Guild Wars 2 Character Creation - Male Asura

You can buy/download Fraps full version to record the video itself. It has settings for the quality of the video your recording but keep in mind that if you computer isn’t that great, it will slow it down a LOT.  I suggest having a 2nd hard drive or external hard drive to records your videos to, it takes some of the pressure off of your main hard drive that your playing the game on, and also you don’t have to worry about size.  Fraps videos are broken into segments, but they’re huge files.

I found a guide on youtube that explains in further detail on the steps to take after recording, give me a bit to find it. I can’t seem to locate it atm looking through bookmarks.

But I remember offhand you will want a program like Any vVdeo Converter to combine all the Fraps segments into a single, smaller (size i mean), video.  Audacity is good for anything audio related.  For example, finding a song you want to play in the background, or during a “introduction sequence” before the gameplay starts.

Sony Vegas and other programs like it are used to edit anything you want in the video.

You can use Fraps, Dxstory or any other screen capture software to record (some don’t work well with games, though), or use a separate video capture card if you want the best performance (the software recorders will reduce your FPS a bit).

Once you have the files, you can edit them with any application able to digest the capture format. Assuming you recorded to AVI files, you can use Microsoft Movie Maker (available for free from Microsoft’s site, if it didn’t come with your version of Windows), or a number of other free / cheap / horribly expensive packages. Most will also let you add separately recorded audio tracks (ex., commentary), if you want.

Avoid smothering your video with effects or fancy titles (a temptation that new editors often succumb to); stick to simple cuts, fade-ins and fade-outs. 

Once the video is finished, if you’re planning to post it on YouTube (or a similar site), export it to a more compressed format (ex., some MPEG-4 flavor) or the upload will take forever (and YouTube will recompress it anyway). If your video editing software doesn’t give you many export options, export to an uncompressed file (which will be huge) and then use a separate converter (there are lots of free ones, such as HandBrake or AnyVideo).

You can also just convert the original (unedited) video to MP4 (or some similar format), upload it to YouTube, and then use YouTube’s built-in editor. It won’t let you do as much as a stand-alone application, but if you just want to trim the video and make simple cuts, it’s probably faster, and you can make adjustments without having to re-upload.