Tools I use for Editing - Part 3

Next I'll briefly talk about Fraps.



Fraps is a utility designed to capture video of whatever application you're running at the time. People, like myself, tend to use this application to obtain gameplay footage from PC games or emulators. But it can also be used to record video from Windows Media Player (say you need a scene from a movie, etc.).

Unfortunately, this utility doesn't work with every application or game. I don't know what triggers this utility to work because some emulators or games that I play don't want to work with Fraps. If you press the "record" button, nothing happens...it's weird. But for a backup, I end up using Camtasia for video capture.

Fraps also isn't free but it's not super costly either ($37). Actually, there is a free version but you can only record 60 seconds tops. You should have a decent computer to run this utility as well. I used to run this on a P4, 2.4GHZ with 1GB of RAM and it barely worked. Sure, I could obtain low quality video but that was it. You're better off having something with multiple processors, a decent amount of harddrive space and at least 2GB of RAM...maybe I'm over exaggerating but that doesn't hurt.



In most of my videos where there is gameplay footage, I used Fraps to obtain it. Strange thing is, now that I have a new computer, I find that I must have Fraps set to 60fps in order for the video capture not to chop out. On my old computer I absolutely had to set it at 29.97fps, otherwise if I set it to anything higher, it would chop out...again, it's weird.

Premiere also can have difficulties with the Fraps video codec but in that case, I'll use Virtualdub to convert it to raw video first then import it to Premiere.



Fraps is easy and straight forward to use if you can get it to work properly. You may have to play around with the fps settings until you find one that your system can handle. All you really have to do is press F9 (my default) to start recording and press F9 again to stop. It's that easy. It can also capture screen shots.

So if you like to record yourself playing games for any which reason, give Fraps a try. I see people use it mostly for speed runs.