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How to Get Good Minecraft Quality With Fraps

The key to recording quality videos of "Minecraft," or any video game for that matter, is finding the sweet spot between taxing your hardware, maximizing the game̵7;s video settings and the recording settings with Fraps. Maximizing, in this sense of the word, does not mean turning everything up to eleven. Rather, you should adjust settings until you find the apex of video quality in terms of resolution and smoothness.

Frames Per Second
- From within the Fraps software, you can manipulate the frames per second as well as the screen size of your video capture. These two factors, when leveraged properly with your computer̵7;s resources, will play a major role in your overall video quality. Under the Movies tab of the Fraps interface, you̵7;ll find check bubbles for FPS and screen size under the Video Capture Settings section. Natively, video capture is at 30 FPS. For most people, using this setting should work just fine. You can shoot for a higher framerate, but the higher you go, the more taxing the process.
Full-Size or Half-Size Recordings
- The full-size and half-size options determine how much of the screen you record. Full-size recordings capture the entire screen, but take a greater toll on your system̵7;s resources. Full-size video can get choppy without a fast CPU and system memory. Half-size captures less of the screen, but you can still record in full 1080p and Fraps will be less taxing on your computer.
"Minecraft" Video Settings
- Before loading your "Minecraft" world, you can adjust video settings from the Options menu. The Graphics setting controls the quality of effects such as shadows, 3D rendering, water rendering and so on. The Fancy setting maximizes effects while Fast mutes effects, which can be handy while using Fraps if you need to cut corners for a smoother video. Render Distance controls how far out landscapes and objects will load from your current position. The further the distance, the higher the resource demand. Lighting effects how the sun or moon casts light on blocks; lighting can be individually rendered on every block, or simulated across all blocks (which is better to increase performance).
Optimize Computer Resources
- Before recording your "Minecraft" video, close down all other programs except Fraps and "Minecraft." This includes Web browsers, as they too take up your computer's resources. If you have multiple local drives, you can increase reading and writing performance by dedicating a drive to Fraps videos. Solid-state hard drives perform faster than hard disk drives, so record to a local SSD if possible.

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