My system:
A P-4 / 3.2GHz w/1GB memory.
FRAPS:
Yes, I used FRAPS. You'll notice it was nothing but water and one group of clouds (Don't know how that happened) ???. Without FRAPS capturing, I'd get 40-50fps. With it capturing, I was lucky to get 20

, which was my target fps. Somewhere in the docs it said to use Half-Size capture for 7200rpm drives and Full-Size capture for 10,000rpm drives.
I set up FS2004 to display 800x600x32 and had FRAPS capturing a Half-Size. Capturing at full-size 1024x768x16 I could not get above 10fps. After capturing I used Video Edit Magic 3 to render to 640x480. I don't think I lost too much quality enlarging.
Video Edit Magic:
Well, I had to use something... I don't really like it much. Four of the "Color Effects" crash the software and it has a hard time saving Video Track 2

. After about 10-15min of editing, I'd have to restart it due to memory problems. But it works. I do like the ability to crop and trim video and/or audio segments. By stretching or shrinking a segment, you can make things go slower or faster. It allows you to "tag" spots in the timeline. Load up your background music, let it play and instead of tapping the table or desk, just tap the mouse to mark key points.
ULead Video Studio 7:
Um, what can I say... It sucks :-/. It can't manage memory to save my project. 5 minutes of editing, memory gets full and PPPTTTHHHH!!!! Gone, history, BYE BYE!
I have a separtate partition on one of my drives just for the swap file. Using this program caused drive full errors if you can believe it. So I moved my swap file to my 120GB and maxed it out at 4.5GB
I used to complain about how much memory I had going to waste. Well... I wasn't editing videos either... now I want MORE!!!
Anything else you want to know?