This is probably something I should have written before OMC, but you guys would probably still benefit from it.

Now, after having watched over 100 videos submitted by you guys, and having the same problem myself, I can safely say that pressing record is hard. Really hard. So a large amount of video footage from fights will start a little late which means some of the important parts of the beginning of the fight are lost. It essentially boils down to 2 reasons:

People forget to press record. Not much to do with this, but sometimes people will remember later. Something that starts out uninteresting turns into a great fight and the recording only begins when it already has become a great fight.

Fraps has a feature that can help with this problem: The loop buffer. I’m not sure if other recording programs have something similar. So what is the loop buffer then? Basically fraps will record a buffer that will be added to the beginning of the video when you press record. Thereby the loop buffer will give you the chance record the initial part of the fight even if you forgot to hit record in the beginning or didn’t expect it to be a worthwhile fight.

The length of the loop buffer can be changed in the settings. Open fraps, go to the Movies tab and change the Loop buffer length to the desired duration. I run with 30sec as I feel it is a nice duration. While I don’t know much about the technical stuff I am pretty sure that the longer the buffer is, the more it will stress your computer.

To activate the loop buffer you simply have to press your record button down until the FPS counter turns pink, which means it has begun looping. Then when you press record like normally it will turn red, as usual, and the loop will be added to the beginning of the footage.

I hope you find this useful. It is definitely a great help for me. Getting the initial parts of the fight can be quite hard, but it gives your pvp video a much better overall quality when you get it.