Question / Help Has anyone with a 1050p monitor tried upscaling (via adjusting the Custom Base Resolution) to 1080p?

C

Covariance

New Member
Hi everyone,

I realise this is a question that can be addressed by simple testing but my CPU is currently tied up rendering something in Vegas right now and I'd rather not disturb it. I apologize profusely for selfishly asking this question instead of waiting 90 minutes to address it for myself. Having said that, I thought I'd ask in case someone can address my inquiry without too much inconvenience.

I love the quality of videos rendered via OBS, especially after following Rich's guide to optimized parameters for local encoding. When I upload directly to Youtube, however, I notice that the quality is substantially worse. I suspect it is because when I recorded my video in OBS, the resolution matches my monitor's resolution (1680x1050 AKA1050p). Consequently, the file is unable to trigger Youtube's 1080p detection and so the entire video ends up getting downscaled to 720p.

I was originally wondering whether or not there was a way I could upscale my OBS recordings. Then I noticed I could set a custom resolution. Maybe I could try setting the custo mresolution to 1680 x 1080? Has anyone tried this before? Will things look horribly distorted? Will some of the footage on the side get clipped? Will I get black bars on the border of my video?

I am so eager to find an answer and I'd love to test it out for myself, but I'd have to wait 1.5-2 hours before doing so.

Cheers and thanks for your help everyone,

- Joe
 
Using 1920x1200 would be the correct upscale for 16:10 resolution. This will increase CPU usage and make things slightly blurrier, whether this looks better depends on your content and how resolution dependent it is.
 
You're probably better off upscaling in Vegas. For one thing, you need to be careful of aspect ratios. 1680x1050 is 16:10 while 1920x1080 is 16:9. So you'll need to upscale to 1728x1080 instead of 1920x1080.

To get the best output for YouTube, save out of Vegas to an "intermediate" file. The easiest is to use uncompressed lossless AVI. Then run that file through Handbrake to make it into an .MP4 suitably sized for upload. This is because Vegas' H.264 encoder is horrible, and .WMV format is even worse.

For a good guide, see this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=rWMX5lSvEgY .

Note that they say to use another format as the intermediate file, and you can do that if you wish. It saves hard drive space their way, as my way, the intermediate file is huge, tens or hundreds of gigabytes (depending on the length of your video). But the final product out of Handbrake is essentially the same (my way might be undetectably higher quality), and once that's done, you can delete the intermediate file and get your hard drive space back.

Also, be sure to encode in Handbrake according to YouTube's guidelines for H.264: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171

The most important changes being only 2 B-Frames and "GOP of half the frame rate", which means set your keyint to your framerate divided by two.
 
Hello gentlemen,

Thank you both for taking the time to respond to my inquiry. Prior to re-entering this thread, I attempted to record with a custom upscale to 1680x1080 as I had mentioned earlier. So far things look pretty fine for the most part; will attempt to scrutinize further when I can. I am also uploading to youtube as we speak, so I'll provide a link to that footage as well.

If it fails, I will try your suggestions.

R1CH said:
Using 1920x1200 would be the correct upscale for 16:10 resolution. This will increase CPU usage and make things slightly blurrier, whether this looks better depends on your content and how resolution dependent it is.
Click to expand...

I'm a little confused - if maintaining the ratio is that important, why not just upscale it to 1728x1080? That way, the ratio remains 1.6:1.0 and I don't have to render as many pixels. Also, what's the point of rending anything at 1920x1200 if Youtube will only show it at 1080p resolution anyways?

Boildown said:
You're probably better off upscaling in Vegas. For one thing, you need to be careful of aspect ratios. 1680x1050 is 16:10 while 1920x1080 is 16:9. So you'll need to upscale to 1728x1080 instead of 1920x1080.

To get the best output for YouTube, save out of Vegas to an "intermediate" file. The easiest is to use uncompressed lossless AVI. Then run that file through Handbrake to make it into an .MP4 suitably sized for upload. This is because Vegas' H.264 encoder is horrible, and .WMV format is even worse.

For a good guide, see this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=rWMX5lSvEgY .

Note that they say to use another format as the intermediate file, and you can do that if you wish. It saves hard drive space their way, as my way, the intermediate file is huge, tens or hundreds of gigabytes (depending on the length of your video). But the final product out of Handbrake is essentially the same (my way might be undetectably higher quality), and once that's done, you can delete the intermediate file and get your hard drive space back.

