Looking for help on what settings would be good for the hardware I have for recording to YouTube
- Thread starter GrimEnd
- Start date
rockbottom
Active Member
Use the settings provided above, then take a look a your log. Duplicate the settings in the Advanced mode.
Lawrence_SoCal
Active Member
The issue is... your question would imply you are a relatively new user. And new users messing around in Advanced Settings can/do mess things up...regularly...
What OBS Studio settings would be good? it depends... on a LOT things.
that is actually a complex question for a sophisticated and powerful application.
A useful answer depends on what other workloads running on your system at same time (incl all background processes), how good you are at Operating System hygiene (in my experience, most users are pretty bad at this); and a lot more
So... the basic recommendation will be to get OBS Studio up and running, stable/reliable, etc.
My recommendation would be to focus on presentation & content, triggering transitions, etc. Those things are usually WAY more important than nuanced Advanced Recording settings.
Then focus on optimizing/enhancing OBS Studio setup for your specific use case, once you have a better feel for hardware resource utilization and real-time monitoring of that.
Typically in this scenario (new application) you have a couple of choices to get far more specific optimized setup recommendation that will actually work over time
- learn the application (OBS Studio in your case) and how to optimize/enhance it.. this will take a non insignificant amount of time
- find someone willing to review your setup, specific use case, workloads, etc and advise for free (good luck),
or
- find someone with expertise and offer to pay them (this last option being of value to those for whom time is money, and paying to get up to speed quickly is worthwhile) .. this is uncommon.. and no, I'm not suggesting myself.
Good luck
Thanks for the answer using the simple settings will it fix the resolution when uploading to YouTube because I read that if you record in 1080p that YouTube will drop resolution on your video
Thanks for the help
Lawrence_SoCal
Active Member
Beware wherever you read that. as I don't think that in general is true (at least anymore). And beware seeing content on YouTube, or Facebook, etc) in a lower-than-expected resolution, as that may be a function of the viewing 'client', not the video itself (ie the higher/original resolution version may still be there, just not what the browser/application defaults to showing)
What is true, for (almost?) all 'free' Content Delivery Networks (CDNs; ie YouTube, FaceBook, Twitch, etc) is that they receive H.264 encoded videos (regardless if 1080p, 4K, or other) is that they re-encode those videos for more efficient distribution. Most of the CDNs have technical blog articles that go into detail of how their process works, at a high-level. High quality video is NOT required on super small mobile screens, and the CDNs optimize for that target market, essentially. So to save money (bandwidth & storage) and to meet typical viewer need (small screen), videos are often HIGHLY compressed (losing quality) but staying at same resolution.
There have been certain 'tricks' to try and reduce amount of video compression (and corresponding video 'quality'), but that is a moving target. Once a trick gets popular, the CDN will target that content to avoid higher costs on a free service.
Things *may* change once AV1 becomes more prevalent on the end-user encoding side. And like some earlier 'tricks', uploading/livestreaming AV1 encoded content now may have some benefits [CDN dependent, and the implications/answer will change over time].
In the getting more sophisticated realm... as you mentioned recording (vs livestreaming)... you'll want to consider your video editor. And it gets real complicated and technical immediately. As my thought is that you would want to optimize your workflow to reduce video quality loss when editing/re-encoding. H.264/H.265/AV1, etc are all LOSSY formats.. meaning every time to re-encode a video (older folks remember video quality loss with each VHS tape copy made from earlier copy) you lose some quality... how much? it depends.
You could encode using H.265 or AV1 instead, or stick with H.264 or even something else. The trick is to find the format with least quality loss, overall, from original encoding to edit/re-encode, then upload (as you tend to have little to no control over what the CDN then does). This takes time and testing. Be aware that the newer encoding formats are more computationally demanding to get a lower file size for similar video quality. Meaning, that if you have the disk space, you may benefit from using a low compression encoding format (with high quality settings) to start with.
But, if looking for an 'easy' answer, I'm not offering such. This is like a multi-variant calculus equation. lots of variable, impacting each other in different ways, different rates, etc..
Something to consider is your time. Recording, then video editing afterwards does enable higher quality content. And it takes time. A question is whether you can get to the point of good enough with livestreaming to avoid editing later. That involves upfront planning, but once Recording/Streaming session is over, you are done. Many plugins, things like Stream decks, etc are tools to facilitate being able to make a session a one-pass event. but, I acknowledge it does depend on the content
"Dropping resolution on YouTube" is more likely to be an automatic quality setting, based on what it thinks of your internet connection at that moment, than actually wrecking your video for everyone. You can force a specific resolution here, up to what you actually gave it:
As you can see, that video (not mine, just a random selection from the front page) was uploaded in 1080, but YouTube thinks my connection is slow enough that anything above 480 won't be smooth, so that's what it gives me by default.
Thanks again