Alright I now have the full version of FRAPS, which at first I thought was rather awesome. However now I've come to realize that recording in full size (1920x1080) gives me about five 4GB files for a roughly 10 minute video. Talk about compression right?

I was wondering how all of you guys who do "Let's Play"'s and other long sessions of game footage manage to maintain full quality but still get a 10 minute video? Also, how on earth do you manage to upload a 4GB video to Youtube and not blow your brains out. When I tried it estimated that I had 857 minutes left to upload it. There's no way I'm waiting over 14 hours to upload a 2 minute video.

So how would I take a video and maintain high quality but keep the file size small and be able to film longer than 2mins on one file?

I'm kind of interesting in finding out this too. Upload speeds here in my country aren't that good, so learning how to effectively do this would be good to know.

I use Windows movie maker to compress or edit parts out or together. Fraps generally makes .avi files that youtube will not accept, using WMM will turn the file into a .wmv file, which youtube does accept happily.

I upload Fraps .avi files no problem, but yes they're huge.