How To Record Gameplay On PC With OBS (Best Settings, Resolutions, and MORE)

recording gameplay has never been easier anyone can do it but not many people can do it right laggy footage blurry footage or just no sound at all today we're going to show you how to record game footage in OBS as well as all the settings to make the quality amazing crisp and clear to make both your microphone and your game sound perfect but then I'm going to show you the most important thing you will learn something massive gaming YouTubers do for every recording and that is how to record both your gameplay and a webcam or camera at the same time inside OBS without burning the webcam over the top of the game this gives you clean footage meaning you can focus on one or the other zoom in on either without issues and make your edits far more engaging for viewers let's go obviously to do all of this you need to install OBS so head to OBS project.com I'll link it in the description and download for your operating system click install once it's done and you're ready to go OBS is an incredible tool you can use it to not just record games but anything on your computer you can stream with it add graphics like these free overlays I made for you guys or you can get much more professional fully animated packs as well so before we show you how to set up your video settings properly let's show you how to enter the giveaway own has given me dozens of vouches to give out to you guys in the comments these work alongside their Global sale as well which means anytime they put up a sale you can grab pretty much any of their overlay packs Graphics banners for your YouTube channel you name it for free or even just a few dollars as I said I'm giving them away in the comments all you have to do to enter is comment # owned giveaway and then what Graphics you'd buy maybe it's an over maybe it's some sub badges or maybe it's just a YouTube Banner massive thank you to own for sponsoring this video if you want to support me please go and support them with the link in the description or by entering the giveaway in the comments now let's get back to the video once you have OBS installed you're going to open it and see this big black box this is called a preview window this is where your gameplay and Graphics will be but first I want to set up your video settings now I know a lot of videos just give you a bunch of specific settings and tell you to copy them without explaining in any detail why and I hope you'll forgive me but I hated my math teacher for doing this sort of thing to me so so I'm going to make this simple for beginners while also trying to make sure you don't leave this video with no idea what to change if something goes wrong if you understand what you're changing and why you'll be far more likely to get better footage and not hit massive snags and find yourself back at this video asking questions so head to settings click video and first thing we're going to do is pick a resolution now personally I always record at 1920 x 1080p on both my base canvas and my output canvas the difference between these two settings is essentially base canvas is your preview window size and the output is what your final video size size is going to be the two main resolutions you'll pick between a 1920 x 1080 or 1280 x 720 these days 1080p tends to be standard but if you on a low-end computer 720p might be a better option for you so if you find your OBS struggling later you can come back here and drop the output to 720 and that way you're scaling down 1080 to 720 for better quality but it won't be so intense on your PC below that is our FPS or frames per second you'll set this to either 30 or 60 most of the time however if you're say Australian like I am or european or another country that uses what's called pal you might want your FPS set to 25 or 50 depending on where you're sending the footage later I'm in Australia and I still use 30 or 60 because it doesn't matter most of the time since everything just goes to YouTube these days with that we're moving on to our output personally I used advanced mode so I do recommend you do as well so select that here in the output section since we're focused on recording today we will click this tab that says recording but if you want to guide on streaming settings then please let me know in the comments and subscribe I'll make that soon let's go down through the settings one at a time first is recording recording path this is where the recordings you make will be saved I recommend making a folder called OBS recordings somewhere that you won't forget and then setting this setting to that below that is recording format the most common you'll know is MP4 or potentially Mau but we're not going to record as either of those because if we did and your OBS or PC crashed turned off or generally stopped recording when you didn't want it to the file would corrupt and be unusable which means you might lose hours of work so instead we're going to be recording as MKV files and don't worry I'll show you how to convert those to MP4 files later without issue inside OBS so you can edit them below that we have our video encoder this used to be so simple but it's gotten more confusing as more graphics cards have become decent for Content creation damn computer engineers and trying to improve our hardware for us so look I will try and keep it simple for you by focusing on just three of these today we're going to talk about nank h.264 x264 and av1 to make this straightforward if you're using any Nvidia card past the GTX 600 which was released in 2012 so likely any Nvidia card being used on a semi new pc you're going to pick nank h.264 this means you're using a special chip on your graphics card to encode footage this chip is separate and just used solely for encoding and decoding so it won't affect your gameplay performance at all and if you're using a graphics card from before that or isn't compatible with enven then you'll likely have to use x264 which will be using your CPU to encode and decode instead of your graphics card finally ab1 is a newer encoder and I will be honest I'm still learning the best case for using it and I'll link instead a video directly in the description by epos Vox who has done extensive testing on this kind of thing if you want a deep dive below that you have audio tracks and encoder I left this as ffmpeg AAC but I did turn on all six audio tracks this is very important because it means I could split my audio up so my mic and my game aren't burned in together