133GB for a 2 hour clip. How to make file size smaller while retaining indistinguishable quality?

[Allusive]

I recorded a clip of Stardew Valley for 2 hours, on the lossless video preset at 1080p 60fps, at Max Quality.
The file size was 133GB, and no I'm not kidding.
How can I make the file size much smaller while still keeping the quality almost indistinguishable?

 

[koala]

Reduce the detail of the game, reduce fps (half the fps results in half the file size), reduce resolution (half the resolution results in a quarter of the file size). A different encoder might result in different file size.

If you don't want to reduce these parameters: no, a certain amount of quality needs a certain amount of file space. Your file size is somewhat large for 1080, even slightly huge, but if your game is high motion and highly detailed, this might be required. As far as I remember, using x264 with low CPU preset creates extremely large file sizes with questionable quality.

You can of course always switch to advanced output mode and use a quality based rate control, then experiment with the quality parameter. Simple mode uses a fixed set of parameters here. Quality based are rate rate controls where you don't set a bitrate. If you're using simple mode and look in the logfile and search for a recording session, you will see which parameters were actually used, so you can replicate these in advanced mode.

 

[Allusive]

Reduce the detail of the game, reduce fps (half the fps results in half the file size), reduce resolution (half the resolution results in a quarter of the file size). A different encoder might result in different file size.

If you don't want to reduce these parameters: no, a certain amount of quality needs a certain amount of file space. Your file size is somewhat large for 1080, even slightly huge, but if your game is high motion and highly detailed, this might be required. As far as I remember, using x264 with low CPU preset creates extremely large file sizes with questionable quality.

You can of course always switch to advanced output mode and use a quality based rate control, then experiment with the quality parameter. Simple mode uses a fixed set of parameters here. Quality based are rate rate controls where you don't set a bitrate. If you're using simple mode and look in the logfile and search for a recording session, you will see which parameters were actually used, so you can replicate these in advanced mode.

Thank you for the reply.
These are my settings for recording.
I am playing the game on a 1440p monitor but recording at 1080, could that scaling increase the size?
The game is locked at 60fps I think,
Its not a performance issue because I'm running a RTX 3060 with a i5-12600.

 

[R1CH]

For 2 hours that's around 150mbps which is very reasonable for lossless quality. Many lossless codecs operate at far higher bitrates. You can probably get away without lossless - have you tried the indistinguishable preset in simple mode?

 

[Allusive]

For 2 hours that's around 150mbps which is very reasonable for lossless quality. Many lossless codecs operate at far higher bitrates. You can probably get away without lossless - have you tried the indistinguishable preset in simple mode?

I need to use advanced mode for multiple separate audio tracks.

 

[koala]

Change from "lossless" rate control to CQP, then in the CQ value (that option will appear once you change to that rate control), set 18. That's about the "indistinguishable" quality available in simple output mode. Experiment with the CQ value for quality versus file size. Higher CQ means lower quality and smaller file size. Changing the CQ value by 3 means about half/double the file size.

18 usually means no visible compression artefacts, starting with 20 you might begin to see artefacts, lower than 15 only increase file size but will not visually improve any more.

 

[sandrix]

This is probably useful to you in order to predict the file size.

Video Bitrate Calculator

A calculator that helps to determine the optimal bitrate for encoding movie files.

www.dr-lex.be

 

[koala]

With quality based rate controls, you cannot predict the file size because of the variable and unpredictable bitrate. Instead, it depends on the amount of detail and movement in the original footage.