Official Fulqrum Publishing forum - Movie Makers/screenshot arstists, I have a question

From a post I made for another forum, hope it helps too:

"Ok, FRAPS is the best program for capturing video, bar none.

Setting up your system though is what you need to do so it works smoothly.

I made "Secret Weapon over Stalingrad" using FRAPS on a Athlon 1.4, 1GB Ram and an Nvidia 4400 Graphics card!

"Not my time to die!" was made on a Pentium 3.2C, 1Gb Ram and Nvidia 6800GT.

So try this.

Set the game resolution at 800x600x32bit.

In conf.ini under OpenGL settings,
Set Forest-0
Water-2

In your game set Stencil buffer On, and Landscape Perfect with everything else on Max Quality (your system should ber able to cope).

Go and play a mission and save the .ntrk or .trk.

Now for FRAPS.

If you have it installed, un-install it and clean your registry.

Now re-install Fraps, but make sure it is on a different Hard Drive (or Partition) than you IL2 install.

Launch FRAPS and set up a hot key to record with, it should capture video to the partition you installed FRAPS to.

Now make sure that you un-tick Capture/Record sound....you don't need it.

Set the frame rate to 25fps for Pal.

Basically Fraps will be capturing exactly that, 25 pictures-per-second.

Ok, now launch the game.

Now here is how to get smooth capture.

Play the track that you want to make into the movie.

When you reach the part you want, drop the speed of playback to 1/4 speed.

Hit record on Fraps.

Now work your way through the track, changing camera angles (but never,ever,ever pan around the plane using the mouse...it looks awful!).

Stop recording after you have finished.

You should see, while recording the frame rate in the top left (or wherever you set it up). Now as long as it doesn't drop below 7 (you may get away with 6) fps, you'll be ok.

So, now you have a video clip(s).

Open your video editing program and import the footage.

Now, remember we recorded at 1/4 speed, this means that you will have to speed the video up on the timeline by 4x or 400%

So speed it up by the above amount.

Now edit the clip, cutting out any bits where you moved the mouse or zoomed or made mistakes.

Now render the sequence out.

You should now see a clip, playing back perfectly, without stutters or jumps.

If it still jerks a little (it really shouldn't), try capturing at resolution of 640x480, but try and keep it at 32 bit.

Hope that helps get you started in Movie Making. We all start somewhere, and I look forward to seeing your results.

BTW, when rendering, export the file to the XVID Codec as this is like JPEG for photos. It reduces the file size, but keeps the quality. Also render the sound out at 128k bit-rate or 64 which again reduces the file size, but keeps .mp3 quality.

Again hope that gets your started, cheers, MP.

Now launch the game"

As for the detail, you can set everything low to record the track (Graphic card settings AA + AF), then pump it up to high to play it back for the recording ;)

Cheers, MP.