I'd like to record a video file of the game I'm developing at 60fps (which the game runs at fine), however when I activate the software I'm using (Fraps), the framerate drops to 20 or less, and it plays back just as chunky as it records. Does anyone know software that will record at any framerate and yet create a file that plays back at 60fps?

Fraps is pretty fast. If you want to record 60 fps (why, may I ask, playing a video is 25 fps as a standard) I guess you'll need a super-fast computer system. You can also try lowering the resolution, or changing the colour bit rate to 16.

Don't know if this helps, but in my experience, Fraps has never been that fast for me. I do have a decent mid-range spec PC, so don't worry about that. Dependent on the standard framerate of the game you are trying to record, Fraps - as you know - has several different framerates to record at. It all depends on several factors, including:

Action on-screen
Monitor Refresh Rate
Framerate setting for Fraps
Standard Framerate for Game in question
Sound Recording (are you?)
Resolution and Colour Depth ( Thank you Marmin :) )

Check these out, then decide what you want to do next. Change the settings dependent on what you're trying to do.

If possible, create a custom format that saves the positions of all the game entities at each frame, so you can view replays of the game within your engine. After that, it's easy to show the replay in slow motion, and either record it then, or save every frame as a bitmap or something, which can later be put into a movie. Depending on your resolution, 60 FPS is probably a very large amount of data to process in real-time.
If you just want to change the framerate and such, try VirtualDub, it's a free video tool.

use 2 HDDs. Save your video stuff to another HD. My friend used an external HD for a while to record everything he did in an MMO he was playing. Didn't really seem to affect his FPS. But he wasn't recording at 60. That's kind of pointless.

Try kkapture. It's a tool designed to solve precisely this problem, though I don't know how reliable it is.

Thanks for all the help guys! I tried KKapture and it looks like just what I want, but it only works in fullscreen and I havent added that to my game yet, might try that when I do.

I tried the external HD suggestion and that works pretty good, it stays mostly at 60fps and drops only to 50fps now and then, which is acceptable.

An in-game demo system would be cool but a lot of work! I'd have to make everything deterministic too. Still, might be worth doing eventually.

I could drop the frame rate but I'd prefer not too, since I'm demoing a physics system with a lot of movement and it's important to display the smoothness.

And Dex, how do you have a user rating of 59? Thats amazingly low, especially considering you were somewhat helpful :)

Another solution is to just take a bunch of in-game screenshots at the desired rate.

Simply run your simulation with a fixed timestep of 60 FPS, and write each frame to disk as a raw image. The actual game on screen as you do it will be only a few frames per second, and you will accumulate tons of data, especially if you aren't using some sort of image encoding. After combining the images into a movie format, it will be nice and smooth.

I know what u mean about fraps
demo 60fps, enable video record, bam demo 10fps :)

Ive found best to have as much free disk space available + run defragment before u record a demo