in my footage later again very recommended you'll see why later though now depending on if you use nank or x264 you will need to use different settings below specifically for bit rate mostly a lot of people people get bit rate confused because it's often talked about in relation to streaming on Twitch which has a soft cap of 6,000 but bit rate simply put is the amount of information being saved or sent really higher bit rates mean more information or higher quality but it also means it there's more taxing on your computer resources because of twitch I see a lot of new creators record footage offline at 6,000 bit rate except that is actually a really low bit rate for recording 1080p footage heck it's even low for streaming but twitch just decided to soft cap it there and tell you all to get screwed so let's set this up properly for recording in the encoder settings you have rate control this will be set to CBR by default which means you're recording at the same bit rate all the time and below that is where you set the bit rate that you want to be recording at all the time I found for 1080p 60 frames per second that recording at 15,000 to 18,000 bit rate gave me excellent quality of editing my gameplay footage down later but any higher than that I couldn't really tell a difference that said 8,000 to 9,000 bit rate did still give me usable and clean footage so if your PC is struggling start at 8,000 or 9,000 and slowly increase to increase your quality the issue is though because CBR means I recording the same bit rate the entire time I end up with massive files and a lot of wasted data I did it because twitch preferred CBR and it just kind of stuck but if you want to get a little more complicated in recordings instead I would recommend selecting cqp which in short is smarter and will change the bit rate as needed so you're not wasting data this does mean rather than setting a bit rate you're setting a CQ level which again in short a low number here means higher quality footage but High numbers mean lower quality I found recording at 15 gave me footage that was perfect and indistinguishable to viewers so zero issues but 20 will also give totally usable footage so again if your OBS can't handle 15 start at 20 and slowly lower it down by one until you find a nice balance below that we have preset a good starting place for this is to set it to good quality but again it's quite self-explanatory changing this up or down uses more or less Computer Resources but of course changes quality slightly below that is tuning I set M to high quality but again that is more intensive slower but better footage now multi-pass mode lets you tell OBS to do another pass on the encoding a single pass means this is off two quarter res means it's better than single and two full res is the highest I don't think many of you will be able to distinguish a difference so single is fine for most especially on low-end PCS I don't want to over complicate this for you finally since you're using nank leave on psycho visual tuning as Nvidia recommends it my GPU is set to zero and my B frame set to two I know that was a lot of detail but hopefully you'll be able to follow my settings and understand how to change these if your PC is struggling I'll show you how to diagnose if your settings are too high in a second so stick around but first x264 CPU encoding settings are a bit different so I want to highlight those quickly if you change video encoder to x264 and scroll down to the encoder settings you'll see CBR is the same and it also works the same as previously explained but instead of cqp we have CRF this while being called different works pretty much the same as cqp for a beginner AKA a lower number of is better but it's more intense on your computer the other settings are very similar to enbank as well but if you're curious I set mine to very fast and high and then I adjust if needed but wait what does if needed actually mean how can I tell if OBS is struggling well the fastest way is to actually just record some gameplay and watch the footage back you'll usually be able to see any issues you're having but the best way is actually to use the OBS stats panel while recording click View and click stats you'll get a lot of information such as CPU usage storage space current FPS which are all helpful but the the three I want to focus on are dropped skipped and lagged frames most don't know the difference but learning this will make life a lot easier for troubleshooting if you're not streaming and just recording then dropped frames won't happen dropped frames are when your internet or network are having connection or stability issues so imagine you're sending your video over the Internet through a big tube but there's holes in the tube and Frames keep leaking out next is lagged frames seen here and these are caused by high GPU usage which means to solve these you need to free up room on your GPU by lowering your resolution General video settings or other encoding settings a bit as I showed you earlier below that is Skip frames which are caused by high CPU usage and again lowering your resolution your general video settings other encoder settings or if possible switch to nank to utilize your GPU more and give your CPU room to breathe but with all of that congratulations the hard part is over now it is smooth sailing if you Tred to record gameplay right now you get a big black screen with no audio and I'm sure there is an audience for that but it's probably pretty Niche so let's add our audio settings now click settings go to audio and you'll be met with six Global audio devices if you're using a microphone and want to record your voice while gaming you'll click mic Ox audio one and select your microphone from the list then for all other PC audio such as games Spotify music Etc you'll click desktop audio and set this to your default Windows system audio for me that is my system bridgecast but for you it might be called headphones speakers or something else to confirm it you can go to the Windows settings and whatever the output is here you use normally will likely work or just set a default once you've added both of these click apply and then go down to the audio mixer dock click the three dots and click vertical layout this is really important because only freaks and sickos use horizontal levels now I want you to click the dot dot dot again and rename Mike Ox to microphone and desktop to gaming this is just to make it a bit neater while recording later you can use these sliders to change