to choose from?

This post has been edited by Ring_of_Fire on Wednesday, May 16 2007, 14:03

[Spuds725]

Have you tried hosting the vids anywhere else??

Youtube will convert the vid to Flash video (whatever the format is in originally) to compress it, which will reduce the quality.

I've converted/compressed using windows media encoder (to convert to WMV) although it takes some playing with to find the correct settings for the size and quality you want-- sound quality settings can vary the vid size by a fair amount, so if you try it, don't ignore the sound.

[Ring_of_Fire]

QUOTE (Spuds725 @ May 16 2007, 16:46)

I've converted/compressed using windows media encoder (to convert to WMV) although it takes some playing with to find the correct settings for the size and quality you want-- sound quality settings can vary the vid size by a fair amount, so if you try it, don't ignore the sound.

In Windows Movie Maker - I tried using "High Quality Video" (much better than "Video for Broadband" 512Kbps) with 320x240 and a variable bitrate and filesize. I am getting the feeling that you need a video capture card or a TV tuner to get the best picture quality, instead of using FRAPS/GameCam. Is that true?

QUOTE

Youtube will convert the vid to Flash video (whatever the format is in originally) to compress it, which will reduce the quality.

I am seeing people using a video camcorder and getting perfect HD-picture quality on Youtube. Sometimes I get good quality on Youtube, sometimes I don't. Anyway to make the quality consistent?

QUOTE

Have you tried hosting the vids anywhere else??

Photobucket, no luck. The only way actually is via a file-hosting network where they can download the full video filesize without the flash video compression (for me it is 50-100MB!) The quality will be surely excellent.


With that being said, I am not wasting my time uploading over 20MB and getting long encoding/compressing hours for no reason - with the quality still looking bad.

This post has been edited by Ring_of_Fire on Wednesday, Aug 29 2007, 15:40