Question / Help Blurry Camera / Stream

[ikoka1]

Hi everyone, I'm desperate at this point as I've tried everything, whenever there is high motion my camera goes beyond blurry, turns into pixels.
In VOD I'm actually using my phone's camera since I wanted to make sure to figure out what the problem is.
Iphone6S through Epoxcam or something like that, I mean exact same thing is happening to my C270, all materials and information is provided below, I woudn't mind doing a test with c270 as well for showcase, but issue is exactly the same, any form of high motion or a lot of encoding results in camera going completely blurry.
I am running a:
i7-7700K @4.5Ghz
2x8GB DDR4 @3333Mhz
1060 6GB Dual OC @2063Mhz
Z-270K
Logfile: https://obsproject.com/logs/AN7ojPEXfFnJTixB
VOD where camera is blurrying: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/607335436
Camera is Logitech C270 / Resolution: 352x288 (since I keep it in corner) / 30 FPS / 709 - Full / Buffering: Disabled
These settings I tried all the variations possible and everything goes blurry no matter what.
I am aware of either getting c920 / proper lightning or getting 20 series card for higher quality encoding (?)
Obviously if I knew what to do I woudn't be here, please help! And thanks everyone in advance.

 

[ikoka1]

Bump.

 

[carlmmii]

"Any form of high motion or a lot of encoding results in camera going completely blurry."

You've answered your own question. This is a limitation of bitrate and compression quality. The bitrate is limited by twitch, and the compression quality is only so good with h264 -- it doesn't matter if you go to x264 slow or turing nvenc, you're still going to have a limit on how good things will look.

The only way to really improve the quality is to make your webcam take up a larger portion of your screen, so that when it does get compressed the compression artifacts have less of an impact on the visibility of the actual image.

I highly recommend watching this video by Tom Scott:

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

www.youtube.com

 

[ikoka1]

"Any form of high motion or a lot of encoding results in camera going completely blurry."

You've answered your own question. This is a limitation of bitrate and compression quality. The bitrate is limited by twitch, and the compression quality is only so good with h264 -- it doesn't matter if you go to x264 slow or turing nvenc, you're still going to have a limit on how good things will look.

The only way to really improve the quality is to make your webcam take up a larger portion of your screen, so that when it does get compressed the compression artifacts have less of an impact on the visibility of the actual image.

I highly recommend watching this video by Tom Scott:

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

www.youtube.com

Thank you for your response, although I still don't think it should be bad to this extent.
I've seen a lot of streamers that stream with the very same limitation by twitch and their cameras exceed mine by a big margin, my face goes beyond recognition when there is motion.
So what I was interested in would be this better if I've got a 20 series card 2060 S onwards or would a good ol' C920 do the trick?

 

[BionicClick]

any Nvidia card 1660 super onward will have the same chip for encoding.

I will make a recommendation of two card I have grown to love

For $250 Asus Strix 1660 super
For $350 you can get the EVGA 2060 KO / KO Ultra that has the TU104 chip, the same one in the 2080 for half the cost.

no matter what card you get anything over the 1660 super will offer the same NVENC encode quality.

I chose to build a $3500 dedicated PC for encode with a 14 core Intel processor. I now use x264 encode. the benefit is a bit better look on stream and when there is fast motion the resolution as always will go blocky, but returns immediately to clear.

I watched your video. its at 720p. and to me the quality looks good. here is a sample of what I got going on. my camera colors are way out of whack on this vid. but you can see with fast motion it always goes blurry no matter what. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/610042937

are you pushing 6000kbps? suggest turning off look ahead, Bframes to 2, and enable physco visual tuning,.

You can also drop your FPS to 30 which will give you almost double headroom with bandwidth. Here is a n image with color corrected cameras input.

 

[ikoka1]

any Nvidia card 1660 super onward will have the same chip for encoding.

I will make a recommendation of two card I have grown to love

For $250 Asus Strix 1660 super
For $350 you can get the EVGA 2060 KO / KO Ultra that has the TU104 chip, the same one in the 2080 for half the cost.

no matter what card you get anything over the 1660 super will offer the same NVENC encode quality.

I chose to build a $3500 dedicated PC for encode with a 14 core Intel processor. I now use x264 encode. the benefit is a bit better look on stream and when there is fast motion the resolution as always will go blocky, but returns immediately to clear.

I watched your video. its at 720p. and to me the quality looks good. here is a sample of what I got going on. my camera colors are way out of whack on this vid. but you can see with fast motion it always goes blurry no matter what. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/610042937

are you pushing 6000kbps? suggest turning off look ahead, Bframes to 2, and enable physco visual tuning,.

You can also drop your FPS to 30 which will give you almost double headroom with bandwidth. Here is a n image with color corrected cameras input.
View attachment 55287

Hi! Thank you for your response.
Yes, I'm running at very stable 6000 bitrate, all the settings are already configured as mentioned, you can drop a quick look onto a logfile provided above :P
Yeah, I did try 30 FPS and it was a bit better, here where I live both C920 and C922 are out of stock, so I'm very limited on what I can buy.
iirc both of the cameras come with built in encoder and a fairly better quality overall, but definetely will be ordering a better GPU as well.
Thank you for your help :)

 

[BionicClick]

if you still get black bars using the 5:4 aspect ratio. you could add your source into a 1080/720p base canvas and just hang the left and right sides off canvas on the preview window?

 

[carlmmii]

Hi! Thank you for your response.
Yes, I'm running at very stable 6000 bitrate, all the settings are already configured as mentioned, you can drop a quick look onto a logfile provided above :P
Yeah, I did try 30 FPS and it was a bit better, here where I live both C920 and C922 are out of stock, so I'm very limited on what I can buy.
iirc both of the cameras come with built in encoder and a fairly better quality overall, but definetely will be ordering a better GPU as well.
Thank you for your help :)

Your camera is NOT your issue.

The camera image is being captured perfectly fine into OBS. The resulting image that is being encoded and displayed on twitch is being compressed down because of the complexity of the scene as a whole.

Additionally, webcams do nothing for encoding. "Built-in encoders" when referring to webcams mean compressing its own image down so that it can be transferred over USB to your computer. This is not the same as the final encoding process that OBS does for the final encoding output.

 

[ikoka1]

Your camera is NOT your issue.

The camera image is being captured perfectly fine into OBS. The resulting image that is being encoded and displayed on twitch is being compressed down because of the complexity of the scene as a whole.

Additionally, webcams do nothing for encoding. "Built-in encoders" when referring to webcams mean compressing its own image down so that it can be transferred over USB to your computer. This is not the same as the final encoding process that OBS does for the final encoding output.

I am truly sorry for answering this late as I had obligatories and a lot of stuff to do irl for the past month
Yes, you are totally in right and I apologize for questioning, although I still don't understand how most of the streamers get their cameras to be crips clean even on Twitch
I tested my streams on Mixer and I had crispy clean Camera with 0 blurryness on 10k bitrate, I wish Twitch cared enough to do something on this matter, 6k bitrate is just... outdated. x)

 

[qhobbes]

I'm able to stream to Twitch at 1080p 29.97fps at 3k bitrate at fairly good quality (it's not broadcast quality but good enough for the purpose). See https://www.twitch.tv/videos/625323826 as an example. This is on an Ivy Bridge i7 (2nd gen QuickSync encoder). I struggle to see how people with much more modern hardware have these problems.