Its common for gamers to show off their skills and scores through gameplay videos or screenshots. By doing so Gamers acquire reputation among gaming communities across the world and if the gameplay videos are hosted on YouTube, they do get an added advantage of earning money as well.
While some gameplay videos are usually walkthroughs though a game, a majority of these are multiplayer gameplay videos which are usually accompanied with hilarious commentary. If you take a look at youtube, you can definitely see that the later is much popular and most of the times multiplayer gameplay videos get more than a million views. However if you interested in recording Gameplay videos on windows, I will show you how you can do that.
I have been playing games from a decade or so and I have tried most of the tools available for windows to record gameplay videos. Among them all, Fraps has been my first preference and it’s undoubtedly the best gameplay video recording tool that’s available for windows right now. While the basic version of Fraps is free to use, it does have a few limitations such as the recording duration will have a limit and the screenshots will have watermark of the Fraps logo.
Apart from its ability to record gameplay videos, Fraps also allows you to take screenshots of games, Perform custom benchmarks and measure the frame rate between any two points and even display a live FPS meter overlay while playing a game. With all these features, Fraps is definitely a must have tool for every PC gamer.
In my opinion the full version of fraps is worth the $37 and if you are planning to create and upload gameplay videos on YouTube or any other video streaming sites, then this invest will be worth it.
How to Record Gameplay Videos on Windows with Fraps
Using Fraps to record gameplay videos is very simple. First of all you will need to install it on your computer and once installed, you need to set a hotkey for recording gameplay videos or simply use the default hotkey to start recording gameplay videos. Further you can even set a location where the recorded videos would be saved. The following instructions will guide you through the process of recording gameplay videos using Fraps.
- Step 1: Download and install Fraps from the link provided at the bottom of this article. Once installed, run fraps and you will be able to see the following interface.
- Step 2: Select the Movies tab and choose from the the settings according to your requirement.
- Click on the change button to select a folder where you want to save the recorded gameplay videos. Select any drive apart from the drive where windows is installed.
- Set a hotkey for recording gameplay videos while inside a game and make sure that the hotkey you have selected does not match with any other game options.
- Check the Record Win7 sound option if you want to capture the game’s audio, otherwise if you need to record your voice through your mic, Check the Record external input option.
- Select a FPS value for the gameplay video. Remember, the higher the FPS value the more space will be occupied by the gameplay video. Since Fraps record uncompressed gameplay video, I will advise you to select a lower FPS value. in case you are planning to edit the gameplay videos afterwards, make sure you check the Split movie every 4 Gigabytes option.
Note: Since fraps doesn’t compress the recorded gameplay video, you should have at least 50GB of free space available for storing around half an hour worth of gameplay videos.
Thats it, Fraps should be now set to record gameplay videos. Fire up a game and press the Video capture hotkey to start recording the gameplay video. Once you’re done, Click on the hotkey again to stop recording the gameplay video.
Additionally, make sure you have enabled the FPS overlay feature. usually when you are playing a game the FPS overlay will be yellow in color and when you start recording the gameplay video, it will turn red and thus you can make sure that the gameplay video is being recorded.
As i have told you before, Fraps doesn’t compromise on the quality of video recorded. However if you need to reduce the size of recorded gameplay videos, you should to change the resolution of the game itself. As for alternative to Fraps, Taksi and Gamecam are two other video recording tools for games that you should check out.
Download Fraps
