Saturday 28 February 2015

Rant No. 4 Fraps Error Messages (or lack thereof)

Fraps is a good recording software, and the one that I use for making my videos. Some of you may notice that there will be a gap in the recordings of the Prison Architect videos going out on the YouTube channel. This is due to Fraps.
I began recording a fresh batch of videos to add on to the previous session, so that I had a backlog of stuff ready to go out over the next few weeks. The first five minutes were fine. The usual 30fps 1080p recording worked smoothly. But then it just cut out. No message. Nothing to tell me that anything had happened, except that the fps counter in the corner changed from its red (recording) state back to its usual yellow. Hardly noticeable! And, as such, I didn't notice it, and carried on 'recording' for another hour, before coming to a suitable point to end the session. It was then, when I pressed F9 to end the recording, that I noticed that it was already yellow and had changed to red again. This time it came up with a little message box, saying that the borrowed external hard drive I was recording to was full, so it couldn't initiate another recording! Why couldn't it have done this in the first place. Had it done that, I would have changed to my internal hard drive, with more space free, and save the video to there instead.

Another thing. I had only been recording for five minutes, and in that time, Fraps had managed to create another 7GB of footage - enough to fill out Harry's external hard drive. The reason that I had been using this in the first place was because Satamer and Harry do the editing for my videos due to my lack of editing skills and the required software to do it in. I was going straight onto the hard drive because I had recorded the PAX South and Prison Architect videos a few days previously, and had found that it took two hours to transfer over. During that time, I couldn't record more footage onto either hard drive involved in the transfer because it severely reduced my fps due to the bottleneck for transfer speeds (40MB/second due to the USB 2.0 slot I was using). This meant that I couldn't get any decent footage until the transfer was complete, and, as previously mentioned, the hard drive was almost full without me noticing.

Anyway, Fraps is a decent piece of software, which does what it's supposed to do, but no more, and some decent things like letting you know when its stopped recording (like a beep or message box) would be nice. Hopefully I'll get some videos out soon, I may release the 5 minutes of footage that was recorded.
However this was a pretty big d*** move from Fraps, and although I would recommend it as it does the job well, it can be a real annoyance at times.

Anyway, this has been a rant from Thomas (The Stacinator). I hope to do more posts on the blog soon (this is my first one!). Bye for now!

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