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With the birth of loads and loads of video sharing sites, people are encouraged to create any sort of publishable videos to share (or brag!). One of the questions that I’ve been asked is “Can I record my gameplay and show it off?”

Sure you can. This guide is intended for those who don’t have any basic at all in gameplay video recording and encoding, thus it will be made simple (and no deep technical stuff!). Let’s cut the crap and start, shall we?

Things you would need:
- Fraps (don’t worry, the trial version is good enough)
- XviD codec
- VirtualDub (get the stable one!)
- Patience
- Lots of hard disk space (for temporary use – preferably defrag-ed to ensure smooth recording!)

Preparation

Of course, you must first install all the tools said above, except VirtualDub, since it doesn’t have an Installer. Just unzip it anywhere you desire. I would strongly recommend you exit all instant messengers, any background running programs that interferes with hard disk operation (anti virus, bit torrent, etc), and finally defrag your hard drive.

Next, set your game to a low resolution. Yes, this is recommended if you want to preserve details and cut down on file size, while ensuring smooth recording. You can keep your graphic detail high, but keep the resolution low (i recommend 640×480, but if this is way too low for you, go for 800×600).

Configuring Fraps

Start Fraps, and click the Movies tab:

In the “Video Capture Hotkey” box, set a key that you can press to start/stop recording during game play. I strongly recommend you to change this key, as most games do make use of F9 for something (i.e. Quicksave, Screenshot). My favorite key is “Scroll Lock” for 2 reasons:

1) It is hardly used nowadays
2) It have an indicator on most keyboard, so you can, sort of “know” if you’re recording :D

How do you change the key? Simple. Click on the box with the “F9″ text, and press your Scoll Lock key, and you’re done:

Begin Recording

Now things get simple, start your game, and when you’re ready to begin recording, just hit the hot key you’ve assigned in the step above (If you followed my suggestion, then press the Scroll Lock key). You will notice there’s some sort of counter on top-left of the game, and it will turn red when you’re recording.

When you’re done with the game, press the hotkey (Scroll Lock) again to stop the recording. Exit the game and let’s proceed to the next step.

Making the file smaller

If you browse the Fraps folder (located in C:\Fraps usually, unless you changed it), you will see your Video file. The file name will be something like “Half-Life2 2007-04-15 11-28-52-66.avi” (the name depends on what game are you running of course, duh!).

Now if you noticed, this file is tremendously huge, while you CAN still share this file in DVDs or mobile hard disks, but it is impractical for web use. Let’s make it more manageable shall we?

First, start VirtualDub, then choose “File->Open video file…“, and find the video file you’ve just created minutes ago:

Now, go to “Video->Compression”, you will see a small dialog box with a list of installed video CODECs on your system. Choose XviD and click the “Configure” button on the right:

You will then be brought to another XviD configuration window:

Leave the setting as is, then click “Ok” twice to dismiss the boxes. Now, go to the “Audio” menu, and make sure “Full Processing mode” is selected:

Now, go to “Audio->Compression…”, and choose “MPEG Layer-3″, then click “Ok”:

Now is the final stage, choose “File->Save as AVI…” and give it a name that you can remember easily. Once you clicked “Save”, it will begin encoding. You will see something like follows:

Once this is done, go to the folder where you saved your video files, and enjoy!

You can visit Shiro’s site if you want to see loads of recorded Video samples :D

Any questions? Feel free to ask :)

If you’re into video encoding, you might want to check my Guide: How to encode XviD files to the exact size desired

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posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 11:58 in Guides.