Fraps dices up my video into too many pieces...

[pbpullman]

Has anyone else had this problem? When I use Fraps to make a movie, it'll spit out several AVI files when I'm done recording. It doesn't do it when I try to make movies with FSX. I made sure the video capture key doesn't conflict with other keys, but for some reason, an 8 minute video gets chopped into 4 or 5 AVI files even though I never stopped recording.

 

I tried looking for Fraps support, but found nothing.

[Blaze]

When I record with Fraps it does the same, slicing the video up in to 4GB pieces. Just put them end to end in your video-editing software of choice (like Sony Vegas), and it'll play back seamlessly.

 

The reason FRAPS uses 4GB chunks is because it records into AVI 1.0 format, and that file format has a hard limit of 4GB. This limit is regardless of anything else you take into consideration, you simply can't have a file of this format larger than 4GB and still work. This limitation was put in originally because I'm sure back when we were all watching VHS tapes yet (1992), the 32-bit limit of 4GB was plenty of space to work with because heck, computers didn't even have drives that big. Now there is also an AVI 2.0 format which does not have this limitation, however the FRAPS software still uses AVI 1.0 format.

 

So because FRAPS uses AVI 1.0, the files are limited to 4GB, regardless of if you are on FAT32 or NTFS or on a 32-bit architecture or 64-bit architecture. It's a limit of the format.

 

Now FRAPS could at some point decide to switch to AVI 2.0 format to get rid of this limation going forward, however I suspect their reasons for continuing to use this format are two fold.

 

1. They may still have a fair bit of 32-bit customer base, though it has rapidly decreased over the past several years. Their current implementation is both compatible with new systems and old systems. They don't need to change it to make it work on the new, it already does.

 

2. There may be some additional performance hit if they switch to AVI 2.0 format on the encoding piece which is in the answer to your next question. Any performance hit in an application designed to record in real time is bad.

 

Keep in mind, everything takes time. Recording the video... Compressing the video... Saving it to disk... FRAPS does all three of these tasks in real time. In needs to do some compression on the video before writing it to disk or there would be too much disk I/O trying to write data uncompressed. So this file size is actually a compromise between the system load in processing and compressing the video and how much effort is involved in writing it to disk.

Edited February 5, 2012 by Blaze

[Devrim]

I use Fraps. But I didn't have this problem.

 

What's your system specs?

[pbpullman]

Thanks

 

Blaze,

 

Thank you Blaze for a very informative answer. I do hope Fraps comes out with AVI 2.0, because a great machine might not see that bad of a hit... esp a 64 bit machine.

 

Devrim...not sure why it doesn't happen to you... are you sure you record your takes in greater than 4GB chunks?

 

My machine is decent...AMD Phenom X4, 1GB ASUS GDDR5 vid card, and 4GB of RAM, however I'll be upgrading the memory to 8GB very soon and probably the video card in a few months.

[Devrim]

Hmm. You're right. I didn't record a video greater than 4GB. But I did longer than 8 min. I think according to my Fraps's settings (half-size etc.), my files were around 1-2GB.

 

Sorry.

 

But, as Blaze says, you can use a video editing software, if the video hasn't to be in one piece.

I use Corel Video Pro X4.

 

Take care...

[WildBillKelsoe]

Has anyone else had this problem? When I use Fraps to make a movie, it'll spit out several AVI files when I'm done recording. It doesn't do it when I try to make movies with FSX. I made sure the video capture key doesn't conflict with other keys, but for some reason, an 8 minute video gets chopped into 4 or 5 AVI files even though I never stopped recording.

 

I tried looking for Fraps support, but found nothing.

 

I have the same problem. But I use Premiere elements, and group the video fragments into one chunk in the project, and add my effects to it then publish to wide NTSC FLV/F4V format (720p) HD Youtube format.