Recently I've received several private messages from people asking for tips on how to make fraps, so I decided to make a detailed guide on how to make simple, yet good-looking fraps. Hopefully with this guide, more people will start to make fraps and post them on l2blah.

1) Get the full registered version of Fraps. Either buy it from there or go download it somewhere else if you can find it.

2) Open Fraps and go to the FPS tab. Select whichever corner you want the overlay to be in. Then, go to the Movies tab and set a Video Capture Hotkey. Set it to Full-size and 25 fps. Uncheck Record Sound and make sure No Cursor is checked, or else it will capture the cursor too and it'll be pretty anoying to look at. Now minimize it and load up L2. (If you're using an older version of Fraps that doesn't have the No Cursor option, disable Graphic Cursor in the L2 options)

3) When you get in L2, you'll see the overlay of how many frames per second the game is running at. To start capturing, press the hotkey you set in Fraps. The overlay will turn from yellow to red while it's recording. To stop recording, press the hotkey again. By default, it will save the video to the Fraps directory. (Note: Before you begin capturing, make sure your resolution is set to 1024x768 or lower. Fraps will not be able to capture at full size if it's any higher, so it'll be forced to capture at half size which will make it look bad)

4) Here's a few tips on capturing L2 fraps. If you're recording something small like a 1v1 you're not involved in, use ALT+H and go to first person mode to capture what's happening in front of you, and zoom out if needed. There are many different ways to make it look cool depending on the situation, so get creative with it. If you're not involved in the actual pvp you're recording or if you can help it at all, keep your character and your camera completely still whenever you can. This will help the compression a lot and result in a better looking video, because the video codec only recompresses whatever moves from frame to frame.

5) After you capture it, you'll need to encode (compress) it. For encoding the video, use VirtualDubMod. The video codec I'd recommend to use is XviD. When you get both VirtualDubMod and XviD installed, open VirtualDubMod. Go to File, then Open video file. Go to your Fraps directory and open the video file you captured (it'll be named something like l2 2005-07-11 22-34-09-90.avi). Under Video, go to Compression, then select XviD MPEG-4 Codec and hit Configure. For the best quality possible, encode it with two passes. Under Encoding type, select Twopass - 1st pass and hit OK, and then OK again. For the Audio, you'll want to go to Streams and then Steam list. If there's anything already there, disable it. Then go to Add and select an mp3 you want to use. Due to the AVI file format, the mp3 file has to have a constant bitrate. If it's a variable bitrate, it will give you a message saying that a VBR audio stream was detected, so download something like LAME, and recompress it with a constant bitrate. For videos, you only really need to compress it at 128 kbps at most. After you're done adding the mp3 as the audio stream, hit OK. Now you can start to encode the first pass. Go to File, Save As, and select a location to store it. It'll start compressing the file and could take quite awhile. When it finishes, you're not over yet since it was just the first pass. Go back to Video, Compression, XviD MPEG-4 Codec, Configure. This time select Twopass - 2nd pass. Set the Target bitrate to about 3000 kbps (Make sure it's not Target size). Hit OK, and go save the file again, overwriting the other one. When it finishes compressing for the second time, you're finally done. (Note: The reason I used VirtualDubMod and not the original VirtualDub is so that you can use an mp3 file for the audio stream, which is very important)

That's how you make simple, yet good-looking fraps. If you want to do more advanced video editing, you'll need something like Adobe Premiere. If you want to host the file on a site to share it on l2blah, I'd recommend FileFront. If you have any questions or tips on fraps making, post them here.