[Bret Snyder]

I have all of the work I did for the game. I don’t think I’m explaining the situation very well. I have a PC game that I worked on. What I am trying to do is play the game, and take real-time video footage of myself playing the game (like watching clips from the game).

So first thing I needed was an application that allowed me to capture video clips of whatever was being displayed on my computer (in this instance, a video game). FRAPS is the most used video-capturing tool for recording video game footage on a PC. I tried it. The problem I had was simply converting the raw FRAPS footage (I have NO idea what codec it uses) into a video format that AE would read.

What I have been doing the last few days has been attempting to simply convert the raw FRAPS footage into a Quicktime format. That’s it.

For some reason, all of the PC apps I have used to convert the footage isn’t getting the job done. I contacted the FRAPS tech support and the rep thought I needed to update my graphics card drivers. He believes that my outdated drivers may be preventing me from converting FRAPS footage. I’ll give that a shot and report back.

I really appreciate the assistance all of you have given me.

Thank you,

Bret

[Bret Snyder]

Would either of you suggest a video converter for me? I originally tried the two that FRAPS suggested. One hangs infinitely when you try to select a codec, the other one didn’t allow you to convert to mov’s. I went to cnet (download.com) and tried a few of the top rated ones there and in most cases, the footage hung the conversion app (unresponsive even after I stepped away from the computer for lunch today). I’m at a loss. I can’t directly drag the FRAPS footage into AE because my Mac doesn’t recognize that AVI codec and there is no FRAPS version for the Mac. As a last ditch effort, I downloaded Windows Media Encoder just to see if it could encode the footage (even if it wasn’t a quicktime conversion)…nothin. When I tried Windows Movie Maker, I would get a CRC error. I’m guessing that means it’s corrupted data? I’m just plain at a loss right now.

I figured this would be a really easy part of the reel. Take video footage of the game. Import it into AE for some quick editing.

[Bret Snyder]

Thanks for your response. FRAPS is a video-capturing tool (like screen capturing, except mainly for video). I still have the 140 meg files (which are perfect), but I wasn’t able to import them straight into AE. It was an AVI format that my Mac did not like so I converted them into mpg’s. I’ll reconvert them into another video format and see if that doesn’t solve the problem. What formats are best to use for video footage in AE?