"Time to go to work..."
"to keep the fraps files small you should turn every on low and record on 640x480"
Lowering the screen size would make the files smaller (by 36% or so), *but* lowering the image quality would do basically nothing.
Fraps doesn't do anything more than grab whatever frames are being displayed, and write them to disk. Increased image quality doesn't make a difference, since on-screen there's still those 640*480 pixels to write. However, it *will* increase frame-rate to drop the image quality, which actually makes it take up *more* space.
I actually have some first-hand experience of this:
In my Infernal Machine run I can run at either 32-bit colour depth, or 16-bit. In 16-bit, the 4-gig file-size limit kicks in at 3:30 minutes, while at 32-bit it kicks in at 4:00, because the decrease in framerate from better image quality also decreases how much data there is, even though there's *twice* as much colour information.
So, in short: Lowering image quality won't help you filesize-wise.
Lowering the screen size would make the files smaller (by 36% or so), *but* lowering the image quality would do basically nothing.
Fraps doesn't do anything more than grab whatever frames are being displayed, and write them to disk. Increased image quality doesn't make a difference, since on-screen there's still those 640*480 pixels to write. However, it *will* increase frame-rate to drop the image quality, which actually makes it take up *more* space.
I actually have some first-hand experience of this:
In my Infernal Machine run I can run at either 32-bit colour depth, or 16-bit. In 16-bit, the 4-gig file-size limit kicks in at 3:30 minutes, while at 32-bit it kicks in at 4:00, because the decrease in framerate from better image quality also decreases how much data there is, even though there's *twice* as much colour information.
So, in short: Lowering image quality won't help you filesize-wise.