Default color format & color space

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Decoherent

New Member
I'm slowly losing my mind as the internet has been failing me :) I removed my video capture card, as it's been giving me trouble for a long time, and I don't want to deal with it anymore :) I'd picked it up during the early DirectX 12 days, when OBS would give surprising (and generally unpleasant) results. Those days seem to be a long ways in the past, so I removed that point of frustration.

The problem I'm running into is, I played with the Video settings in the Advanced tab, and now I don't know what the defaults were, or what they should be :) I don't know if it matters, but my video encoding settings are:

NVENC H.264 encoder
CQP: 16
Preset: Slow
Tuning: High Quality
Multipass: Two passes (quarter resolution)
Profile: high

This is running on a nVidia 3060 Ti; I've been using these settings for ages without any trouble. The low CQP is from when NVENC needed a lot of bits to look good. I don't do any streaming, just local recording, for editing and eventual YouTube uploading. I don't have/use HDR.

So. What should I set the color format and color space as? IIRC, OBS has a preferred configuration to keep everything hardware accelerated, which is of course what I want. I have the color space set to "Rec. 709" & "Full" at the moment. I444 sort of looks like best for SDR, but I don't know how it's processed internally.

I'd greatly appreciate some guidance, before I wreck some recordings :)
 
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Decoherent

New Member
Well, unfortunately neither really contain the answers I was looking for. This guide suggests NV12 & partial color range. I'd rather use full range, I mean, I'm just recording right off my computer, I don't want to lose data up front (I think). The nVidia guide i just for streaming, and doesn't mention anything about color formats. Using full color range made my videos very dark, as many people on the internet have discovered.

Interestingly, after tons of testing, using I444, Rec. 709, & full range looks fine. I know YouTube is going to ruin it after I upload a video, but I'm trying to give them as good of a source as possible :) I didn't really notice any particular performance penalty, but I don't have any games where my machine is teetering on the edge. Will this go through OBS's internal acceleration?
 
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Decoherent

New Member
Replying to myself...I did find a good performance test, I have Cyberpunk 2077 balanced right at 60fps. Starting up a recording using the above settings did incur a performance penalty...I have the FPS capped at 60, but flipping on the recording dropped it down to ~55fps, which isn't so great. That seemed to be the case with most of the settings.

So, back I go to NV12, Rec. 709, Limited.
 
Suslik V

Suslik V

Active Member
Probably, you can buy second PC for recordings and use capture card to be independent from main PC load.
OBS developers recommends this:

Certified Devices | OBS

OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers or record your own videos with high quality H264 / AAC encoding.
obsproject.com obsproject.com
 
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Decoherent

New Member
To follow up on my own thread...while digging around, I discovered that in the nVidia Control Panel, there's a "Color accuracy mode" option. The default (I assume) is "Enhanced", which seems to mean it just basically spits out whatever it wants. However, there's a checkbox for "Override to reference mode", that enforces, well, standard color spaces. With that enabled, lo and behold, suddenly everything works correctly. So now, I can use I420, Rec. 709, Full and everything looks right. Anything I break is now my fault.

To be clear to any future readers, I mean "looks right" in Adobe Premiere, not VLC; VLC is much more tolerant of basically anything, so it's not always a great test.
 
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AaronD

Active Member
As I said in a different thread about AMD problems, beware of things that try to help, but end up fumbling around instead. That's amazingly common, even from big names!

Generally in *any* technical thing, the ideal is "a straight dumb wire". If you need to counteract something that you can't get rid of, that's fine, but spend a good amount of effort to find and get rid of it first!
 
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