# Nvenc CQP Recording settings for Youtube 1080p



## Nass86 (Mar 31, 2021)

Hello guys,

I had a little laugh at myself today. I test-cranked the settings way up on CQP 18 for a 1080p recording at 60fps on my Nvenc encoder.

It looked quite good but not worth the (wait for it) 64gb I racked up in 2 hours.

Furthermore, I uploaded it to youtube, realised I wanted to edit some bits out, and figured it would be faster to download the compressed version and upload that again after I'm finished editing. The upload took about 24 hours!

Guess how big their version of my file was? (again, wait for it..) a mere 1.6gb. One point six!!

I had heard an experienced Youtuber say today there's no point in going below 22 CQP if the file will only end up on youtube as he had tested lower numbers down to 15 and the visual quality stayed the same once he went under 22 and youtube did it's own compression on all tested videos.

So it begs the question - if I'm recording on Nvenc with CQP, what should the setting really be to try and look as good as possible and almost match the quality youtube shapes my recording into anyway? Or is CQP 22 the jackpot?

I was recording at CQP 18, Max Performance mode (as "Max Quality" doesn't make a difference in CQP output quality but also risks encoding lag / uses more GPU).

So I'm happy staying at 22, but is there something else I'm able to do to basically give youtube what it'll spit out anyway?


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## koala (Mar 31, 2021)

The recording quality you should choose depends on the kind of postprocessing you intend to do. If you just want to upload directly what you recorded, you can record with the same quality Youtube recodes every upload with. Or a bit better quality to make sure.
If you intend to postprocess your recordings, and that postprocessing involves recoding (recompressing) your video locally, you should choose a higher recording quality, because recoding means quality loss. The quality after recoding should be not lower than the quality Youtube offers for their videos.

tl;dr
Ok, you simply want a value. CQP 22 seems a valid value. If someone verified lower values get you no better quality after you uploaded the video to Youtube, go with 22.

For myself, I'm doing a recoding step with postprocessing. I record with CQP 18 and a resolution of 2560x1440 (1440p), which yields a file size of 44 Gig for 1:40 hours of gameplay (4.4 Gig for 10 minutes). I cut and postprocess this video and export it with the x264 encoder with CRF=22. This is not exactly CQP=22, but roughly similar.

This yields a file size of 2 Gig for 10 minutes of gameplay. According to Youtube guideline, this is about the recommended 20000 kb/s bitrate with 1440p (1080p, the recommended bitrate is lower of course). This recoded video is what I upload. It's about half the raw file size.
For 1080p, Youtube recommends lower values of course. See https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171#zippy=,bitrate


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## Nass86 (Mar 31, 2021)

That's brilliant thank you very much.

Only just found out that the video youtube let me download was 720p not 1080 (my own video) - but your answer still helps me with this as I was clearly encoding more than I'd either get from the camera (iPhone) or get from youtube once its on there.

Thanks again :)


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## omidt (Sep 11, 2022)

koala said:


> The recording quality you should choose depends on the kind of postprocessing you intend to do. If you just want to upload directly what you recorded, you can record with the same quality Youtube recodes every upload with. Or a bit better quality to make sure.
> If you intend to postprocess your recordings, and that postprocessing involves recoding (recompressing) your video locally, you should choose a higher recording quality, because recoding means quality loss. The quality after recoding should be not lower than the quality Youtube offers for their videos.
> 
> tl;dr
> ...


Hello How can i compress to x264 with CRF=22 on handBrake ?


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## omidt (Oct 24, 2022)

Hello How can i compress to x264 with CRF=22 on handBrake ?


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