During recording: Switch between regular recording and timelapse.

[S-I-T]

Hi there,

I record a lot of art tutorial videos at work and thought it would be fantastic if there was a way of switching between normal recording and timelapse mode during a recording.

Maybe the screen displays a T or something to show you're in timelapse mode. User could set how many frames per second or similar.

 

[AaronD]

Haven't tried it myself, but there's this:

But I gather that you want a button that switches *live*, *while recording*, to a low capture rate, and back again, while the entire file plays back at the normal rate, thus making that section into a timelapse with no post-processing necessary. Correct?

I can see the use-case, but it would of course, only be possible for recording, not streaming. Maybe the stream could be unaffected, the raw capture could still be at the normal rate to feed that, but only a selectable fraction of those frames would make it into the recording? That would also require a dedicated recording encoder, which OBS already has by running the stream encoder twice with different options.

But a lot of us actually copy the one encoder's output to the file as well. So the recording is *exactly* what the stream was, encoding artifacts and all. So that wouldn't work for you either. You'd have to use the dedicated recording settings, even if you're not streaming, and you'd have the performance hit of running two encoders simultaneously while streaming and recording. If you have enough of a PC to do that, then that's fine, but it does still have *two* copies of a high-demand process instead of just one.

 

[DerrickDVo]

I'd be really happy to see this and possibly even develop it. It's something I definitely want for my gameplay videos, as opposed to having to go in and change it in post. It feels like it shouldn't be too conceptually different from the current "pause recording" function in OBS, which this is kinda like toggling "pause recording" very quickly? I don't know if that'd possibly be too expensive computationally, but I couldn't see why not.

I don't have any experience working with OBS, but I could imagine that "catching" only every couple frames by essentially only toggling recording say, 10 times a second, would match your use case? I'm also of course assuming this is for solely a recording and not for streaming whatsoever, since like pause recording, it'd only be used to that end.

 

[DerrickDVo]

Alright! I got it working in perhaps the most cursed way possible, using Auto HotKeys to quickly toggle off the recording and periodically turn it on for short bursts!

I don't fully understand AHK, but I managed to finagle it until it actually worked! I think OBS doesn't get along with framelong inputs, so, I'm hoping this works.

Compiling this into a AHK script and binding Pause/Resume recording to numpad 1/4 (this can be changed pretty easily) makes this code "work"! Sorry for being a couple months late to the party, and hey if anyone wants to take this and make it into a more sane plugin that'd be wonderful. For now though, I wanted to share what I did that worked to an extent.

AutoClickerEnabled := false

#Persistent
Numpad8::
AutoClickerEnabled := true
SetTimer, AutoClick, 0 ;
return

Numpad9::
AutoClickerEnabled := false
SendInput, {Numpad4}
SetTimer, AutoClick, Off
return

AutoClick:
if (AutoClickerEnabled) {
SendInput, {Numpad4 up}
SendInput, {Numpad1 down}
Sleep, 125
SendInput, {Numpad1 up}
SendInput, {Numpad4 down}
Sleep, 25
}
SendInput, {Numpad1 up}
SendInput, {Numpad4 up}
return

 

[DerrickDVo]

Actually, that solution doesn't work very well since it's not reliable enough while playing another game. Oops. I'm sure there's some way to optimize it with AHK, but I do think that ultimately such a thing ought to be a feature in a plugin rather than trying to force it to happen. The behavior while recording, due to the lack of reliability, is essentially that it only roughly doubles the speed since it's random whether or not the button presses register, and it's pretty jittery. But, if you're focused on the OBS software, it does pretty much work properly.

 

[AaronD]

That might be another, admittedly niche, reason to have two machines: one dedicated to the game, and the other dedicated to OBS. Use a physical capture device on the OBS machine to grab the screen from the game machine. Then the OBS machine can of course be focused on OBS, and the AHK hack can work.