Recording at 60 fps vs converting to 60

[Eiroth]

I currently want to record a game I play at 90 fps and upload to youtube, which supports a maximum framerate of 60 fps. Now, the correct solution I presume would be to limit the framerate of the game to 60 fps and record like that, but I've gotten far too used to higher framerates to do that now.

My question is whether I'll get the best results by recording at 60, or by recording at 90 and converting to 60 using ffmpeg or handbrake. I've done some testing, but I'm not sure I've gotten the settings right.

 

[carlmmii]

You will always get best results by recording at the native framerate you intent to record at, or at least an integer multiple of it (although with motion blur, this latter argument is invalid, since motion blur length depends on the virtual shutter speed).

The problem comes into movement per frame. In your example of wanting to play at 90fps and convert to 60fps, the only way to do this without making completely new frames would be to throw out every 3rd frame, and play the remaining frames back at 60fps. This results in a jittery mess, since there will be a certain movement going between one frame and the next, and then twice the movement for the next after that, and then back to the slower movement.

Any type of "true" framerate conversion would be done using interpolation, which unfortunately results in much blurrier results as the contents of the stitched frames need to be composited using information from the nearest frames in time. It might look alright, but it's not going to be as good as just recording what that frame should be in the first place.

 

[Eiroth]

Thanks for the reply. Yeah, I figured that would be the main problem, but I'm already pushing it slightly at 90 fps, so going up to 120 is probably not an option. I guess I should just keep recording at 90 and accept that the 60 fps version will look a bit weird. At least that way I can still save the proper 90 fps version if I want to.