DxTory worked great! no compression artifacts or anything that I could notice. thanks!
The reason fraps does what it does is because of the Codec and the way it's played back through most players. It actually has nothing to do with how it's captured 
With fraps footage if you convert it to Quicktime H.264 .mov instead of .Avi footage it shows no darkening 
Dxtory is definitely the way to go though imo 