The Game Video Recording/Editing Topic (programs, settings)

[Art Blade]

Hey guys,

for some time now we've got a handful of members recording their own gameplay videos and discussions about what and how are scattered across the forum. I think it's time to share our knowledge and experiences in a way that we can find it when needed. Like, here.

First a vid once recommended by fragger that helped me too, from one of the creators of the OpenShot video editor.



The "recorders" and their software, so far:

PZ: PS4
Dweller_Benthos: nVidia's ShadowPlay/OpenShot
nex: D3DGear
fragger: D3DGear/OpenShot
BinnZ: OBS
OWGKID: D3DGear, OBS/PowerDirector 16
Art Blade: D3DGear, OBS/OpenShot

I think it really kicked off when nex got a whole bunch of us started with D3DGear. Until then, other stuff was in use. In the meantime, I created well over 100 videos.

We found out that D3DGear is easy to handle and really fast which means it produces smooth videos, works with apparently just any game BUT it creates insanely large raw video files, even on low settings.

OBS is free but hard to manage and the results depend on the combination of tons of different settings. In other words, not everyone's cup of tea.

However. I spent a lot of time trying to get OBS to produce high quality videos while creating small files. I gave up, reconsidered, gave up, reconsidered.. in total, I spent weeks, on and off, trying to master that bloody OBS. The tutorials and tips&tricks articles and videos on the net are inconsistent and sometimes utter nonsense, you can't just copy someone else's settings to get their kind of result, it is very likely not going to w0#k for you.

With all that said, for now I'll just sum up what I've learned so far:

In my opinion, OBS will beat D3DGear by a mile when set up properly. Just one example:

I recently recorded a Hitman 2 video for myself, for testing purposes, that is 1.40h (one hour forty minutes) long. The game quality settings were/are essentially on maximum (except shadows) and the video setting was/is 1080p60. The file size: 3.8GB.

I got that file size with just a few minutes on highest quality settings when using D3DGear.

My average 1080p60 vids of a couple of minutes are usually just a few hundred MB, like 3 minutes 100MB, kind of.

I uploaded an almost 20 minutes vid about creating a Hitman contract and the file size is just 680MB.

All my recent vids are made with OBS because, can't beat it.

Wanna know how to set up OBS properly? What D3DGear settings are useful?

Also video editing with free OpenShot can be tricky. There are tons of useless tutorial vids but fragger found some really cool ones. We should also collect tips and tricks how we edit stuff.

What do you guys think? Shall we start creating our own knowledge base, tutorials, tips and tricks sections and all that?

Alright, "Shoot!"

[fragger]

Sounds like a good thing to me, Art. I don't have anything yet to contribute off the top of my head, but I think a knowledge base would come in very handy, especially for those of us who are fairly new to the whole video recording/editing thing

[Art Blade]

OK, cool. Let's see what the other guys have to say.

3. 2. 1. Sorry, time's up..



Seriously, I want to know what you other guys think. If you're in for it, then I'll start posting settings. But I much rather post them in individual topics, else we're likely going to end up in one mass-topic with everything mixed up and hard to find.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah might be a good idea, maybe a sub forum for video creating / editing?

[Art Blade]

yeah, could be here in media

[nex]

Can only do good 
Art and I did quite a bit of testing with D3DGear and I got to the point now where I'm happy with the settings.
Although the file is big like Art says, yesterday I did a 13 min clip 1.16Gb, but setting up D3D is a piece of cake compared to OBS.

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[LowPolyOWG]

OBS isn't that good for thread-heavy games (The Division/Destiny), as footage usually stuttered. D3DGear feels way better. PowerDirector is a movie editor suite. Quite powerful tool. It sometimes go for -70% discounts, which makes it a cheap package

PowerDirector turned the 2.28 GB file to a 795 MB one, after rendering

[Art Blade]

the stuttering you mentioned was a huge problem for me, too, which is why I got D3DGear in the first place.

But I solved the stuttering problem in OBS.

To cut it short: you need a base output which shouldn't be too low and a maximum output, like a variable bitrate. And believe me, the maximum should he a huge number.

Edit: for games or maps that are really heavy on the graphics, I set up a second profile with these settings:

Massive Bitrate setting:
Bitrate 8192 Kbps
Max Bitrate 24576 Kbps

/edit.

OBS output
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[LowPolyOWG]

 

Nice find!

[Art Blade]

cheers

you'll notice that OBS in my setting uses, like D3Dgear, a hardware encoder.

In my case, the "new" nVidia NVENC H.264.

VBR stands for Variable Bit Rate.

Edit:
read this post first but then please don't forget to read about my latest observation and addition/correction which will help you achieve better results.
/Edit.

What it does: the field "Bitrate" is actually the minimum at which a vid is being recorded. It does influence the overall video file size. I set it to 5x1024=5120 which is usually sufficient. Set it lower and you might get stutter even if there's not much going on. Set it higher and the vid size inflates unnecessarily. However, you can play with that and test it.

Max Bitrate: I generously set it to 160x1024=163840 to be able to cope with even demanding game settings. Set it lower and you might actually touch the limit causing stutter. If it stutters, try an even higher value. From what I can tell, recording a racing game might actually require really high settings but normal shooter/action games should be fine with my value. Depending on how much action you're recording, like running around, many NPC, tons of reflecting objects like glass panels, the software will crank up the output up to what you define there. If it's not needed, it will drop down to the Bitrate setting of 5120. Which is why VBR is the best option along with hardware encoding, it is closest to what D3DGear does, only with a lot smaller files.

Obviously you still need to set the video output like so:

OBS video
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[LowPolyOWG]

 

[Art Blade]

 

I used to get brutal stutters around glass panels and windows which in the end made me buy D3DGear. But as soon as I realised how massive the video files were, I desperately tried to reduce that.

The screenshot posted by nex is spot on, it is the best compromise to get (if barely) what I'd call "acceptable" quality and file size. It downscales to 1280x720 and only uses 50 frames per second, both of which reduces file size significantly. What is misleading: "Good" quality/compress ratio is actually the best compromise. If you chose "best," it isn't related to compression but quality, meaning you'll get a massive file size. So set it to "good" as depicted in nex's screenshot. The result is a smooth video that looks slightly blurred but you won't get any lags while playing and you'll get comparatively small file sizes.

But still, they're BIG compared to the OBS settings I posted above, plus the OBS vid quality (max quality/high profile) and resolution (full HD @ 60 fps) is really good. Also, thanks to hardware encoding, you won't notice lags while playing the game.

Which is why I prefer recording with OBS.

Just repeating myself here but damn, it took weeks to figure out how OBS works to get proper results, and I'm happy to share those settings with you.

Feel free to ask me anything I haven't covered yet, I'll do my best to answer your questions.

[Art Blade]

Oh, regarding OBS, one more thing springs to mind:
I remember G mentioning, "the preview is always active," which might use up GPU/CPU and all that.

You can just right-click on the preview and choose "disable" (or enable, for that matter)

[Dweller_Benthos]

Not sure how big the files are from Shadowplay, but I do know they hit the Windows 7 file size limit after about 11 minutes of video, which is why I uploaded a couple as part 1 & 2. I'd have to look at what settings I have, but I think I'm doing 30fps just to limit it a little bit, but I think I just put the slider halfway between "good" and "best" and left it at that. There is a custom setting where you can set fps and bitrate and all that, but so far I've been satisfied with the results so never looked much further into it.

[Art Blade]

I just uploaded a 9 minutes 30 seconds clip 1080p60 and the raw video is just 362MB small.

If you want to check out the quality, here you go.

Spoiler