FRAPS videos are ear-fuckingly loud

[Mirai Gen]

And yet the voiceover I record is about half the volume, and Windows Volume Control is not helping at all.

I even turned the volume down in game and it played at maximum.

[Nikose Tyris]

reduce the volume in windows movie maker for the audio you rip in game.

[Mirai Gen]

Fraps is also recording the voiceover I'm supposed to be doing, but it makes it about a quarter to half the volume.

Reducing the volume in WMM would reduce that too.

[Nikose Tyris]

Could you do the voice over afterwards while watching the video you've recorded? FRAPS tends to be a little bitch. >.>

I'll edit this post from the office once I talk to the tech guy about FRAPS and funny sound recordings, he knows more then I do.

[Mirai Gen]

I'm waiting.

Anyone else?

[Nikose Tyris]

From Work:

"FRAPS sucks for recording both game and Voiceovers, but if he's dead set on it, his best bet is to set the system volume and Microphone volume to max and speak clearly into the system. FRAPS records audio from the game- it's not meant to record quieter, or else it would be useless to testers and game video makers. However, if he's playing through a TV card in his computer on an Xbox360, he can set Windows Movie Maker to Capture the Game video/audio, and record his voice over seperately."

He recommended "xfire.com" for what you're doing. I'd give it a look.

[Mike McC]

Or, record your commentary through a different program and combine the two into one movie file.

[Nikose Tyris]

Like was originally reccomended. :P

[Mike McC]

Like was originally reccomended. :POriginally you recommended reducing the volume. Then you suggested recording the commentary after the video.

I was talking about simultaneously recording the commentary. So no, new recommendation for this thread. Besides, a different person reiterating a suggestion helps to strengthen it anyway.

Seriously, if this program is giving you this much grief over something that is easily circumvented, then circumvent it.

[Mirai Gen]

He originally recommended it over MSN, which is why he said 'as previously recommended'.

And the reason I'm not recording video and recording sound and merging is because running a single extra software over Mirror's Edge lags it enough, since it's a pretty graphically intense game.

[phil_]

To avoid lag, you could record your voice over with a different piece of hardware, like a Yak Bak or a tape recorder, then get that into your computer.

[Mirai Gen]

So Mirror's Edge won't work with Xfire. It keeps telling me it can't find files, including Steamapps.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

I swear to god I've told it to detect repeatedly and it keeps on looking for Steam applications rather than the fact that I got it from a CD.

[Mesden]

Or, record your commentary through a different program and combine the two into one movie file.

This is probably the best idea. Do something noticeable and time it with some ingame noise at the beginning so you can sync the audio.

[Mike McC]

I really don't think a simple audio-recorder is going to diminish the preformance of the game + video combination in any significant way.

Now, if you try to record it through some massive editing program with the resource footprint on par with iTunes or Firefox, yeah, there might be complications.

If you are not already doing so, it might help to boost preformance to record these files in a raw format, and do the compression after the fact. However, you would need ample harddrive space to achieve this. Also, I've noted preformance boosts in my computer when I write large files (such as torrents of AVIs) to one of my secondary harddrives as opposed to my primary one.He originally recommended it over MSN, which is why he said 'as previously recommended'.Thank you. I did not know Nikose expected me to be clairvoyant.

[Mirai Gen]

What audio-catching program should I use? I was thinking Audacity but that probably sucks up processing power like crazy, and my instinct is to shy away from any and all built-in Windows programs.

[Mike McC]

The easy way to see how much resources something takes is to start recording with it, Open up the task manager, and look at it on the second tab. Also, minimize it after you open the task manager to get a more accurate view of how much resources it is eating up. You could also play with the settings to see which settings have the lowest impact on the system.

Edit: From my test, recording on the default settings, Audacity looks to take up no more than 8 megs of RAM. If your computer can't spare that, I'd look into upgrading the RAM, optimizing the SWAP file, or perhaps closing absolutely everything except the game, video recorder, and audio recorder (this includes things like your anti-virus program).

The CPU load on my poor, old, mostly idling Celeron D, as reported by the task manager, was about 10%. It should be significantly less on anything that decently runs Mirror's Edge.

[Mirai Gen]

The real trick is that I'm running FRAPs too, which creates absolutely giynormic videos and makes ME run choppily.

After running Audacity and Fraps and putting together a Mirror's Edge video I've decided that this really isn't something I wanna do. So, okay, thanks for the help but dinner is canceled.