alright, so i looked at the old threads, but with all them being at least 3 years old, it cant really answer my question. I've recorded about 8-13 videos in live for speed, both on xfire and fraps. i have gotten the full 30 on xfire since that is its max, and record with 50 fps on fraps. all of a sudden, i tried recording tonight, i was getting 11 fps. it doesnt make a whole lot of sense to me because i can run this completely maxed, and have proven in while recording it as well. the only thing that i know has changed since then, is i updated my drivers on my gfx card. which could be the reason possibly. my specs are

Intel core i7 960 3.2ghz
Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600mhz 6 gb
Nvidia GTX 470 1.2 gb
WD 1 tb 7200rpm

Quote from tyler88 :

the only thing that i know has changed since then, is i updated my drivers on my gfx card. which could be the reason possibly.

we have a winner here, I think

Also remember to defrag your hard disk and to set sky colour to 16 bits

ah. typical. i might roll them back just for the hell of it. thanks for the help.

EDIT: rolled back the drivers, didn't fix it, trying to find out what i changed..

Are you maybe recording on open layouts?

i don't really know what you're referring to when you say "open layouts" i think i do, but at the same time, no. it's not that big of a deal, but its strange because i dont really know whats causing it. i tried switching the sky color to 16 bit and my fps went up to 13. so that didn't fix it. it's just kinda mind boggling

Open Layouts is when you can drive on all the circuit off Fern Bay(For Example) at the same time. They are used a lot in Cruise Servers.

could be your ingame AA setting. I have to turn mine down when recording.