Question / Help My recordings stutter and are jittery

[Gazondaily]

Hi everyone,

I hope you are all keeping well and safe.

I am trying to get the correct OBS settings for recordings but all my footage just appears to be stuttering whilst performing absolutely fine in-game. My PC specs should allow me to record hassle free and I see very little CPU usage so I am at a loss at what to do. I've tried setting the Rate Control at CQP and Lossless.

I use a 2560 x 1440 display running at 144hz

My PC specs are :

AMD Ryzen 7 3700x 8-Core
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070
16 GB DDR4-2400 Kit RAM
SAMSUNG 970 EvoPlus SSD
AORUS PRO B450 MOBO

Log file: https://obsproject.com/logs/tczNYkwpfUOWWJyY

Your help would be massively appreciated!

Thanks :)

 

[Gazondaily]

Sorry to bump but is anybody able to help?

 

[FerretBomb]

Sorry to bump but is anybody able to help?

Your logfile does not contain a live streaming or recording session, so we won't be able to tell much from it. Immediately though,

12:46:26.191: output 0: pos={0, 0}, size={2560, 1440}, attached=true, refresh=144, name=EG27144
12:46:26.191: output 1: pos={-1920, 363}, size={1920, 1080}, attached=true, refresh=60, name=S23A700

There's a long-standing Windows bug when running multiple monitors at different refresh rates, causing stutter/judder with hardware-accelerated programs. There's a fix coming later this or next year in the Win10 2004 update, but the only fix for now is to run all monitors at the same refresh rate.

 

[Gazondaily]

Your logfile does not contain a live streaming or recording session, so we won't be able to tell much from it. Immediately though,

There's a long-standing Windows bug when running multiple monitors at different refresh rates, causing stutter/judder with hardware-accelerated programs. There's a fix coming later this or next year in the Win10 2004 update, but the only fix for now is to run all monitors at the same refresh rate.

Thanks for the response! I did try lowering the refresh rate to 60hz but this did not help the stuttering at all. Neither did changing the resolution to 1080p.

 

[FerretBomb]

Sorry to hear that. We'll need a new log file containing a streaming or recording session at least 30 seconds in length where the issue was occurring to be able to give any other troubleshooting help though. :)

 

[vapeahoy]

AMD Ryzen 7 3700x 8-Core
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070
16 GB DDR4-2400 Kit RAM
SAMSUNG 970 EvoPlus SSD
AORUS PRO B450 MOBO

Log file: https://obsproject.com/logs/tczNYkwpfUOWWJyY

12:46:25.855: Running as administrator: false
12:46:25.855: Game Bar: On
12:46:25.855: Game DVR: On
12:46:25.855: Game DVR Background Recording: On
12:46:26.240: D3D11 GPU priority setup failed (not admin?)
12:46:26.590: [CoreAudio encoder]: CoreAudio AAC encoder not installed on the system or couldn't be loaded
12:46:26.993: adding 46 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 46 milliseconds (source: Mic/Aux)

have you done any manual ram tweaking at all? I'd try and lower system latency and see if you can get a starting point of onboard latency down to in the 20's at least.
Even if the ram is only 1200, 2400mhz effectively, you should be able to clock it to 3200 at least with 100% stability. If you don't do this, you'll be missing out free performance, greatly so, from your 3700x cpu and even your rtx2070, well actually everything.

 

[Gazondaily]

Sorry to hear that. We'll need a new log file containing a streaming or recording session at least 30 seconds in length where the issue was occurring to be able to give any other troubleshooting help though. :)

Hi I have just recorded a new log. Hopefully this helps and actually contains a recording session! How you guys decipher this stuff is beyond me.

https://obsproject.com/logs/2bg816L6JfP1xFwa

12:46:25.855: Running as administrator: false
12:46:25.855: Game Bar: On
12:46:25.855: Game DVR: On
12:46:25.855: Game DVR Background Recording: On
12:46:26.240: D3D11 GPU priority setup failed (not admin?)
12:46:26.590: [CoreAudio encoder]: CoreAudio AAC encoder not installed on the system or couldn't be loaded
12:46:26.993: adding 46 milliseconds of audio buffering, total audio buffering is now 46 milliseconds (source: Mic/Aux)

have you done any manual ram tweaking at all? I'd try and lower system latency and see if you can get a starting point of onboard latency down to in the 20's at least.
Even if the ram is only 1200, 2400mhz effectively, you should be able to clock it to 3200 at least with 100% stability. If you don't do this, you'll be missing out free performance, greatly so, from your 3700x cpu and even your rtx2070, well actually everything.

Ah so Game DVR could be an issue? I turned that those off for the last log. Not sure about the audio encoder or what that's about.
I haven't done any manual tweaking to the RAM until you just mentioned it. I just unlocked the XMB profile.

The footage is still jittery. I recorded on lossless because that's what I've usually had the most luck with in terms of minimal jittering. Ialso noticed that a Discord overlay on top of the game i was playing was flickering in the video when it wasnt in-game.

Really appreciate the help guys!

