Achieving Best Possible YouTube Quality from 1080p60 Recording

[hleV]

For years I've been struggling to record 1080p60 and encode in a way that it'd look good on YouTube.

The game is DayZ - lots of high detail foliage/trees. I know upscaling is a must these days to get more bitrate, I use Adobe Premiere Pro to encode (along with upscaling to 1440p), but the results are still not satisfactory. I even made a test recording 1440p60 raw and it still didn't look as crisp as videos of more popular DayZ content creators.

• Example 1080p upscaled to 1440p - even watching at 1440p setting, it's a blurry/blocky mess.
• Example raw 1440p - still a blurry mess.

I'm recording using my GTX 970's NVENC encoder, and the raw footage comes out good, I can't really tell a difference between in-game and the video.

This is what I have on OBS currently. I've tried other settings, recording at CBR 60/90/120mbps/etc., putting CQ Level at 15, enabling Look-ahead and Psycho Visual Tuning, setting Max B-frames to 4, but these settings seem to affect the performance but not the quality of raw or YouTube video.

The video comes out at a variable bitrate, mostly between 20mbps and 200mbps.
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I've tried encoding at high bitrates (e.g. target 100/max 200mbps, or just constant 60/90/100/130mbps) and I couldn't tell which one was worse on YouTube. It just screws my videos up in an identical way.

Maybe I lack the better quality-per-bitrate that newer gen NVIDIA GPUs' NVENC has, considering right now at CQ Level 20 the bitrate jumps to 200mbps quite often?

Do any of you record at 1080p60 and get good quality videos on YouTube? I'd love some examples and recording/encoding settings to try.

 

[koala]

Youtube recodes every uploaded video, so you're not fighting your local encoder but the Youtube encoder you cannot control. Even if you send a lossless source, Youtube will create a blurry mess out of it, if it has too much detail.
You need to reduce detail in your game graphics, so the Youtube encoder is able to keep the detail you left, within the bitrate limit the Youtube encoder is set to. The foliage is what kills your video quality.

If I take your Youtube video as reference, Youtube created these resolutions with these bandwidth (excerpt):

[info] Available formats for YNj1SGfvCok:
format code  extension  resolution note
247          webm       1280x720   720p 1761k , webm_dash container, vp9@1761k, 30fps, video only, 55.27MiB
136          mp4        1280x720   720p 2017k , mp4_dash container, avc1.64001f@2017k, 30fps, video only, 63.31MiB
302          webm       1280x720   720p60 2850k , webm_dash container, vp9@2850k, 60fps, video only, 89.44MiB
298          mp4        1280x720   720p60 3111k , mp4_dash container, avc1.640020@3111k, 60fps, video only, 97.64MiB
303          webm       1920x1080  1080p60 4803k , webm_dash container, vp9@4803k, 60fps, video only, 150.72MiB
299          mp4        1920x1080  1080p60 5543k , mp4_dash container, avc1.64002a@5543k, 60fps, video only, 173.95MiB
308          webm       2560x1440  1440p60 12517k , webm_dash container, vp9@12517k, 60fps, video only, 392.80MiB

You see the bandwidth after the resolution. For 1080p60 for example, you get 5543kbit/s in a mp4 container. Create your local video in a way that if it is recompressed to a video with bitrate 5543 it is still acceptable. That's not much for high-detail high-motion video like yours.
For 2560x1440, you get a quite good bitrate of 12.5MBit/s, so the quality for this resolution should be somewhat better if you upload this resolution natively and not upscaled, but the downscaled 1080p version will not improve.