Question / Help Can this program record raw video?

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Tim Carter

New Member
I've been looking around for a good desktop recorder that does NOT encode video.

You can't edit encoded video. I want it to give me raw video, the same way FRAPS does. That way I can edit then encode it on my own.

I downloaded OBS and tried using it, but it looks like it forces you to encode the file.

Anybody?
 
Sapiens

Sapiens

Forum Moderator
It's certainly possible to edit the encoded video OBS outputs, people do so quite often. I would suspect an issue either with the editing program you're trying to use, lack of proper codecs on your system, or possibly that you disabled the Use CFR option under Settings > Advanced.

That said you can try the local recording guide at https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/how-to-make-high-quality-local-recordings.16/ and use a crf=0, however be aware that the output will be super huge.
 
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Tim Carter

New Member
It may be possible, but it's not optimal.

For optimal editing - including the ability to do crossfades, manipulate frames and so on - you want RAW video. Totally unencoded.

There is no issue with the editing program I'm using. It's Adobe Premiere. You generally can't import encoded videos into Premiere. Nor would you want to, as there is less quality with encoded video.

Encoded video is it is made up of a few keyframes - which contain 100% of the image (i.e. they are like raw frames) - and many more compressed frames - each of which is only a partial image. Raw video is like 100% keyframes, and no compression artefacts. That's what gives you the power to edit to high quality.

Compressed video is used for the majority of low-quality desktop capture: which is unedited junk with a guy talking while he manipulates stuff on his desktop: lots of dull waiting while he messes around trying to click on things; interruptions like facebook popups and other crap. Edited videos are more professional.

I do my compression after editing, using VirtualDub.
 
Sapiens

Sapiens

Forum Moderator
Well I'm glad we've clarified the difference between "can't" and "not optimal". :) You can try what I linked you to in my first reply, but OBS outputs all of its video through x264 so if that doesn't meet your needs then you'd probably want to stick with a program like Fraps or Dxtory.
 
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Tim Carter

New Member
Argh!

Thing is, FRAPS doesn't record the full desktop. (Yes, you can do it with Aero on, but even then you can't do it with certain programs.)

But I just have to point out that when you discover a failing of a program, incompetent people say "too bad", while competent people try to fix the problem.
 
paibox

paibox

heros in an halfshel
The problem is that the problem is only a perceived problem, you're expecting OBS to do things it wasn't designed to do, but for instance FRAPS and DXtory are. OBS' main purpose is live streaming, and live streaming is mostly limited to Flash video playback, which in itself does not support playback of "raw" color formats such as RGB or 4:4:4 YUV, and h.264 is the best codec supported by Flash as well.

This has nothing to do with competence or incompetence, nor is there an actual "problem" to fix, adding additional video codecs to OBS is actually more of a problem than you may think, especially without causing trouble when people would select said codecs and try to stream with them.

In obs-studio, the rewrite of OBS that is currently in the works, it is possible to have separate outputs, and you could add a local recording output that uses a different, perhaps lossless codec, using ffmpeg. This feature will however not be added to the current version of OBS.
 
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dchattin

New Member
Tim, if you dial the CRF towards 0 as described in Sapiens' linked guide, the picture quality is nearly lossless. Encoding does discard some information but there are degrees of losslessness, with the settings right it's very unlikely any human can perceive any artifacts, x264 really is beautiful at high quality.
 
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