OBS Recording Produced Massive File Size

[deepdarkboys]

Hey guys! This is my first post here so I apologize if I screw up any of the formatting.

I've been recording PC gameplay with OBS for a few months now, and it has been going pretty smoothly. Today I recorded three separate videos, all with the same settings, but for whatever reason the third and final one produced MASSIVE files.

First I did some basic display capture stuff, YouTube videos and whatnot. That's the first log file, 16-27-01. The files produced were a reasonable size - ~2 gigs for 20 minutes.

Second I recorded a game called Inscryption. That's the second log file, 21-54-27. This time using Game Capture in OBS. The files are ~6 gigs for 24 mins, and ~4 gigs for 13 mins. Again, reasonable!

But third, I recorded a game called Happy's Humble Burger Farm. All settings in OBS identical. Using Game Capture again. Nothing different about it, recorded them back to back. But the files.. 38 gigs for 40 mins, then 28 gigs for 23 mins?! How'd this happen?! The only thing I can think of is that in game I set the graphics to Ultra for this one.. but I mean I'm not playing Crysis over here. This is Happy's Humble Burger Farm!

Is the giant file size a result of letting OBS record for such a long stretch? I feel like I've done 40 minute recordings in the past and nothing like this has happened before. It really scared me because it completely filled my hard drive. I checked My Computer and for a few minutes it was saying that I had 0 bytes on my drive.

Any and all help is massively appreciated. Thank you all so much in advance!

Sincerely,
Adam of DDB

 

[FerretBomb]

You are recording using CQP.
That means that the encoder will use as much or as little bitrate as is needed to maintain a given image quality level.
Recording a (mostly unchanging) desktop isn't going to need much bitrate.
Recording a (constantly moving) first or third person perspective game is going to need A LOT more. Especially if there is a lot of detail and foliage.

Entirely normal and expected. To reduce recorded filesizes, bump your CQP level up from 18 to 22 or so. The larger the number, the worse the image quality, but the smaller the file size. Most who are recording for video creation do not keep their high-quality master footage for long, or have devoted recording drives. Good quality in real-time takes space. You CAN then throw the footage through something like Handbrake to re-encode it more efficiently, once it's a dead-file recording.

 

[deepdarkboys]

Thanks Ferret! This makes sense given that Inscryption largely involves the player staring at a static screen, whereas HHBF is all first person and quick motion. If I raised that level to 22, would the difference in quality be negligible? I've noticed that regardless of how clean the recording is, or even the export of the finished edit, once it's uploaded to YouTube it ends up kind of compressed regardless. It'd be good to find a CQP level that is more or less on par with YouTube's video quality, so I'm not wasting hard drive space to obtain a quality that won't be seen on the other side anyway.

I also noticed after posting this that I had my monitor set to 165hz refresh rate. Could that have had something to do with it? Even though I've set OBS to cap it at 60? I lowered the monitor refresh rate to 60 after this, and then did some recording for a different first-person game, and the file sizes were reasonable again.

Thanks again!
Adam