Capture video quality - my face is as fuzzy as my beard

[Transistor]

I'm recording some training videos for a YouTube audience with a talking head in the corner.
I'm using DroidCam OBS over home WiFi for the video source. I can see the video on the Android phone is high quality. When I expand the talking head in OBS Studio it has deteriorated but is "acceptable" - but better would be better.
I'm using a 1:1 recording of a 1280 x 720 portion of my screen.
The saved videos are lacking definition of the screen text and graphics and the talking head quality might have been considered OK on 1990's dial-up Internet.

Figure 1. OBS mkv.

Figure 2. Original application.

Figure 3. OBS output .mkv screengrab from VLC Media Player.
Figure 3 looks half-OK as presented here but the greys are washed out and the overall effect of the washed out edges and blurry text is to give a rather jaded and unprofessional look.

Can anyone offer some suggestions on improving the quality? The latest log file link is available at https://obsproject.com/logs/cldVpafFOQAn4Pn9.

Many thanks.

 

[saltyd]

One random thing that might help - running OBS as administrator. This has helped me solve random quirky things in the past.
right-click the OBS link and use "run as administrator". You can also set that as the default running method.

 

[Transistor]

Thank you for your reply. It didn't make any difference but I couldn't think of any reason why it might!

 

[Suslik V]

1. Log shows that you are using Display Capture sources and capturing 1920x1080 screens. Are you sure that you cropped your capturing area to desirable 1280x720? Because posted image looks like it was downscaled from larger size.
2. As for colored texts - the blur will preserve in any case because of 4:2:0 chroma subsampling (almost every video on the planet has it).
3. As for DroidCam app - it uses own compression for data transfer, thus quality may vary from setup to setup.

Also, for local recordings it is better to use CRF-like rate controls not CBR.

To test colors you may try test charts:

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

 

[Transistor]

One random thing that might help - running OBS as administrator.

I found some explanation in the Encoder performance troubleshooting document. Thanks for the treasure-hunt clue.

(I haven't solved the problem yet though. I'm working through Suslik's suggestions but the interface appears to have changed a bit on V30 and all the YouTube and online articles are a bit out of date and this is slowing me down.)

 

[Transistor]

Hi, @Suslik V.

>1. Log shows that you are using Display Capture sources and capturing 1920x1080 screens. Are you sure that you cropped your capturing area to desirable 1280x720? Because posted image looks like it was downscaled from larger size.

Yes, the canvas is set to 1280 x 720 so that even though I'm capturing from a 1920 x 1080 screen the application I'm recording is sized to 1280 x 720. I may have had this scaled in the earlier attempt. Since then I've learned about resizing the capture area with the Alt-red-handle drag (which turns the handles and frame green). This means I'm keeping the 1:1 from the original and there's no resampling.

>2. As for colored texts - the blur will preserve in any case because of 4:2:0 chroma subsampling (almost every video on the planet has it).

OK. Thank you for your work on the chroma test cards. I got a suitable one and things look pretty good.

>3. As for DroidCam app - it uses own compression for data transfer, thus quality may vary from setup to setup.

I switched to USB connection and played around with a few things. The most important was to set the appropriate scale filtering: Sources | right-click | Scale filtering | Lanczos.
I can keep my beard.

The result:

Thank you for your help.

 

[Suslik V]

Just for info, if you prefer to making all recordings in one take (or live/streaming), you may be interested in:

OBS Lua - Zoom to Mouse

An OBS lua script to zoom a display-capture source to focus on the mouse when you press the assigned hotkey. You can optionally toggle following your cursor so that it is always in view while zoomed in. Cropping and positioning of the source is...

obsproject.com

This script will add new configurable hotkey named Toggle zoom to mouse, that can be found in the OBS Settings > Hotkeys.
Edit: Of course, if your source is Alt-cropped (not fullscreen display capture) then this script is not recommended.
Edit 2: Of course, it is still possible to add simple Crop/Pad filter to the source, but its usage is less convenient.