In total, a 55 minute recording ended up being 2 minutes long, and even then, of those 2 minutes, 2 frames were recorded. Welp, here goes an hour of my life i will never get back. Everything looked fine for OBS itself while recording, the playback was a bit choppy at around 20fps but i could tell what was going on, and i mean, it should turn out better on the video right? And then it was only when i went to watch it back i realized that something messed up. Looking at the stats, i saw that 99.9% of frames were lost due to encoding lag. I have absolutely no idea what went wrong, and of all things before recording i had prioritized the fps over the resolution, i mean, i set the resolution to 856x480, very low quality, thinking that was well enough to record an hour of video. I'm hoping that someone can tell me what setting to change so i can at the very least, avoid this in the future. I have left the log in case if that is needed to help tell what went wrong. I thank you in advance.
Question / Help Almost an hour of recording completely ruined.
- Thread starter DevinWolf
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- ruined recording
carlmmii
Active Member
To put it bluntly, you have an ancient laptop. There may be ways to eek out just enough performance to get the job done, but don't set your expectations too high at all.
You're using CRF 16 for the recording -- there is a good chance that if you're trying to record to a hard drive, that it actually won't be able to keep up with the data required to be written, resulting in the encoding lag to jump up. Set this to CBR for the meantime just for testing and set it to 3000 kbps. If you end up getting actual framerate, then you can try raising this or changing the quality mode back to CRF afterward.
The next step is your encoder. Unfortunately, you don't have the benefit of any type of hardware encoding, so x264 is your only option. But, you can go to superfast or ultrafast presets to take even more load off your CPU. You will be sacrificing quality for performance, but performance is what you need right now.
The last bit is the rendering lag. This is tricky, as we don't really know what you're trying to record. OBS uses the GPU to perform scene compositing, and normally this is a rather minimal task for modern GPUs, but for yours it probably will require a considerable amount of resources, even just from a VRAM perspective. Since you're running windows 10, ensure that game mode is turned On, and run OBS in administrator mode -- this should force OBS to be on the priority list for GPU utilization.
Also on the topic of priority, make sure OBS's process priority is set to Above Normal or High in the advanced settings.
You're using CRF 16 for the recording -- there is a good chance that if you're trying to record to a hard drive, that it actually won't be able to keep up with the data required to be written, resulting in the encoding lag to jump up. Set this to CBR for the meantime just for testing and set it to 3000 kbps. If you end up getting actual framerate, then you can try raising this or changing the quality mode back to CRF afterward.
The next step is your encoder. Unfortunately, you don't have the benefit of any type of hardware encoding, so x264 is your only option. But, you can go to superfast or ultrafast presets to take even more load off your CPU. You will be sacrificing quality for performance, but performance is what you need right now.
The last bit is the rendering lag. This is tricky, as we don't really know what you're trying to record. OBS uses the GPU to perform scene compositing, and normally this is a rather minimal task for modern GPUs, but for yours it probably will require a considerable amount of resources, even just from a VRAM perspective. Since you're running windows 10, ensure that game mode is turned On, and run OBS in administrator mode -- this should force OBS to be on the priority list for GPU utilization.
Also on the topic of priority, make sure OBS's process priority is set to Above Normal or High in the advanced settings.
FerretBomb
Active Member
Just seconding, that is an ancient laptop and is well below minimum specs. x264 Ultrafast might be able to compensate and allow it to work, but real-time video encoding is extremely demanding. You really need something a bit more powerful.
That worked like a charm! I'm now getting around 40-50fps instead of the literal .00001fps i had been getting previously. Since i started recording videos on this dinosaur, i had been trying to prioritize framerate, so i wasn't too worried about the quality dip, and the application I'm using isn't the highest resolution either, being lower than standard definition. And yeah, the current pc I'm on is way to old for it's own good. I'm planning on investing in one that can actually run resource intensive programs let alone OBS, at it's full capabilities. Right now I'm just trying to squeeze the rest of the life out of this until then. Thank you so much, as most of the settings you had mentioned i had mostly just glazed over.
FerretBomb
Active Member
Definitely try switching back to CQP or CRF target recording then, Ultrafast is extremely poor quality and will need a lot more bitrate to maintain visual quality (and CQP/CRF will give it as much as it needs dynamically). Once the actual recording is done, you can use something like Handbrake to re-encode it using a better-quality compression method in non-realtime to bring file sizes down.
koala
Active Member
I don't understand why you try to record with 60 fps. Double the fps means double the data to process, thus double the resource demand.Try to do 30, better 15 fps. If OBS skips every other frame due to overload anyway, it's only consequent to reduce the frame rate in the first place.