Fraps recording 3 minute, 5 GB movies? Why?

ZombieGenesis

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Just bought the full version of fraps and tried out the video capture. After an hour recording I find all the movies have been split into 3 minute videos, each one is 4.9GB in size. I tried running VirtualDub (compressing) but afterwards that 3 minute movie became 16 GB!! Somehow...
What on earth?
 

Fr]anc[is

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May 13, 2010
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Fraps files are always going to be ginormous. I don't recall it being that bad, but they will always be big
 

PlasmaFrog

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They're not the proper file format. You can convert them after you're done with the raw footage.
 

josemlopes

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ZombieGenesis said:
Just bought the full version of fraps and tried out the video capture. After an hour recording I find all the movies have been split into 3 minute videos, each one is 4.9GB in size. I tried running VirtualDub (compressing) but afterwards that 3 minute movie became 16 GB!! Somehow...
What on earth?
Use Windows Movie Maker or Sony Vegas and edit them, depending on the format of the rendering you will have a smaller file. Like 10Mb.
 
Oct 2, 2010
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Because it has to record in real-time while your computer does other stuff, Fraps dumps raw video data into the file. It's incredibly space-innefficient, but it's high-quality and you're expected to compress before using.
 

ZombieGenesis

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I tried compressing using VirtualDub, but that didn't help. At all.
Perhaps I'll get Moviemaker and use that instead.
 

Fenring

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You were recording at 1080x1920, weren't you? And with sound turned on too, probably.
 

Darktau

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Mar 10, 2009
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All the movies are meant to be that big from fraps, as they are uncompressed, this lets you have better frame rates when recording.

1) Open virtual dub
2) Open movie (first part)
3) Append avi segment for each part afterwards (in order)
4) Go to compression and use the following:

Codec: FFDshow if you do not have it, download and install this: http://www.cccp-project.net/
Presss configure
Encoder: MJPEG
Bitrate: Set to max then mess around with settings to suit your fancy

5) File > Save as avi..
6) Save and watch


No problem ;P , quote or PM for any further help.


Fenring said:
You were recording at 1080x1920, weren't you? And with sound turned on too, probably.
1080x1920? Surely you mean 1920x1080 :p
 

acer840

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Mar 24, 2008
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ZombieGenesis said:
Just bought the full version of fraps and tried out the video capture. After an hour recording I find all the movies have been split into 3 minute videos, each one is 4.9GB in size. I tried running VirtualDub (compressing) but afterwards that 3 minute movie became 16 GB!! Somehow...
What on earth?
Because it records in real time, it hasn't got the time it encode it and compress it, and even if it could, that would be a ginormous amount of computing power. So it dumps it in without encoding and compression to keep system speeds up, and it limits it to 5gb so when you do go to compress, it won't take an age to load up a 80gb file.
 

Darktau

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ZombieGenesis said:
And what about the length? Are they always 3 minutes, or is that just due to file size?
The file size limit is usually 3.9GB or 4.9GB and it will cut it off then.
 

acer840

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Mar 24, 2008
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ZombieGenesis said:
And what about the length? Are they always 3 minutes, or is that just due to file size?
Because 3min is equal to about 5gb in your rendering rate, I would guess.
 

Zer_

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Feb 7, 2008
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What most people said in this thread is completely right.

VirtualDub is a great free tool to compress video, you need to select the appropriate codec first, FFDShow based codecs are great, too. :)
 

Eclectic Dreck

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acer840 said:
ZombieGenesis said:
Just bought the full version of fraps and tried out the video capture. After an hour recording I find all the movies have been split into 3 minute videos, each one is 4.9GB in size. I tried running VirtualDub (compressing) but afterwards that 3 minute movie became 16 GB!! Somehow...
What on earth?
Because it records in real time, it hasn't got the time it encode it and compress it, and even if it could, that would be a ginormous amount of computing power. So it dumps it in without encoding and compression to keep system speeds up, and it limits it to 5gb so when you do go to compress, it won't take an age to load up a 80gb file.
This is entirely correct. Uncompressed video means each frame is entirely new data from the previous (the most basic and often used compression only updates pixels that change from frame to frame rather than having lots of extra information) and this can be enormous (for 1920x1080 at 32 bit color depth, this equates to about 64 megabytes per frame, 3 minutes is 4500 frames at 25 FPS). The actual process of compression is computationally expensive as, in the most naive interpretation the algorithm must check each pixel in one frame against the same pixel in the next frame. This equates to roughly 2 million individual checks per frame. The end result is simply that few computers would be capable of doing this in real time (in a single second it would be required to perform 50 million checks with the actual number of operations being several times as large. Given that any given step, even the most trivial computation in the process, requires several clock cycles to complete (several dozen cycles just to grab the data of a single pixel from memory followed by many more clock cycles to compare the two), you quickly find that, even at the very high frequency of clock cycles on modern computers, you simply cannot do the job quick enough. As a result, the program has no choice but to simply write the raw data to disk so that it can be compressed later.
 

Zer_

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I usually go for the K-Lite complete codec pack. I'm not sure if CCCP comes with the proper codecs to actually compress files, if only to read them.

Also make sure you use VirtualDUB x86. 64 bit based codecs are actually rare. Basically the 32 bit version of VDub can only read 32 bit codecs, and the 64 bit can only read 64 bit codecs.
 

ZombieGenesis

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Zer_ said:
I usually go for the K-Lite complete codec pack. I'm not sure if CCCP comes with the proper codecs to actually compress files, if only to read them.

Also make sure you use VirtualDUB x86. 64 bit based codecs are actually rare. Basically the 32 bit version of VDub can only read 32 bit codecs, and the 64 bit can only read 64 bit codecs.
Well I'm using the 64 bit version of VDub but I have no idea what the codecs are :/ Just downloaded the CCCP pack recommended but it hasn't changed anything.
 

Zer_

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ZombieGenesis said:
Zer_ said:
I usually go for the K-Lite complete codec pack. I'm not sure if CCCP comes with the proper codecs to actually compress files, if only to read them.

Also make sure you use VirtualDUB x86. 64 bit based codecs are actually rare. Basically the 32 bit version of VDub can only read 32 bit codecs, and the 64 bit can only read 64 bit codecs.
Well I'm using the 64 bit version of VDub but I have no idea what the codecs are :/ Just downloaded the CCCP pack recommended but it hasn't changed anything.
Use the 32bit version. The 64 bit version doesn't have enough codec support.