Question / Help High quality, little file? - Ideal recording settings?

[higgins909]

I've noticed that some videos are 720p 30fps and about 20-80MB and only 7~ minutes long. Is this possible with OBS? Any of my videos like that are about 250MB.

I want to record in 720p, but not be a huge file. Right now 30 fps 720p 46min is 1.6gb. If I did my math right, about every 3 minutes is 80MB, how can I get 80MB to be 7~ minutes and actually better quality? My videos have a bitrate of 5000~kb and can still "smear" while the other video that I'm wanting to get by is 1500kb.

At some point I switched over to MOV and it seemed to fix my audio issue with my editor.

 

[Boildown]

There's really only two ways to increase quality: More bitrate and higher CPU-cost encoding. Since you want to lower the bitrate, or at least get the quality up without increasing the bitrate, you need to encode better using more CPU power.

The Presets are the biggest lever that can be "pulled" to tell OBS to encode using more CPU. If you don't have a beefy CPU however, your computer won't be able to handle it and it'll duplicate frames, which looks even worse than smeary video. Other tricks you can do are to record using a CRF instead of a constant bitrate, assuming you aren't already doing this.

The guide here: https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-classic-how-to-make-high-quality-local-recordings.16 tells you to use Ultrafast Preset. In order to record with less space but equal quality (in general), you'd want to use a "slower" preset, like SuperFast, VeryFast, Faster, etc. If you go too far, it WILL impact your gameplay (assuming you're recording games), and/or it WILL cause duplicated frames, which looks terrible.

For most people its better to record at high bitrates using a fast preset (like UltraFast or SuperFast), then compress the video down later using software like Handbrake. Hard drives are cheaper than server-class CPUs, after all.