looking for some help with this emulator?

okay, no idea if you guys could help or if this is the right site to be posting on, but here goes. okay, so i recently decided to start doing game walkthrough videos aka let's plays. i don't have a dazzle or any other kind of capture card so i looked towards screen recorders and emulators. problem is, whenever i get done recording a video and go to edit it, the video as itself is messed up. the picture is gray and very pixelated, you can't see hardly anything. the audio skips in and out. i use audacity to record the stereo mix from windows vista so i can mute the speakers and still record the game audio, and the screen recorder for the gameplay and my microphone. i use windows media encoder as the screen recorder. i'm playing N64 emulators using project 64. usually i take the audacity game audio file and the screen recorder file and try to sync them up in windows movie maker, and that's when i notice the gray screen, etc. my PC specs are:

CPU: AMD Phenom X4 9850 2.5GHz

RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2

GPU: Integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200


if anyone could tell me what's happening and why the recording always turns out like this it would really help.

Does it stutter/lag in playback??

thanks for the reply, but i fixed it. it turns out that i was using the default video codec that comes built in to windows. i found this out when i tried a new program and it alerted me that the default windows codec provided poor recording quality. i now use the Xvid video codec and all is well. although now i am experiencing lag. but that would just be my computer being old, wouldn't it?

Ah glad to hear you fixed it! But yes it's probably your computer that is lagging.

hmm, but it would seem only the videos lag.i have no lag at all during gameplay.

Hmm I think it's more of the hard drive then, I use to record bf3 gameplay and the game would be smooth but the playback was laggy, I then read some where about the hard drive wrote speeds and etc. I think that might be the thing in your situation, where as the write speed is kind of slow which would cause laggy playbacks.

ah, i see. well this SATA drive i'm using is back from when SATA first came out. i actually meant to buy an IDE drive. so the RPM is probably pretty low

That probably why your playbacks are laggy, my old setup had an old data hard drive, sometimes playback is smooth sometime it's super laggy.

also depends on frame rate that you are capturing at and if the file is compressed or not etc... If you could provide some information on that it would be appreciated.