Also, be sure to encode in Handbrake according to YouTube's guidelines for H.264: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171

The most important changes being only 2 B-Frames and "GOP of half the frame rate", which means set your keyint to your framerate divided by two.
Click to expand...

Oh lord, the reason why I wanted to upscale in OBS was because I wanted to avoid re-rendering in Vegas. For one thing, I've noticed that the colours always look washed out when I save as an .wmv (although I now realize I can fix this by adding the effect, "levels - studio rgb to computer rgb"). Still, the less amount of processing (and therefore effort and time) the better.

Still, if I end up deciding that upscaling in OBS makes things look unbearable, I will follow your suggestion more thoroughly. Again, though, in the meantime, things don't look that distorted at all having upscaled from 1680x1050 to 1680x1080.

Cheers and thanks@!
 
Covariance said:
Oh lord, the reason why I wanted to upscale in OBS was because I wanted to avoid re-rendering in Vegas. For one thing, I've noticed that the colours always look washed out when I save as an .wmv (although I now realize I can fix this by adding the effect, "levels - studio rgb to computer rgb"). Still, the less amount of processing (and therefore effort and time) the better.

Still, if I end up deciding that upscaling in OBS makes things look unbearable, I will follow your suggestion more thoroughly. Again, though, in the meantime, things don't look that distorted at all having upscaled from 1680x1050 to 1680x1080.
Click to expand...

If you're not doing any editing in Vegas, just taking your OBS output and putting it on YouTube, then that changes things. You should upscale in OBS to 1728x1080 (1680x1080 messes with the aspect ratio as you noticed). If that's possible, I never tried upscaling before, but from R1CH's post it sounds like it is. In this case you should set OBS to use YouTube's .MP4 / H.264 encoding guidelines instead of doing it in Handbrake. Use custom x264 settings to set B-Frames and keyint, mainly. Previous discussion here: https://obsproject.com/forum/thread...lity-local-recordings.12600/page-4#post-46031
 
Last edited:
Hello again,

Thank you for the added information.

Incidentally, here is what it looks like when I set the video output to 1680x1080:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om1mr5pK638&feature=youtu.be

I don't think any distortion actually occurs. In fact, I've determined that merely adjusting the video output dimensions only adjusts, well, the video output dimensions. If I were to also indicate that the position/size of my source were to stretch to fill out the dimensions, then I could expect distortion to occur. As is, though, I believe all that happens is I have my 1680x1050 game capture source embedded in a 1680x1080 frame. Like a 24x35 inch poster embedded in a 24x36 inch poster frame.

Thanks for your continued interest and for the reference to the previous discussion, though!
 
No matter what, a 16:10 video on youtube will have black bars of some kind. If you DO upscale to 1920 x 1200, you may get "original" quality (may read as 1440p in the player) and your final quality will surpass a simple 1080p render.

If you manually add black bars by messing with the res, then 1680 x 1080 will have less quality. If you upres to 1200p, then while it will get downscaled if you select 1080p, there will be more actual pixels and you'll retain the higher quality option.
 
@D2ultima

I don't entirely understand. What is the purpose of upscaling to 1920x1200 if the resolution of the game I'm playing isn't even that high. Isn't that just artificially triggering Youtube's 1440p? The way I see it, I am playing the game at 1050p. I upscale to 1080p with the cost of black boundaries to trigger Youtube's 1080p. I honestly don't mind the black bars very much at all.
 
Because youtube gimps bandwidth up until 1080p. By uploading "above" 1080p (even slightly) your bitrate allowance is much higher. Or that is how it worked before; it might be different now. Either way, you know what you can do =3. Good luck!
 
By uploading "above" 1080p (even slightly) your bitrate allowance is much higher.
Click to expand...

Most fascinating; I did not know this. Can you provide me with a table wherein I can reference bitrate allowance as a function of recognized resolution?

(e.g., 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1440p in one column, allowed bitrate in the second column).

Cheers and thanks again for the information!

Now I just wish there was some way I could get Youtube to not compress my 60FPS to 30FPS. Probably all for the best, though, since my upload speed is painfully slow at 512 kbps.
 
I don't remember where to find it... but usually your bitrate will get massively downgraded and quality will be lost if you "just" do 1080p. I know some youtubers play/record at 1080p but slightly upscale it so that you can get the more full quality. I haven't had a 1200p screen in a year and something though, so I'm not sure.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top