I messed up my recordings by unplugging mic

[youtuber999]

Hi, I am new with the youtubing scene, I did a couple of videos shooting video off my Ipad and a couple using obs, it was rough learning everything like how the mic should be at 1000%, how is that even logical, but it came out all right in the end. However using obs I had troubles with the sound on the built-in mic and when I tried to mute it came out as static so I bought a boom kit and it was much better. But when I was starting a new series of videos for a game I wanted to kick off with an extended guide for the game (crafting, weapons, skill trees etc) and I shot a lot of video that I was going to do a lot of cutting and add voice after. Now here is where I messed up, I unplugged the mic so the program would only pick up in-game sounds, I didn't mute since muting was so bad the first time I tried. OBS went bananas when it couldn't find a mic and the videos ended up huge. However since I was new I didn't understand that this was the reason so I was like "must be some good quality videos". When I imported said files into Lightworks it was a huge mess because the huge files were now enormous. Since I am a bit dense, it took a while for me to figure out the problem, and now I am looking for solutions.
So, is there a way to rescue these files or do I have to delete everything and start fresh?
Since the videos play I guess plan B would be to record me looking at the videos on my screen while properly mic'd, but I'm guessing this will affect quality. There's some footage in here that I am very eager to save though, certain situations than can't be recreated easily.
Adding to this that yes, I also tried to remux but it's the same issue.

 

[AaronD]

I think your first mistake was to just dive into a large project without playing with it first and learning how things work in the first place.

Start small. Things that you can easily redo several times because you killed it somehow. Then once you understand that, add another small thing to it, etc.

You should not unplug anything, or allow things to sleep or wake up, during a session. Between testing and the end of the show, there should be no configuration changes whatsoever. If you don't want to hear something, use its mute button. If that has a problem, then fix that problem so that it works.

It would be a huge help, to imagine your rig as if it were analog, like this, and trace the signals through every bit of processing as if it were a collection of separate analog boxes:

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

www.youtube.com

- YouTube

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

www.youtube.com

Windows itself includes some processing of its own, to make conference calls work for people who understand nothing but still expect to be heard in the middle of a rock concert or whatever. You need to find all of that and turn it off too, wherever Microsoft hid it so that people don't break their own calls by accident and blame them, and whatever they decided to call it.

Take a good full day to explore ALL of the settings, across everything, figure out what each one does, and set them on purpose to suit *your* purpose, instead of the other way around.

Create and keep a set of documentation for what you actually have, separate from the settings themselves, and keep both it and the settings in sync with each other. If you do it well, it's much easier to look at the docs than to try and decipher the settings again.

 

[Lawrence_SoCal]

So, is there a way to rescue these files or do I have to delete everything and start fresh?
Since the videos play I guess plan B would be to record me looking at the videos on my screen while properly mic'd, but I'm guessing this will affect quality. There's some footage in here that I am very eager to save though, certain situations than can't be recreated easily.

Without more information, can say about the HUGE files. They could be fine to work with, in general... other than being large. The issue would be hardware or software that can't handle the size. And if the ONLY change was unplugging the mic, then Video resolution/frame rate should NOT be the issue, so I'd guess the Audio (which tends to be relatively small) is the extra.. but that shouldn't make the files HUGE. A decent video editor (don't know if Lightworks is such or not) can ignore the audio encoded with the video.

So... rescuing those files really isn't an OBS Studio question. It is a question for your video editor... and it is HIGHLY likely to require you to get into the details of resolution & framerate, encoding format, color depth, etc..
- a good place to start would be figuring out how to check such details for a given video (lots of way to do this, I'd start with what you have) and compare to the much larger files and see if you can identify what changed