Question / Help Terrible Quality for Local Recording

[Rinzei]

Hi everyone. I've only used OBS on and off for the last few months, but I'm at a standstill. I have a decent machine and graphics card, using OBS to record some gameplay. While the preview seems fine, the resulting video is choppy as all hell - pretty much unusable. The audio is fine, no skips or anything, just very choppy video. I've found the guide for best quality of local recording and it just doesn't seem to do anything for my setup.

I've used this guide from the Resources page, as it's the major result that comes up every time I look the best settings up. I've tried crf=20, crf=20, even crf=2 - nothing looks smooth. I did a test of all three settings, and then did a quick capture with FRAPS, which was smooth as butter - of course, it was also 7 times the size of the crf=2 recording.

My PC specs are:
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
8 GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6950 2GB Graphics Card

I was running it on Saints Row: The Third, DirectX10/11 version. I DO use RadeonPro for my graphics settings in some programs, but I had it disabled on SR3 in case it was interfering. I am also using Window Capture with Borderless Windowed installed, as Game Capture only shows black screen with audio for me.

I have also noticed more freezing with OBS recently. Previously, when I previewed feed or started/stopped recording, it was instantaneous - now, for some reason, it's begun to delay in doing any of those things and if I touch anything while it's "thinking" about it, the program will freeze into "Not Responding". Not really a major issue, if I have some patience to wait, but it just seems weird that it suddenly started doing it. Wonder if the new update isn't playing nice on my PC? I'm on v0.638b.

I'm at a bit of a loss. I'm not very well versed on bitrates and encoding, so I'm not sure what I should or shouldn't change, and most advice I've seen around is to use the guide I've already been using. Does anyone have some insight?


I've also attached my log file - it was too large to paste into the thread.

 

[Osiris]

Downscale to 1280x720.

 

[theinzane]

Hello

Your local recordings are bad quality because your bitrate is to low for the resolution you are trying to encode (1080p). I recommend increasing your bitrate to at least 5000 for local recording 1080p30fps. The quality still wont be lossless but it will be a significant improvement over what you are currently using. If you aren't concerned with disc space than you can increase the bitrate even higher to improve the quality further.

If you want to live stream to twitch I recommend going no higher than 3500bitrate.

I personally suggest for a high motion game like saints row or any FPS game to record at 720p 60fps. The quality is good but having the extra frames really helps the feed look a lot smoother and it should be a little less taxing on your CPU than trying to encode 1080p footage.

I hope this helps and gets you the results you desire.

 

[Osiris]

Theinzane, he has his custom buffer size set to 0, so OBS is gonna use as much bitrate as it needs to achieve the quality level.

 

[Rinzei]

Reducing it down to 1280x720 and changing it to 60fps has made it smoother - still a bit choppy and I can definitely see in the running animation that frames are being skipped, but it's smoother than before. Upping the max bitrate has had no effect. Changing the crf to lower than 10 hasn't had any improvement really.

Space isn't a major issue. I've got 1TB left on my harddrive and I don't record that often, so there's space to play with for the moment, but I'd still like to keep the videos well under what full lossless would amount to.

 

[Rinzei]

I did more testing last night and it did not matter what I did - the recording for Saints Row 3 was always unwatchable.

I tried, with the resource guide's settings:
1. Radeon Pro, 60Hz refresh Rate, with Dynamic Framerate Control enabled at 60fps, then at 59fps - still the same
2. Radeon Pro completely disabled - was actually worse!
3. Running the above on Saints Row 3 with DirectX9, instead of DirectX11 - no improvement.

I then tried recording using Fraps has a sort of "benchmark" - again, this was perfect, albeit massive in size. I then tried using an Elgato Game Capture HD capture card. After some fighting with it, I managed to get that working - the recording was also smooth, like Fraps. (Can't get the audio to work, but that's a different problem for another forum...)

I then realised that I had just been testing Saints Row 3. I took a look at some older videos frp, OBS, using the same settings, and realised that they were all fine - including Skyrim running on Ultra with the newer ENBseries binary. So, I'm wondering if Saints Row 3 is just crap for encoded recording! I'll be running some tests on other games, including Saints Row 4 and Skyrim again, this evening to see if they're better or not. It'll be a shame if I can't get the recording to work with Saints Row 3, but sometimes, them's the breaks.

 

[alpinlol]

1080p60
preset ultrafast
buffer 0
bitrate ignored (type in whatever 1000 default)
cbr=unchecked
cfr=checked
crf=16

if possible dont use game capture with the anticheat hook except it is needed as another test you might try disabling aero as a test on win7


after you have tested those settings post a short vid on yt if possible so we can actually see if it is "bad quality" or just bad quality in your opinion.

you might aswell test using bitrate/buffer 30000

 

[Rinzei]

1080p60
if possible dont use game capture with the anticheat hook except it is needed as another test you might try disabling aero as a test on win7

I'll do some test videos this evening when I get home. I'm not able to get Saints Row 3 working every time with Game Capture though - it just seems hit or miss. Will that make a big difference? Using Game Capture vs. Window Capture (with Borderless Windowed enabled)?

 

[alpinlol]

I'll do some test videos this evening when I get home. I'm not able to get Saints Row 3 working every time with Game Capture though - it just seems hit or miss. Will that make a big difference? Using Game Capture vs. Window Capture (with Borderless Windowed enabled)?

well no doubt game capture is the best capture method available for games on windows7 on win8 monitor capture would be close to game capture but usually games tend to run better when they are played in fullscreen mode which only works with game capture (not all games though)

and not using anti cheat hook if possible is just a recommendation obs gives you when you mouse over the checkmark so why not trust them :)

 

[Rinzei]

I'll give Game Capture another go then - see if I can get it to play nice. :3

 

[Rinzei]

Alpinol, you're awesome. :) The setting that was throwing it was the preset. On veryfast, it's crap - ultrafast, it's smooth like FRAPS and still a seventh of the size as one. I managed to get Game Capture working with SR3 Directx9 edition - DirectX11 just shows up blank. Game Capture definitely worked better than Window Capture in that case as well. Window Capture didn't stutter the same as before, but it seems to just get stuck for seconds at a time on a single frame. Not very good. But yay, Game Capture looks great! :)

For just comparison, here are a few of the videos.

Normal settings from the resource guide, 1080p60, with veryfast preset - Window Capture - This is what I was getting everytime with Saints Row 3 that nothing else seemed to be doing...

 

[Rinzei]

alpinol's settings - including ULTRAFAST preset, 1080p60 - Game Capture (watch it on 720p - for some reason, 1080p glitches out - the recorded file doesn't do that)

 

[Rinzei]

alpinol's settings - including ULTRAFAST preset. 1080p60 - Window Capture (again, watch in 720p, because 1080p glitches)