Question / Help Best settings for my CPU? Local Recording.

[Sir Rudi]

Hi there, I used to record Daylight gameplay, with the following settings:

Encoder: x264
Quality Balance: 10
Max bitrate: 10000
Audio Codec: AAC - Bitrate: 320

1080p 30 FPS

Use multi-threaded Optimizations - Checked
x264 CPU Preset veryfast
Encoding Profile: high
Use CFR - Checked

Also using a facecam webcam of 640x480 (old Microsoft LifeCam VX-1000). Was able to record the game without any issues. I'm also using a dual monitor which makes 1920x1080 + 1280x1024, where I keep OBS open to check on it while recording, don't know if that affects my performance but probably does, using two display monitors.

Now I was recording Fears of Layer, with the same settings as the above and was lagging on a few parts of the game, as in the beginning, in the kitchen area and so on.

Tried to change the settings by searching the best local settings found this https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/how-to-make-high-quality-local-recordings.16/

Tried that, but didn't change much, so my question is what would be the best settings for me to use with my current computer specs?

Leaving here my specs:

Motherboard - MSI H97 Gaming 3
Power supply - Corsair Modular CX 850W M 80+ Bronze
Processor - Intel Core i5 4460 (3.2GHz) Socket 1150
Cooler - CPU Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
RAM - G.Skill Kit 8GB DDR3 1600MHz RipjawsX CL9
GPU - MSI R9 380 Gaming 4GB GD5

Also the footage is being saved on a separate hard drive, western digital 500gb, an old one, could this be a issue too? I mean, I mainly see the GPU and CPU at 100% usage, but I will go check now how's the disk usage as I'm recording.

Also was using quite an high Max bitrate 10k ? Another question is, if I save my video footage editing on Premiere as 8/6mbps target bitrate, it's useless to be recording the previous footage at 10k right? If i'm just going to "convert" it anyway.

Some of the my questions might seem stupid, sorry about that, but I don't know much about this, that's why I'm asking and trying to know what would be the best settings to use for local recording gameplays.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Harold]

Use the local recording settings guide and change your x264 preset to ultrafast.

Another question is, if I save my video footage editing on Premiere as 8/6mbps target bitrate, it's useless to be recording the previous footage at 10k right?

Wrong. Every time you encode with less bitrate than is capable of holding your video, you lose quality. The ONLY time you should be encoding with less bitrate than would normally handle the content is the absolute last encoding in your process.

Also, premiere's encoder (mainconcept h264) has a worse quality per bitrate vs x264. Ideally you'd want to use an x264 encoder as the encoder for your last encode before uploading.

 

[Sir Rudi]

Every time you encode with less bitrate than is capable of holding your video, you lose quality.

Yes I know that, the reason I encode it with less bitrate on Premiere is because of the file size, due to the fact that my internet is very slow for uploading, therefore the less size I have to upload the better, but I also try to maintain the better quality I can, based on this document https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171, youtube recommends to upload at 8mbps 1080p, before actually seeing that I used to render my videos on Premiere at 10mbps, now I do it around 6-8mbps target bitrate, and the quality doesn't end up bad at 8mbps.

So if I do that, I could just record with the 8k max bitrate on OBS, and render it at 8k on Premiere. Would just lose some quality as you said about the premiere's encoder h264 having worse quality than x264.

But I'm going with the local recording settings guide, and change the preset as you said, seem's to workout nicely, I can't notice if I'm losing quality by doing that yet though. Also using cfr=22 atm, and trying different options like resolution downscale 720p with Lanczos as well, and seeing what I can get best off, without losing much quality.

The game I'm testing this out right now is Watch dogs, everything maxed out except MSAA, which is x4, and Motion Blur off.

One last question, by using the preset ultrafast means my CPU is bad to record? At least using max settings on the games or without using resolution downscale/faster presets.

Thanks.

 

[Harold]

CRF not CFR is the setting, and you should use crf of 15-20 instead of 22.

Ultrafast preset allows the encoder to use less cpu, and using crf based bitrate selection allows the encoder to throw bitrate at the file to offset what would otherwise be quality loss.

Record using crf of 18 in OBS using the local recording settings and ultrafast preset, output from premiere in a lossless format, then transcode in handbrake using the slowest x264 preset you can tolerate at the desired bitrate or quality value.

 

[Sir Rudi]

Yea CFR my bad. In premiere lossless format would be "match sequence settings" option? Recording in Ultrafast makes the files quite large, 10 minutes 2gb, I did the match sequence settings on Premiere and it kept the 2gb, so I presume it's lossless, then went to the handbrake and used the very slow preset, as I don't know whats "placebo" any ideas on that? H.264 Profile as High. and the Avg Bitrate 8000kbps with 2-pass encoding.

File was 500mbytes with good quality! Thanks a lot for the help Harold.

 

[Harold]

placebo is the slowest preset in the list. Getting that kind of reduction in filesize is normal.

Try with crf of 15 in handbrake with the same preset as well. Sometimes you can squeeze more reduced filesize than with an average bitrate based encode.