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They showed up much lower than I would like and the on-screen display positioning doesn't match their placement on the overlay window in settings. I tried changing the overlay settings to a smaller font size and moving them to the right side of the display. Since there is no benefit to using no compression, it's no use using this setting but it is concerning my system became unstable during use. Surprisingly I did not seen an improvement in framerates even though the file sizes averaged about 10MB/min of recording. The second time I loaded Skyrim the game crashed during gameplay recording and the video was unviewable. The loading screen took forever to load (usually I don't have time to read a single tip) and the Playclaw video stopped recording once the game started. The first time I tried to run Skyrim while recording my computer suddenly turned into a PS3. I'm unsure whether FRAPS compresses video during recording so I switched the Playclaw settings to "no compression". 2MB per min at the default settings of Playclaw. With both set to record stereo sound at 30FPS, I found FRAPS would take up about 3-4MB per minute of recorded video vs. In comparison, FRAPS drops the framerate about 10FPS. A 4min video takes up about 8MB of space.
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Once Playclaw starts with the default "low compression" settings, the framerate drops about 20FPS.
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Since the game renders up to 60FPS, I know I'm pushing my card to the limit and it will give me an opportunity to see how much Playclaw impacts my framerate. Mostly cleaning up the blocky shadows that are notoriously bad using Skyrim default settings. I have tweaked Skyrim to max out the graphics beyond the default ultra settings. I used Playclaw to record Skyrim using a Radeon HD 5850. Since I didn't use that method I can't elaborate. They did, however offer an alternative in the form of visiting a website. Installation was painless, I did have to send information over the Internet to activate this software using the provided registration code. To answer #5, there is an options in settings to allow Playclaw to minimize to system tray. FRAPS regular purchase price is a little steep so I appreciate the opportunity to try an alternative. #3 is incorrect that FRAPS costs money unless you want videos limited to 30 seconds at a time. Thanks, in particular, to #25 Doc Savage's fantastic review I installed this.
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