You can always buy FRAPS, literaly the best PC game recorder, but your computer needs damn good RAM to run at a high Frames Per Second rate. Another option is Replay Video capture, just a bit less quality but decent. If your a cheapstake, you can get the demo that reduces recording time to 2 minutes. Take your pick, squire.

MSI Afterburner is free and is as good as everything else on the market

There's Bandicam too. It's pretty good.

yeah he is right the main requirements for this is u have a updated DirectX version and a big monitor

Bandicam > Fraps.

My opinion and personally proved in my case to be way better then the poorly coded fraps.

Well I choose Bandicam and there's proof that's why it's awesome recording software!
Click here to read the proof!

Fraps is the best one to use.

If you're like me and have no money to buy FRAPS or hate watermarks, just use Camstudio. Sorry, but it's your best option.

Okay, from my experience:

FRAPS and Dxtory are your Direct 3D capture softwares. Ifone doesn't work well for a certain game, try the other. I personally love FRAPS, especially for emulators, but Dxtory has on the fly compression and is sometimes a bit faster.

Bandicam is an excellent Screen Capture. It basically captures video of your computer screen, for flash games, tutorials, etc.

And you webcam can be captured in Windows Movie Maker. But if you have the software for your webcam handy, use that instead (WMM is CPU intensive). EDIT: There is also a method of using Xfire to produce a facecam that is overlaid onto your D3D game. That's handy so you don't need to sync the separate videos and it'll cut down on rendering times.

Also, having good RAM is important for any computer, but if you want a high FPS (29.97 fps is fine really) on your recordings you NEED a hard drive with high write speeds. A Solid state drive is preferred. Think about it: You're producing a huge video file in seconds, a fast Hard Drive is important. There are ways around this using scripting to compress your videos straight from the pipeline, but those methods are hardcore CPU intensive and will hog from your game. Writing to the HDD while playing a game isn't oo noticeable, just the loading times increase a bit.