Create Videos from dem files in Counter Strike with Fraps and WeGame

The .dem files are the demo files which store the data related to the input to the game like, the key presses in the Keyboard, Mouse clicks or Joystick input in the game Counter Strike while playing. When the demo is been played, these inputs are again given to the engine and the output is displayed as the playback in Counter Strike.

It is always better to record demos, before directly making the movies as the direct recording takes more memory usage and may slow down the game and the recording performance. There are three methods of recording a Video. These include the methods by Fraps, Wegame, Video Mach.

Fraps uses the Video output of the screen to directly record it as a video. Wegame also does the same thing. But with Video Mach or any other sotware of such kind, you need to record movie in the Counter Strike. This will give the output as a series of images saved in the cstrike folder. These images should be clubbed and made as a motion picture. For this the Video Mach Software is helpful.

Comming to the clarity of the video output, all are ok. But with Fraps, you need to spend some 2GB of Disk Space just for 5minutes of Video. Wegame is optimal based on the settings. In the third case too, the each image saved will be around 1.5MB. 30 frames per second will give out 50MB per minute.

Movie editing can be done by using the Adobe Premier or by Windows Movie Maker Softwares. Both are equally good. Adobe Premier's latest versions seem to have better features.

With Fraps or Wegame, you just need to install the software. That will start the application automatically on startup. When you start any game, you can see FPS on the top left corner of the game view. This shows the FPS possible. In the case of Fraps, you just need to press F9 to start recording the video and the same key to stop it too. Now the output video will be saved in c:\Fraps folder. You can see the video wih VLC or Mplayer or any other media player. F10 will save a screenshot. WeGame also follows similar procedure to record the videos.

Settings will greatly effect the lag in the game while recording the videos. It is always better to use the same FPS for recording and in the game settings. You can change FPS of the game by giving the command "fps_max 30" in the console of the Counter Strike game. This will change the Frame Rate to 30. Also videos are mostly made with 30 Frames per second itself.