Question / Help How to record lossless quality

[DeMoN]

1080p is not enough. And to avoid losing quality by the scaler I would how said recommend to upscale without interpolation (nearest neighbor) by a factor of x2.
Then you end up with 1600x1200 (if your game is 800x600 (never heard of 800x500, you can only mean 800x600).
1600x1200 gives you the minimum of 1152pixel to reach youtube's ID 308 encoding, which is the one for 1440p videos and has 10000 kbit bitrate, while ID 303 (1080p) has just 3500 kbit and 1080p looks totally crap on youtube. An artifact nightmare.

PS: Windows Timeline Software has terrible Scaler and terrible decoder and terrible encoder. Thats why it can read only h.264 files with a chroma resolution of 4:2:0.
Your next problem is, that lossless needs the high444 predictive profile of h.264. Another stuff Windows Timeline Software cant read...
The only software with slightly better support is TMPGEnc VMW 6 (which even has x264 and even can read mkv and output mkv and has more than 3 settings for the encoder)
And Shotcut may read in some more formats due to its ffmpeg implementation.
Colormatrix of 709 will work with vegas too though.

At OBS you have no nearest neighbor scaler, just interpolation ones (bilinear, bicubic and lanczos). And interpolation takes some cpu. I would recommend to upscale the video afterwards anyway because also for the x264 cpu usage it is recommended to do the upscale afterwards, because then x264 has to process just 800x600 pixels and not the upscaled bigger frames.
Also I wouldnt use 1920x1080 as a scaled result, because it will stretch your video and that may look bad.

 

[King Meow]

1080p is not enough. And to avoid losing quality by the scaler I would how said recommend to upscale without interpolation (nearest neighbor) by a factor of x2.
Then you end up with 1600x1200 (if your game is 800x600 (never heard of 800x500, you can only mean 800x600).
1600x1200 gives you the minimum of 1152pixel to reach youtube's ID 308 encoding, which is the one for 1440p videos and has 10000 kbit bitrate, while ID 303 (1080p) has just 3500 kbit and 1080p looks totally crap on youtube. An artifact nightmare.

PS: Windows Timeline Software has terrible Scaler and terrible decoder and terrible encoder. Thats why it can read only h.264 files with a chroma resolution of 4:2:0.
Your next problem is, that lossless needs the high444 predictive profile of h.264. Another stuff Windows Timeline Software cant read...
The only software with slightly better support is TMPGEnc VMW 6 (which even has x264 and even can read mkv and output mkv and has more than 3 settings for the encoder)
And Shotcut may read in some more formats due to its ffmpeg implementation.
Colormatrix of 709 will work with vegas too though.

At OBS you have no nearest neighbor scaler, just interpolation ones (bilinear, bicubic and lanczos). And interpolation takes some cpu. I would recommend to upscale the video afterwards anyway because also for the x264 cpu usage it is recommended to do the upscale afterwards, because then x264 has to process just 800x600 pixels and not the upscaled bigger frames.
Also I wouldnt use 1920x1080 as a scaled result, because it will stretch your video and that may look bad.

The game is 765x503.
And you go way too much into detail, all I want to do it record screenshot-like quality that Sony Vegas will read, like Camtasia does.
No upscaling or whatever weird stuff.

This is what Camtasia gives:

Spoiler

And this is a screenshot:

Spoiler

I can't tell the difference.

 

[SumDim]

Stop using non-standard resolutions. Always use 16:9 scaling for YouTube.
The width x height ratio must be 16 / 9 = 1.777777

765 is not divisible by 16
503 is not divisible by 9
765 / 503 = 1.52

Guess what? Its going to look like sh*t.

 

[King Meow]

Stop using non-standard resolutions. Always use 16:9 scaling for YouTube.
The width x height ratio must be 16 / 9 = 1.777777

765 is not divisible by 16
503 is not divisible by 9
765 / 503 = 1.52

Guess what? Its going to look like sh*t.

Not the source of my problem.
I don't do any scaling and the quality is still shit.

 

[SumDim]

You are giving YouTube a non-standard 16:9 image. It has to do something with that image to stretch it to fit within the 1.7777 ratio.
IT makes it look like sh*t.

Give YouTube a chance and supply it with a standard 16:9 output resolution.

 

[DeMoN]

What aspect ratio has the game? if its not 16:9 I wouldnt recommend to stretch it to 16:9. Youtube wont stretch it either and no one forces you to do that.
_
With Vegas you wont have an option. It can read only 4:2:0 files.
The only option you have is to switch to another software which supports AVI vfw codecs and use a codec like MagicYUV or UTVideo and set it to RGB. Such codec can be read in also in vegas.
But you'll never able to read h.264 files with higher chroma resolutions than 4:2:0 into vegas. it just doesnt support it and it doesnt support lossless h.264 either.
But you need higher than 4:2:0 to reach the chroma quality you want to have.

 

[King Meow]

You are giving YouTube a non-standard 16:9 image. It has to do something with that image to stretch it to fit within the 1.7777 ratio.
IT makes it look like sh*t.

Give YouTube a chance and supply it with a standard 16:9 output resolution.

