whats it to be - fraps, camtasia or hypercam?

I spoke with Rod Maher from Beepa, creator of fraps who just happens to be down the road from the production office. He said "fraps uses uncompressed video - its raw footage" when I questioned the fraps codec he said "the compression is lossless"

Torley Linden says "Fraps isn't totally lossless itself but uses its own FPS1 codec; its filesizes are still smaller than wholly raw, uncompressed footage, but still too gargantuan for my tastes. FRAPS' competitors like GameCam and even WeGame offer other codec choices, and another hurdle for FRAPS is its movies can't be played (that I know of) on Macs."

Rod cleared that up so if you are editing on Mac, as I am, he recommended the codec from Perian .

Camtasia is often favoured for its versatility and choice of codecs When I searched forums about this I found a bunch of people preferred Camtasia over Fraps.

"I'd highly recommend Camtasia because it's simply easy to use, powerful, has built in editing software, and produces phenomenal quality videos, but it comes at a price - $300. If you don't want to spend any money CamStudio http://camstudio.org/ is usable. It's got a simple interface, but doesn't produce mind-blowing visuals, but if you plan to upload it to any site like YouTube it really won't matter."

Torley Linden says "FRAPS continues to be a popular choice for "pure" machinima, but not for video tutorials. Why? Because it fails to capture special cursors (like those used in click actions), has no means of highlighting the regular cursor and clicks (as I've come to enjoy), and it can't capture "regular" applications like Firefox with the ease-of-use Camtasia Studio Screen Recorder can, which is why I switched.

But wait, that's where I ran into another problem: the TechSmith Lossless Codec is great… if you're capturing mostly flat areas of color. But throw in a lot of gradients, motion, and near-photorealistic scenes as Second Life often has, and that's where you run into a lot of problems: my capture often dropped to sub-10 FPS (Frames Per Second), which isn't acceptable for showing Second Life in motion."

HyperCam is an alternative screen capture program that allows uncompressed capture AWM Mars says "I do not use any codec when capturing, I use AVI format with no compression. Capturing in uncompressed formats will give you a more 'what you see is what you get'. Adding a codec at capture stage, is not reversible and therefore you already have degraded footage, any further applying of codec will only become accumulative.

All come with a free trial, so test them out and see how they work for you.

A technique used to create the HBO Second Life film was filming the monitor and vignetting the edges in post. I found the tests I did were not very crisp and I was getting a much clearer image from screen capture.

For mac users Snapz Pro X seems to be the best

Watch this space and I will post some tests of different screen capture for comparison.