Question / Help Blurry screen recording and laggy web cam on iMac 10.12.6. I've spent the whole day trying to fix this.

[Slayer666]

Hello community, this is my first post, I'm new to this.

I'm trying to capture a screen recording with web cam window, it's for music production, I'm not streaming, this is only for friends on Facebook.

I feel like I've tried everything, I've read dozens of threads on here and elsewhere, watched countless YouTube videos, followed countless instructions, used the auto configuration wizard, used common sense and have experimented with virtually every combination of settings etc. But still no joy, the videos are still blurry and depending on the settings the web cam video is very jerky. My computer and graphics card are powerful enough so I don't feel this should be as troublesome as it's been. However I'm aware I may be making some horrendous noob mistakes!

Some help would be much appreciated, I'll include a couple of pics with my spec and the log file.

Thanks in advance, OBS and it's community look great! I'm looking forward to going down this particular rabbit hole!

Log File - https://obsproject.com/logs/oRpKq7mY6CkxH5BO

Cheers.

 

[Narcogen]

Generally speaking, you get the best quality by capturing everything at its native quality, and providing OBS with the maximum amount of time and resources to encode frames, and the maximum possible bitrate for recordings or streams. Getting good performance is selecting which of these values to compromise on.

Modern macs, unfortunately, especially those with built-in displays, tend to pack relatively high resolution monitors with relatively weak GPUs. This means getting acceptable performance while recording or streaming with OBS often means some scaling-- either scaling down what you're displaying inside OBS, or running your display at a lower resolution than native before capture, which can also make things blurry.

18:42:25.304: base resolution: 2560x1440
18:42:25.304: output resolution: 2560x1440
18:42:25.304: downscale filter: Lanczos
18:42:25.304: fps: 60000/1001
18:42:25.304: format: NV12
18:42:25.304: YUV mode: 709/Full

You're not going to get good performance out of this machine at 1440p60. Target something more reasonable like 1080p60 or even 1080p30. Depending on the content you want to stream, these changes may not even be critical. To do this, set either your output resolution, or, if you experience rendering lag, both your output resolution and base resolution, to 1920x1080. The bitrate you have selected, 5000kbps, is not sufficient to provide good quality under high motion even at 1080p30 or 720p60, to say nothing of 1440p60.

Do not use CBR rate control for local recording. That setting is primarily for streaming. Use CRF rate control and a quality setting between 14 (very high quality) and 23 (good quality). Higher quality means larger files.

Now for performance:

18:53:00.801: Output 'adv_file_output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 45 (2.5%)
18:53:00.802: ==== Recording Stop ================================================
18:53:00.806: Video stopped, number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 853/927 (92.0%)

You're only slightly overloading your GPU with your current settings, so compromising just a bit on either canvas resolution or framerate should completely address that. You might even be able to do 1440p30 if you so choose, as you don't have much rendering lag.

What you are doing, though, is completely overloading your CPU.

8:52:30.483: [x264 encoder: 'recording_h264'] preset: slow
18:52:30.483: [x264 encoder: 'recording_h264'] profile: main
18:52:30.483: [x264 encoder: 'recording_h264'] settings:

18:47:46.675: [x264 encoder: 'recording_h264'] preset: fast
18:47:46.675: [x264 encoder: 'recording_h264'] profile: main
18:47:46.675: [x264 encoder: 'recording_h264'] settings:

The default CPU preset is veryfast. Going slower than that is basically for multicore monster AMD CPUs on Windows build. It's not going to help you on this machine one bit. You will possibly need to go to a faster preset, like superfast, if you don't reduce your output resolution and framerate.

You can also choose to use the hardware encoder option, but this is not nearly as powerful as the NVENC encoder on Nvidia cards, and provides lower quality. You will also need to use a lower resolution and framerate here as the 290x is quite an old card at this point.


Also change your color space to 709/Partial, which is the default. Using Full will increase load and decrease apparent quality for the vast majority of your viewers.

OBS Studio: Color Space, Color Format, Color Range settings Guide. Test charts.

Introduction. For higher compression rate, video encoders usually use methods of representation of each video frame as 3 separate channels: one for luminosity and two for color. This allow to compress color info separately from the luminance...

obsproject.com

I know your question is primarily about image quality, but from the logfile, your machine is struggling to achieve acceptable performance with any of the settings you have tried to use, and resolving that would need to come first, most likely by accepting necessary tradeoffs of resolution and framerate.

 

[parsonstim617]

THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH for this break down!!