Sigh, I'd hope you would read the posts before posting. I don't even upload to YouTube or do any upscaling.
Well here goes a TL;DR

Options:

Spoiler

Result:

Spoiler: unacceptable

Desired result:

Spoiler: ✓

 

[King Meow]

What aspect ratio has the game? if its not 16:9 I wouldnt recommend to stretch it to 16:9. Youtube wont stretch it either and no one forces you to do that.
_
With Vegas you wont have an option. It can read only 4:2:0 files.
The only option you have is to switch to another software which supports AVI vfw codecs and use a codec like MagicYUV or UTVideo and set it to RGB. Such codec can be read in also in vegas.
But you'll never able to read h.264 files with higher chroma resolutions than 4:2:0 into vegas. it just doesnt support it and it doesnt support lossless h.264 either.
But you need higher than 4:2:0 to reach the chroma quality you want to have.

Yeah, I stretch and do a final render in Sony Vegas to prepare the vid for YouTube, this thread is just about getting the desired quality.

And surely there has to be a way to get the quality I want without using these fancy color spaces and such since Camtasia is able to do it, lol.

 

[DeMoN]

like said. With Vegas impossible with h.264 streams.
Camtasia wont do it with an h.264 export either. Export the video and you'll see it has 4:2:0 and will look bad too.

You need VfW AVI Codec at RGB or YV24 colorspace to get the result of chroma you want PLUS readable by the bad vegas decoder.

 

[King Meow]

like said. With Vegas impossible with h.264 streams.
Camtasia wont do it with an h.264 export either. Export the video and you'll see it has 4:2:0 and will look bad too.

You need VfW AVI Codec at RGB or YV24 colorspace to get the result of chroma you want PLUS readable by the bad vegas decoder.

Vegas does read the .avi files Camtasia produces and when I render with Vegas, the quality is still the same desired quality I'm after :/

 

[DeMoN]

yes .avi.

I think you rendered into AVI with a RGB supporting codec and used RGB.

Now try h.264 and it will be 4:2:0 and look not like you want.

 

[DeMoN]

But since you cant use VfW Codec on OBS you either have to change your capture software, or find a software with better decoders than vegas has.
OBS' ffmpeg implementation would offer UTVideo, but I remember it being slow compared to the VfW variant.

 

[King Meow]

yes .avi.

I think you rendered into AVI with a RGB supporting codec and used RGB.

Now try h.264 and it will be 4:2:0 and look not like you want.

Well could I not do what Camtasia does with OBS? I don't even know what Camtasia does lol, everything is a default settings (not like there are any settings to change, lol) and I hit record and the result is screenshot-like quality & tiny file sizes.
Sorry about not understanding all this fancy stuff with encoders and decoders. All I just want is to be able get the quality I want, and the framerate I want :*(

 

[King Meow]

But since you cant use VfW Codec on OBS you either have to change your capture software, or find a software with better decoders than vegas has.
OBS' ffmpeg implementation would offer UTVideo, but I remember it being slow compared to the VfW variant.

Any chance you'd know of a screen recorder that can do that at 120fps without dropping a lot of frames (like e.g. Bandicam or Camtasia does)?

 

[DeMoN]

any software with VfW Support.
But with your low resolution it also may work with OBS' ffmpeg UTVideo. So set Output mode to "custom ffmpeg", choose UTvideo from the list and avi as container. you can save only 1 audiotrack then though.
Set color to RGB and dont forget to change the colormatrix from 601 to 709.
120fps is a lot of fps, but should work with your low resolution.

Dont forget to install UTVideo on your system so that Vegas has a decoder for it.
http://umezawa.dyndns.info/archive/utvideo/utvideo-18.2.0-win.exe

 

[SumDim]

Sigh, I'd hope you would read the posts before posting. I don't even upload to YouTube or do any upscaling

Sigh? I can read between the lines and know what you are doing. You just said you prepare the video for YouTube!

Yeah, I stretch and do a final render in Sony Vegas to prepare the vid for YouTube

Not going to go any further into this. I would be more than happy to explain what is going on but you aren't paying attention. Good luck to you.

 

[King Meow]

Sigh, I'd hope you would read the posts before posting. I don't even upload to YouTube or do any upscaling

Sigh? I can read between the lines and know what you are doing. You just said you prepare the video for YouTube!

Yeah, I stretch and do a final render in Sony Vegas to prepare the vid for YouTube

Not going to go any further into this. I would be more than happy to explain what is going on but you aren't paying attention. Good luck to you.

My quality problem isn't caused by the upscaling/aspect ratio change, I have bad quality BEFORE I do any of the for-mentioned things, therefore it not the relevant to my problem in any way.
So I'm the one who's not paying attention?

 

[DeMoN]

The problem hasnt anything to do with stretching anyway. Its simple. He wants to stay on RGB Colorspace before encode so that he can overlay some RGB images on the video also being in RGB.

 

[King Meow]

any software with VfW Support.
But with your low resolution it also may work with OBS' ffmpeg UTVideo. So set Output mode to "custom ffmpeg", choose UTvideo from the list and avi as container. you can save only 1 audiotrack then though.
Set color to RGB and dont forget to change the colormatrix from 601 to 709.
120fps is a lot of fps, but should work with your low resolution.

Dont forget to install UTVideo on your system so that Vegas has a decoder for it.
http://umezawa.dyndns.info/archive/utvideo/utvideo-18.2.0-win.exe

I'll be damned, this did it!
Huge huge huge thank you!

One problem (which I'm not too concerned about, but would be nice if I got it fixed):
The audio I now record becomes extremely distorted:

 

[King Meow]

Also the bit rate is now 381Mb/s, which obviously is super unnecessarily high, is there a way I could make it be less?
What I put here doesn't seem to have any effect.