Fraps

Hi Everyone,

For my company, I am making flight instruction videos using a RC Simulator on my bootcamped imac G5. Previously, a friend has been doing the capture for me. He basically takes a 50FPS recording of the recording we already took in the simulator. He's become unreliable so I have to do it now. The problem is I cannot get fraps to record at a high enough framerate regardless of window size. The most I can get is 25fps. I would bootcamp my unibody macbook but somehow I don't think it will fare any better. If we want to do this, will we have to dive into the realm of the Mac Pro? Next is actually editing, which I do on the OSX partition. How will I get the AVI recording once I have it over to the mac side so I can edit it in Final Cut Pro? Windows is partitioned as NTFS. Any help is appreciated.

Regards,

Sean Williams
Executive Editor
RcHeliResource.com

First - it sounds like you have an intel iMac, you can't bootcamp a G5. Bootcamp AFAIK is only for Intel macs.

Second - Do you have the registered version or the unregistered version? The unregistered version is limited to a lower frame rate, lower quality audio, and has the website and fraps imprinted on every frame of the video. The full registered version offers more frame rates, better quality audio and no fraps indicator.

Third - do you even know what FPS you get in the game normally? with fraps running, but not recording, it should show you up in the corner what FPS it is seeing. If it's seeing 25fps, then that's all that it will record max (and probably a few frames less due to the fraps overhead during recording). It's possible that although the game is playable, you're actually seeing the fps limit on your machine... If your imac doesn't have a dedicated GPU/video ram (ie: it has an intel on board gpu using shared ram, or a nvidia 9400m using shared ram (some games will run great, some won't, depends on game and age when it comes to the nvidia)) you will get low performance.

In terms of getting the video over - if it's on a bootcamp partition, you should see the bootcamp drive on your desktop in which you can just open the drive, navigate to the Fraps folder and drag over your .avi's onto the mac side. OSX can read NTFS partitions just fine - writing to them you can't do without installing something like NTFS-3G.

In terms of editing it, I'm not sure if FCP will convert it directly - I used either compressor or mpegstreamclip to convert my footage into an editable format. Once that's done it's fairly easy (you can see something I threw together recently here: YouTube - COD WAW Zombies Tribute HD - part was recorded with the non-registered version of Fraps, and the very end clips were recorded with the registered version. Footage was recorded at 720p (some 30fps for the non-registered, and end portion at 60 fps, ultimately all converted to 30fps if I recall correctly), edited on Final Cut Pro, then output to .mov h.264 for youtube in hd.

1. Must be intel then.

2. I have registered fraps

3. I am getting about 80 fps in the game normally.

4. When I open the bootcamped drive, nothing is useable, its all in dollar signs and other gibberish, I can't find any "normal" files.

Ok, on number 2 / 3:
Launch Fraps
If Fraps is autolaunching at logon, open the Fraps control panel (right click on the Fraps icon and select settings. Click on the Movies tab. Check your fps there, it then sounds like somehow you've got it set tfor 25 fps. Depending on your desired output, set it to 30, 50, 60 or custom - if doing custom and your ouput is for dvd, enter 29.97, if your output is for bluray or AVCHDDVD and you want 720p60 enter 59.94. If you're getting 80fps in game, you should have no problem maintaining your original stated goal of 50fps.

Regarding #4:
That isn't right - you should be able to read the drive. On the OSX side in Disk Utility verify the drive and verify the permissions and fix if necessary on the OSX partition, then boot into windows and do a check disk on the windows partition - it's possible the windows partition wasn't cleanly unmounted causing a problem for OSX reading the partition properly. I assume you're using OSX 10.5 (Leopard) - make sure your OS is fully up to date (even if it's 10.4, make sure it's fully up to date for Tiger then). If you're still having problems, you may want to try installing NTFS-3G for your revision of OSX - it will require you to install MacFuse which is also free. If there is something right with the NTFS drive, NTFS-3G should throw up warnings when it trys to mount it in OSX.

I know you can transfer the vidoe between the two partitions, as that's how I did it - recorded in fraps on Windows, then in OSX copied the files over to my video work drive.

Hope that helps!