Question / Help How to achieve highest possible quality recordings?

[InternetSandman]

I'm running a streaming setup for a local gaming tournament, but the venue's upload speed tops out at about 3mbps so I can't just go crazy with video settings. My laptop's hardware basically puts no practical limit on the quality I can achieve so far as I can tell (i7 6700HQ, 16GB RAM, 970M, and solid state storage galore) so my only bottleneck is upload speed. What are some good ways to increase the quality of the stream without hogging upload bandwidth?

Also, I've googled this question before and haven't found anything encouraging but I figured I would ask again; is there any way to record the stream at a higher quality setting/resolution than what I'm broadcasting at?

 

[joebopie]

Yea you can though it most likely wont be as much of a difference as you hope, and it will put a massive load on your CPU.
it does depend also on what your streaming to. e.g twitch may be funny with these changed.
as far as i know...
change the encoding profile to HIGH.
change the x264 CPU down(slower) until your CPU is maxed out.
you CPU may be powerful but it will max out im sure.
the slower the preset is the more compression passes it does per frame.(as i understand it) and the more quality.
sombody else will have to tell us if changes the FPS between 30-60 will make a difference.
also remember to leave about a 0.5mbps up free or it will skip a lot of frames.