Question / Help Need some advice for adjusting FFmpeg settings for high quality local recordings.

[D_Widget]

Heya! I've been using OBS Studio for local recordings for awhile now and mostly use it to record high quality game play using a custom FFmpeg setting and having it downscaled to 720@60fps. Recently I've upgraded my rig and was hoping to finally start doing full on 1080p recordings, but it seems like my custom settings are a little too CPU intensive. Whenever I finish a recording in 1080p, the outputted file takes forever to be usable, to the point where I usually have to restart the explorer.exe process because the task freezes up.

Here are my current settings, specs, and log. Is there anything I should adjust or should I consider a different video Encoder/container/etc? I heavily edit my videos so I try to make sure that the source footage I'm working with is decent enough that re-encoding afterwards doesn't ruin it, which usually means, for me, staying away from x264. At this point I'm considering just going back to 720p, so any help is appreciated. Also, I'll admit I'm not really knowledgeable in any of this, so I may be doing something incredibly wrong, so if this is a dumb question I apologize.

 

[Fenrir]

Why aren't you just using the recording quality presets? What exactly are you getting by trying to use custom ffmpeg output?

 

[D_Widget]

Why aren't you just using the recording quality presets? What exactly are you getting by trying to use custom ffmpeg output?

The presets, while they provide decent video, don't provide the quality I need for editing, due to the software encoding directly into x264 or NVENC. The ffmpeg output settings I use provide much higher quality recordings that I can edit heavily and not have to worry about loss of quality. It is also a little bit of a space saver than the raw video I would get with Fraps and OBS doesn't impact my system like Fraps does.

 

[Fenrir]

The presets, while they provide decent video, don't provide the quality I need for editing, due to the software encoding directly into x264 or NVENC. The ffmpeg output settings I use provide much higher quality recordings that I can edit heavily and not have to worry about loss of quality. It is also a little bit of a space saver than the raw video I would get with Fraps and OBS doesn't impact my system like Fraps does.

You're basically using the lossless preset but also kinda breaking things, like your CRF metric is being ignored. Can you try the lossless preset and see if it works better?

 

[D_Widget]

Sorry, have been kind of busy recently. Just tried using the lossless preset and my game crashed and my computer froze. Kind of reluctant to try it again. This was done while recording to an external hard drive with plenty of space.

 

[wallrik]

The lossless preset is literally what you're already trying to do,
avi container, utvideo video and pcm_s16le audio.

Computer issues is probably some issue outside of OBS.

If you still want ffmpeg output, as already mentioned by Fenrir - you can't set "crf" for utvideo. The only option you can set is "pred" for its prediction method. It can be "none", "left", "gradient" or "median".

"left" is the default setting and optimizes for decoding speed. "median" optimizes for compression ratio.

But I would suggest that you just use the lossless simple output and try again. :)

 

[D_Widget]

The lossless preset is literally what you're already trying to do,
avi container, utvideo video and pcm_s16le audio.

Computer issues is probably some issue outside of OBS.

If you still want ffmpeg output, as already mentioned by Fenrir - you can't set "crf" for utvideo. The only option you can set is "pred" for its prediction method. It can be "none", "left", "gradient" or "median".

"left" is the default setting and optimizes for decoding speed. "median" optimizes for compression ratio.

But I would suggest that you just use the lossless simple output and try again. :)

Gave it a second try, No crash, but as soon as I stop recording OBS got stuck on "Stopping Recording..." for upwards of 5 minutes for a 1 minute recording (during the encoding, the cpu was never went above 16% btw, not sure if that's something to take note of) , and the final product had audio and video hitching at random intervals. This was for a 1080p60fps recording use the machine specs I put in the OP.

Here's a Log of the process if that helps. A lot of things seem to be pointing to hardware not being up to snuff for recording lossless 1080p60fps video, which I'm not sure about since I consider my machine to be pretty high-end. Any thoughts?

 

[Osiris]

Post a screenshot of the main window of GPU-Z

 

[D_Widget]

Post a screenshot of the main window of GPU-Z

 

[Fenrir]

Verify if your motherboard has support for PCIe x16 3.0, you're only running at 2.0 which can be an indication of problems.

 

[D_Widget]

Verify if your motherboard has support for PCIe x16 3.0, you're only running at 2.0 which can be an indication of problems.

Motherboard is 78LMT-USB3, can't support PCIe x16 3.0. Only 2.0... Sounding like I may need to upgrade my motherboard.

Edit: Upon reading up a little bit more on it, Does the PCIe version really make that much difference with a 1070? Everything I've found so far seems to indicate that graphics cards are only now just getting to the point where 3.0 is even useful. That's just from a cursory glance at various forums, though.

 

[Fenrir]

Motherboard is 78LMT-USB3, can't support PCIe x16 3.0. Only 2.0... Sounding like I may need to upgrade my motherboard.

Edit: Upon reading up a little bit more on it, Does the PCIe version really make that much difference with a 1070? Everything I've found so far seems to indicate that graphics cards are only now just getting to the point where 3.0 is even useful. That's just from a cursory glance at various forums, though.

No, if your motherboard only supports 2.0 it's fine, it was just something that could indicate an issue if it's supposed to support 3.0.

 

[D_Widget]

No, if your motherboard only supports 2.0 it's fine, it was just something that could indicate an issue if it's supposed to support 3.0.

Gotcha. In that case, sounds like it is indeed an issue of hardware just not being able to handle encoding lossless 1080@60fps on the fly. Any recommendations for settings for local recordings that would still have enough quality to handle heavy editing?

 

[Fenrir]

Use simple mode and the indistinguishable quality preset, with the NVENC encoder.