Question / Help Trying to figure out what's going on with my frame rates.

[Uzuki]

This is what my setup looks like when I use OBS in tandem with the Elgato software (for flashback recording). It's great and I love it but one thing I can't figure out is what's going on with my framerate in OBS. It's locked at 30 FPS and my Elgato captures at 30 FPS, but sometimes they seem to fall out of sync. And it's like OBS is doing 20-25 FPS even though says 30, because the feed stutters as if it's capturing every other frame of the Elgato preview. Can this even happen? If you use OBS to capture what's basically a 30 FPS video at 30 FPS what's going on when it looks like it's dropping frames but still showing a consistent 30 FPS in the status bar?

 

[Narcogen]

Do a recording, then post a log:

Please post a log with your issue! Here's how...

 

[Uzuki]

Eh, well if I have to make a log file nevermind. I was just wondering if anybody savvy on video editing might know what's going on. I have logs disabled and blocked because I don't want OBS spamming them on my SSD.

 

[carlmmii]

Just a guess, but it sounds like preview just dropping frames. It's always been an issue. As long as it shows up fine in a recording, there's nothing to worry about unless you're trying to play directly from the preview.

Btw, use a compressed folder for your logs if you're worried about space saving. It's just text, so it compresses to practically nothing... and gives you valuable information that people can actually help you with.

 

[Narcogen]

OBS logfiles, even for sessions lasting hours, are tiny text files. You don't need to turn them off to save your SSD, and no one will be able to really help troubleshoot a performance issue without seeing them.

 

[Uzuki]

It's not their size, it's the constant writes. SSDs have a limited lifespan depending on writes (and size doesn't matter) so I try to minimize the amount of files that get saved to mine. Every time you open OBS it creates a log file and I don't need that. I would enable it though if I had any real problems with OBS.

 

[koala]

Don't be afraid of writing logfiles to SSDs. Logfiles are tiny. A few kilobytes. You can write these thousands of years continuously and not wear out a SSD.
There has been research how much data can be written to an SSD, for example the german computer magazine c't:
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/mel...-beendet-Exitus-bei-9-1-Petabyte-3755009.html

The result: you can use SSDs just like ordinary harddisks. If you write 40 GB a day, the better SSD last about 623 years, the not so good 1/9 of it, which is almost 70 years. And nobody really writes 40 GB a day but much less.

Actually, SSDs make perfect devices for video recording and video editing due to their incredibly low random access latency!

Log files of 10-20 kilobytes are absolutely nothing. In case you cannot estimate how kilobytes, gigabytes, terabytes and petabytes relate to each other:
1 petabyte is 1000 terabyte
1 terabyte is 1000 gigabyte
1 gigabyte is 1000 kilobyte
thus
1 petabyte is 1000 * 1000 * 1000 kilobyte or 1,000,000,000 kilobytes.

If your SSD can sustain 1 Petabyte (that's the worst SSD from the c't report), and we speak of 100 kilobytes of OBS logs a day, it wears out due to log files in 1,000,000,000 kilobytes / 100 kilobytes per day = 10,000,000 days or 10,000,000 / 365 = 27,397 years.

So: just use your SSD freely.
Use it where it plays out its strength: work with heavy read and write access, made incredibly fast du to the high IOPS of a SSD. You restrict yourself unnecessarily, if you don't use it this way.
I do video editing and other stuff on SSDs for years, I've yet to see a worn out SSD. On the other hand, I have a cupboard full of broken HDs (I'm a collector of these).

 

[Uzuki]

If your SSD can sustain 1 Petabyte (that's the worst SSD from the c't report).

Uh, my SSD is 150 TBW, nowhere near 1 PB. It's capacity is only 120 GB and I have about 30 GB left of that. It's alI I really need since I have several HDDs and don't play many games on my PC. I took what you said to heart though and moved my temp folders and paging file back to the SSD.

 

[koala]

All the SSDs in the above mentioned report had TBW between 60 and 150. They all exceeded their predicted lifetime by far in the test. TBW means is "terabytes written". It doesn't mean that if you have a 120 GB SSD, you can write that 120 GB, delete 30 GB and again write 30 GB to get to this number of 150. A terabyte is 1000 times 1 GB.

Instead, for your 120 GB SSD with a TBW of 150, you can completely erase and write it full for 150 terabytes * 1000 gigabytes per terabyte / 120 gigabyte = 1250 times. You can 1250 times erase and write the whole 120 GB.

If you do this once every day, your SSD still has a guaranteed lifetime of 1250 / 365 = 3,4 years. According to the c't report, the worst SSD exceeded its guaranteed lifetime by factor 2,5. That means if you have this worst model, the actual lifetime of your SSD will be not lower than 8,5 years.
And if you don't rewrite the whole 120 GB but only half (60 GB), the actual lifetime of your SSD will be not lower than 17 years.

Honestly, you don't need to waste one second of your lifetime with thinking about how to reduce SSD wear out.
They simply don't wear out during their useful lifetime! When SSDs were new, it was rumored that they wear out very fast, but years of productive use showed all these fears were unsubstantiated. Don't stick to these obsolete and unfounded rumors.

 

[Uzuki]

Yes, I know all that. Except I'm terrible at math but susceptible to words. So when you said "If your SSD can sustain 1 Petabyte (that's the worst SSD from the c't report)" I assumed you were saying their worst SSD had 1 Petabyte in TBW, way above 150 Terabytes. I didn't bother actually reading the article since it's in German.

 

[koala]

I'm sorry, I didn't completely read that report at my first post. That 1 petabyte was the worst of the "pro"-rated SSDs, not of all tested SSDs. The worst SSD was a consumer SSD that actually died after 2,5 times its TBW, and I used that number in my second post.