hints for a newbie filmmaker

Hello
i want to start amateur movie shooting in sl, im already trying but i noticed a big problem: i cant capture a good frame/second amount! my pc is not enough powerful!!
I read that many people uses 2 PC for capturing, how does that works?
It requires a specified program to be done?
I can use my pc and a good laptop, i connected them in Lan Connection (after a long long day of trials!) now i dont know what to do exactly!

Help me please

My suggestion is this...buy a graphic converter. A box that allows you to plug in an RGB monitor cable out of your computer...and will convert that signal into the output stream of your choice (IEEE 1394, USB, RCA...etc.). Then capture that signal the best way you see fit.

When I first began making machinima on a desktop...I used that method to input a signal directly into a mini-dv camera. Then captured that footage via firewire, and edited it on my desktop.

That might seem like a rather inelegant suggestion...but ANY other program running alongside SL is going to seriously cause some degradation issues with your PC, performancewise (unless you're running a cutting-edge, RAM-heavy deck).

I always prefer keeping my source and my capture units separate....the video is always cleaner, and the framerate always seems to be much higher, as a result. Of course...concurrency is always gonna be a bugaboo on some issues, too.

Okay..pardon my ramble, Nefertiti *laughs*, it seems that I forgot to answer your question.

Take one of your computers and plug it in to SL. Use the other machine to capture the RGB monitor stream from the first computer, using a program like FRAPS.

The SL machine is your "camera" the other machine is your capturing tool.

I use a series of Macs logged in to SL. Several of them are "actors" while two of them are "cameras". I feed the monitor signal from the last two into a small video switcher...and capture that via firewire directly into Final Cut Pro on my editing Mac.

If you can't get a good framerate lower your graphics settings. Particularly the draw distance and maybe play with the shader, rendering, lighting, terrain and detail settings. In some sims you may always get a poor frame rate so it's best to avoid filming there. If you don't have a choice - you're filming for a client - at least warn them. In my experience most don't care if the action looks jerky. That's sl. The exception is usually travelling shots (dollies, cranes, crabs, etc) which can look truly atrocious with a slow frame rate, so you may best served by keeping with static shots in those cases.

thanks for suggestions guys, what im really not understanding is this point:
I have SL running on PC 1
I have Fraps running on PC 2

How can i record what is happening on PC 1?

no, Fraps and SL have to run on the same machine. Fraps is capuring the data from the SL client.