 

[vapeahoy]

It's all rather simply really. Some options and features, yadayada, are meant for specific things. Like encoding a movie for your own use, that you want to have very good quality on and so it doesnt realy matter how many hours it takes to encode it.
This is the thing that practically every user doesn't get. Doesn't matter if it's gpu or cpu encoding etc. For things like recording, storage device quality matters quite a bit, for streaming it has practically zero impact.

You really should learn yourself how to go about tuning your ram as running at only 2400 is very low. 3466c14 or 3600cl15 should be the goal.
All memory non-ecc is very overclockable for the most part. How much is possible to get out of a kit depends greatly tho to some extent.
for multi threaded workloads you're missing out at least 15% performance, probably more like 20. Which in file encoding can be hours, for real time streaming means having to make sacrifices you dont want to make.
If you record on lossless, you are going to need a fast storage device and having faster ram will help the overrall process greatly in this scenario.
Having some performance left to spare will be needed for buffering reasons etc.
When it comes to windows, everything is a issue, as they program it as if it is supposed to be a part of everything, instead of just being the operating system. It's sad the user isn't given a choice upon install to just disable all non essential operating stuff.

 

[FerretBomb]

GameDVR does take up an NVENC session, but it shouldn't be an issue here.

12:57:57.403: Output 'adv_file_output': Number of lagged frames due to rendering lag/stalls: 68 (0.4%)
12:57:57.403: Video stopped, number of skipped frames due to encoding lag: 1156/18823 (6.1%)

The first one is GPU overload. It's not high, but advised to run OBS as Administrator (you aren't at present) to prevent any peaking issues.

The second one is encoder-side. You're using NVENC, so this normally comes down to one of three settings.
-Don't use Max Quality as the preset, use Quality instead.
-Turn off both Psycho-Visual Tuning and Lookahead
All three of these use CUDA cores, and generally just tend to screw things up a lot of the time, causing encoding lag. You have PVT turned on; turn it off.

Please disregard the comments about running your RAM faster, that's unrelated and the performance benefits are negligible in the case of most systems... and definitely in the case of livestreaming. If you were doing renderfarm work that might be measurable (generally in the single-percentage range though). It's absolutely NOT related to your issue.

As far as disk testing, most (spinning platter) drives have write rates above 60MB/s. SSDs are quite a bit faster. Only if you're recording in ProRes or some other lossless format would this be an issue (and from your log, you aren't doing that... almost no one ever needs to do that, so good). If you're concerned, download CrystalDiskMark and run a write speed benchmark to check on it. Generally any spinning-platter drive back to IDE will be able to handle video recording write speeds.

More an issue is that you still appear to be running mismatched refresh rates which WILL cause a problem. Also, you appear to be recording directly to MP4, which you should NEVER DO FOR ANY REASON. MP4 is not a recording-safe format; record to MKV or FLV and remux it to mp4 afterward if you need them for editing. There's a reason it pops up an orange warning message when you switch it to mp4 output. Also, many video editors will choke on OBS native-record mp4 files anyway, but have no problem with remuxed mkv->mp4 files.

 

[Gazondaily]

GameDVR does take up an NVENC session, but it shouldn't be an issue here.

The first one is GPU overload. It's not high, but advised to run OBS as Administrator (you aren't at present) to prevent any peaking issues.

The second one is encoder-side. You're using NVENC, so this normally comes down to one of three settings.
-Don't use Max Quality as the preset, use Quality instead.
-Turn off both Psycho-Visual Tuning and Lookahead
All three of these use CUDA cores, and generally just tend to screw things up a lot of the time, causing encoding lag. You have PVT turned on; turn it off.

Please disregard the comments about running your RAM faster, that's unrelated and the performance benefits are negligible in the case of most systems... and definitely in the case of livestreaming. If you were doing renderfarm work that might be measurable (generally in the single-percentage range though). It's absolutely NOT related to your issue.

As far as disk testing, most (spinning platter) drives have write rates above 60MB/s. SSDs are quite a bit faster. Only if you're recording in ProRes or some other lossless format would this be an issue (and from your log, you aren't doing that... almost no one ever needs to do that, so good). If you're concerned, download CrystalDiskMark and run a write speed benchmark to check on it. Generally any spinning-platter drive back to IDE will be able to handle video recording write speeds.

More an issue is that you still appear to be running mismatched refresh rates which WILL cause a problem. Also, you appear to be recording directly to MP4, which you should NEVER DO FOR ANY REASON. MP4 is not a recording-safe format; record to MKV or FLV and remux it to mp4 afterward if you need them for editing. There's a reason it pops up an orange warning message when you switch it to mp4 output. Also, many video editors will choke on OBS native-record mp4 files anyway, but have no problem with remuxed mkv->mp4 files.

Many thanks for your help on this! I did change to those settings and it really helped! There is still some of that choppiness but it is a lot more tolerable that before. I suspect I will have to invest in another 144hz screen to completely rid myself of the issue.

Thank you for taking the time to look at the issue. Your help is greatly appreciated.