Question / Help Best settings for recording?

K

keybounce

Member
What are the best setting for recording?

From what I've been able to understand, both Nv12 and I420 do a 2x2 chroma sub-sample (4 Y, 1 U, and 1 V) -- making every group of 4 pixels about the same color. I'd like to avoid that.

My editing software doesn't like I444 (NB: So far, only VLC seems to like it; not quicktime, not Camtasia, etc). I cannot find any documentation on what RGB does.

What are good x264 options to include, and what's the recommended Preset? Right now, I'm using "medium", because what I understand of the faster ones is that they add flags to reduce recording quality.

(I love that Camtasia can handle multiple audio track recordings; being able to separately adjust the game, my mic, Teamspeak and Skype during editing will really be nice.)
 
K

keybounce

Member
Because editing.

I don't mind it eventually being turned into 420. But I want to have a good quality original, that doesn't take up too much space so I can keep the original around.

QuickTime player recorded at a unbelievably large size. I have not tried it since getting a retina screen.
Camtasia's recording is still pretty big, and with a retina screen it was as big as QTP's non-retina recording.
SnagIt loses too much quality and won't record above 15 fps.
Iris has a nice balance, but can't handle more than 2 audio channels.
OBS can do three or 4 audio channels (big plus), but the default recording is horrible.

As a quick example: OBS is the only one that makes text look fuzzy and unsharp; all of the others record text sharp and clear. Someone more knowlegable about this than me explained it was the sub-sampling causing the text edges to "smudge" into the adjacent color.

Now, that page you linked to is for an older version of OBS. But: I am using CRF (using 14), and I have enough CPU available to use medium (the target game is Minecraft, which has trouble using more than 3 threads at a time, and I have 4+4 cores). Other than that, translating that link into modern OBS, it seems to be saying ultrafast, CRF 15-20.
 
Black Ops

Black Ops

Member
Correct me if i'm wrong but you are wanting to record at 4:4:4 where the video is high quality doesn't take up too much space?
 
K

keybounce

Member
I can adjust the quality down, if needed, to reduce file size.

Quicktime player seems to be motion jpeg -- really good quality, really big file sizes. I could, and did, compress things with iMovie without seeing any difference in quality, and a big reduction in file size. (NB: there was a color shift; generally, I did the compression after producing an episode. iMovie was happy to work with projects when the source video had been changed to a different quality level). The biggest issue with iMovie was that several actions caused the video to be "optimized" -- meaning, converted into Apple intermediate Codec, which was about as big as the quicktime player recording.

I have seen recordings go anywhere from 1g per hour, to 10g per hour. 1g per hour is fine; 10 is not. Typically, I might record 3-5 hours, and then pick out highlights.

Now, Camtasia's "you can't alter the recording used in a project" means that I can't "reduce the size" afterwards. And, I have switched to record lots of segments, rather than one continuous recording -- and a lot of those segments just get tossed.

I know that, supposedly, color is less important than luma to our eyes; but given the large color shift I constantly see in the blue/purple and red/orange areas, plus the "red bleed" (which, according to Wiki, is caused by sub-sampling generating an out-of-gamut color) means that I want to get accurate colors during editing. Playing with mods that add colorful flowers showed me just how "off" colors could be in recording (sadly, Camtasia was just horrible/unacceptable here -- like three good reasons to not use it as a recorder).
 
K

keybounce

Member
AAGGGGHHH..

How do I get OBS to record an 854x480 minecraft window at 854x480, without rescaling it to 852x480?

This might be why text doesn't look as sharp ...

Also: OMG, I just took a look at the filesize difference. OBS is recording much, much smaller? As in, down from about 2500 kbps to about 300 kbps, as seen by looking at the playback rate in VLC (plus a one minute test recording, even at CRF 10/medium, was only 7.7 MB.)

Oh -- QTP is no longer even a candidate. It's now recording retina resolution, and actually lost the title bars in the last OS security patch (so no more close window button, etc). (Last time I used it for recording was 10.7.5)
 
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