HOW TO: Record Your Best Flight Sim Moments

As the saying goes, "If your friends don't see it, it didn't happen". You probably don't want to miss out on an opportunity to show your friends the awesome landing you made in the 747 despite the massive crosswind. The best way to do is it to record your landing using a screen capture tool, and then upload it to YouTube.

Here's the how-to:

1. Download FRAPS. It's a screen capture tool made for games. You can download the demo but it limits you to a 30 second recording plus a watermark is stamped onto the video. I highly recommend you grab the full version. I've also tried alternative freeware products, but FRAPS is the only tool I've been happy with. Trust me, save yourself the trouble and just buy FRAPS ;-) Note I am in no way affliated to the company! If you are not willing to spend the money, then you can Google "FRAPS alternatives".

2. When you install and run FRAPS click on the Movies tab. You will see that the hotkey is set to F9. This is no good because F9 changes the view in Flight Simulator X. I just changed it to 9.

3. Run Flight Simulator X and start a flight. Press 9 to start recording and press it again to stop it. You can start and stop recording at any time. The files will be saved to C:\Fraps

4. You will notice that even a few minutes of recording will give you a very large file size. You're not going to be able to upload that to YouTube! But fear not. See the next step.

5. Download Any Video Converter Free Edition. Yeah it's free. Install it and run it. This is what you will use to compress your file.

6. In Any Video Converter, Click the button "Add Video" and find the video that FRAPS created (by default it will be in C:\Fraps).

7. On the top right of the window there is a dropdown menu. Click on it and select "Customized AVI movie". You can also experiment with the other file types if you want.

8. Now click "Convert". Wait till it finishes.

9. In the left pane click on "Common Used Video Formats". You should see your converted file there. Right click on it and click "Open File Location". And there's your file! It should be much smaller now and ready to upload to YouTube!