I experience this problem more with some games than others, but last night I was recording some Rainbow Six Siege gameplay and it can look a little choppy. I've watched youtube videos following setups to optimize my recording but that didn't seem to help. How can I make the recording smoother? Here's my log:
Question / Help OBS seems to be dropping some frames when recording, it's not clean.
- Thread starter spark8000
- Start date
FerretBomb
Active Member
Yep, your log shows that you have 4.3% skipped frames due to encoder lag.
1) Run OBS as Administrator. You also have some rendering delay, and this will help fix it thanks to the GPU priority workaround added a few revisions ago.
2) Don't use CUDA-enabled options. Use the Quality preset instead of Max Quality. Turn OFF Lookahead and Psycho-Visual Tuning. These regularly cause problems even on well-tuned systems, and are almost always the cause of NVENC encoder overloads.
3) NEVER RECORD TO MP4 DIRECTLY FOR ANY REASON, EVER. MP4 is not a recording-safe format. If anything goes wrong during the recording, the entire recording will be corrupted into a big pile of digital garbage, and be 100% un-recoverable. Many editors have problems with the mp4s OBS records directly, as well. Record to MKV, and use the OBS File menu, Remux Recordings to generate mp4 files if you need them for editing. You can also turn on auto-remux on completion of a recording in Settings->Advanced.
1) Run OBS as Administrator. You also have some rendering delay, and this will help fix it thanks to the GPU priority workaround added a few revisions ago.
2) Don't use CUDA-enabled options. Use the Quality preset instead of Max Quality. Turn OFF Lookahead and Psycho-Visual Tuning. These regularly cause problems even on well-tuned systems, and are almost always the cause of NVENC encoder overloads.
3) NEVER RECORD TO MP4 DIRECTLY FOR ANY REASON, EVER. MP4 is not a recording-safe format. If anything goes wrong during the recording, the entire recording will be corrupted into a big pile of digital garbage, and be 100% un-recoverable. Many editors have problems with the mp4s OBS records directly, as well. Record to MKV, and use the OBS File menu, Remux Recordings to generate mp4 files if you need them for editing. You can also turn on auto-remux on completion of a recording in Settings->Advanced.
I've adjusted some output settings, including increasing my CBR bitrate up to 20000, set the key frame interval to 2, set preset to quality, profile to main, unchecked lookahead. I also put process priority to above normal in advanced settings. This seemed to fix the problem for a small sample of footage I took. I have another problem I experience in longer recordings where gradually as the recording goes on the audio lags behind more and more, is this due to dropped frames do you think?
FerretBomb
Active Member
Don't record with CBR. Use CQP or CRF.
CBR is only used for livestreaming as many services require it due to limitations with their back-end infrastructure, and need a reliable rate to smoothly handle video segmentation and delivery.
CQP/CRF are quality-target based encoding methods, that use as much or as little bitrate as is needed to maintain a given image quality level (larger numbers are worse quality, 0 is uncompressed video; most use in the 16-22 range, some go down to 12 if they plan to edit the video later, lower than that generally shouldn't be used). When recording, you don't have to worry about the bandwidth bottleneck that streaming does... and frankly, hard drive space is cheap.
Post a new logfile and we can take a look at the audio desync. This can happen for a number of reasons. Is it only one audio source losing sync, or do all of them drift?
CBR is only used for livestreaming as many services require it due to limitations with their back-end infrastructure, and need a reliable rate to smoothly handle video segmentation and delivery.
CQP/CRF are quality-target based encoding methods, that use as much or as little bitrate as is needed to maintain a given image quality level (larger numbers are worse quality, 0 is uncompressed video; most use in the 16-22 range, some go down to 12 if they plan to edit the video later, lower than that generally shouldn't be used). When recording, you don't have to worry about the bandwidth bottleneck that streaming does... and frankly, hard drive space is cheap.
Post a new logfile and we can take a look at the audio desync. This can happen for a number of reasons. Is it only one audio source losing sync, or do all of them drift?
I tweaked some settings and after about a 30 min recording I don't see any problems! Here's my log if you wanna confirm everything is fine (except for exporting to mp4, I'll change that)