how loud your voice and games are recorded the goal is for voice to reach roughly -2 DB and the game should sit around -30 to -24 it's important to understand that all audio on your PC will be picked up on desktop audio so if you're recording your game and watching Netflix well now you've got Netflix audio in the recording and everyone knows you love watching the good doctor this is a really simple audio setup but it's just to get you started if you want a detailed video on how to split audio sources well that will be linked in the description because it's far more complex before we move on though click the three dots again and click Advanced Audio properties over on the right you will see tracks and a heap of checkboxes earlier in the settings we turned on all six tracks for recording remember and I said how important it was I'd recommend turning off everything to start with and now if you're streaming normally everything is sent to track one because that's what your stream will here but for recording you can split these up I will set everything to track one just for safety but then I will set my microphone to track two and my game to track three this means if I take my footage into editing software later my game and microphone are separate so I can edit them individually if we didn't do this and I wanted to make my game louder or quieter well I'd be affecting my voice as well again you can split this all up further such as recording Discord on its own track as well with the video in the description but without audio added it's time to capture your game and then I will show you my literal magic settings to record clean gameplay and Camera in the same file first in OBS on the left you will have a scene dock rename this to game scene and then right next to it is the sources doc we're adding a source to this dock that captures your game so click the plus and you're met with a list of potential sources your eye probably went straight to game capture which we can use but there are actually three options that are used for three different things if we add game capture and double click it you'll see mode most leave this on full screen application but I prefer changing this to capture specific window and then selecting my game under that I leave on anti-che but something people often forget is your capture cursor turn this on or off if you want your mouse in the recording and that is all you need for game capture but sometimes OBS won't recognize or let you capture certain games in these cases you'll use window or if it's really dire desktop capture window capture works the exact same as game you pick your window and you're done but again if game capture and window capture aren't working well then you can use desktop capture just please be very careful doing this as it captures obviously the entire desktop your entire monitor that you select including if you minimize or alt tab the game you can reveal your desktop and all those homework folders you're hiding from your mom but with that done what if you want to record your webcam as well so people can see your reactions to getting that sick triple collateral on Dust well click the plus add camera source and select your webcam TDA now if you recorded this you'd be burning this camera in over the footage you can't remove it easily later and while you might be fine with that I personally hate it so instead let me show you a trick giant YouTubers use every day go to profile at the top and click duplicate name this wide recording now in your settings you'll see everything should still be the same but we're going to change a few things first we're going to go to video and change our resolution to be double the width so 1920 x 1080 becomes 3840 x 1080 or 1280 x 720 becomes 2560 X 720 hit apply and go to Output recording settings now if you're using CBR to keep your settings simple then you'll need to double or potentially depending on the game if it's really high movement increase your bit rate by 2.5 times so for example if I was using 8,000 bit rate I would go to either 16,000 or 20,000 and if you're using cqp or CRF you'll drop this down a little lower but I found 15 still gave me pretty great quality obviously remember increasing bit rate and resolution like this will increase the load on your PC so this might not work for a low-end computer but for now once that's done hit apply go back to your Source list and make sure your game is full screen on the left and your camera is full screen on the right with no overlap this means we now have essentially 2920 X 1080p sections on our screen being recorded at the same time so start recording as normal once you're done stop recording but wait that's right this file is weird long and it's also an MKV so how do I edit any of this well first go to file in OBS Remo select the file you recorded and click Remo this converts it from from an MKV to an mp4 because remember MKV is great to avoid corrupt files but it's terrible for editing open your editor of choice I love Premier Pro and drag the mp4 file in this will create a timeline that matches its settings which isn't what we want so right click the sequence click settings and change your resolution from the big wide weird one down to 1920x 1080 or if you're using 720 down to 720 now select your clip in the timeline and drag the file over so the game is covering the full screen copy it layer it on top and then drag the top one over so the cam is full screen as you can see my audio is now perfectly synced with both my cam and my game in just a few minutes without either being burned in if you want you can add a crop effect and crop the game off from the top layer so it's just the webcam and do the exact same on the bottom but cropping just the webcam out so it's just the game you'll also see I have six audio tracks that's because we set these up earlier and you'll see here track one is all of my audio but track two is just my microphone and track 3 is just my game or Desktop sound with this I can edit my gameplay my camera and all of my audio easily to make the best videos possible if you want to learn more about how to set up OBS get fancy and AD Graphics click this video right here if you want to learn about all the ways that I create content I recommend clicking this video I Master Seven skills in seven days it's been called my most valuable video on YouTube I'll see you guys next week

Channel: Stream Scheme

Views: 299,084

Keywords: best settings obs, display capture obs, game capture obs, how to record gameplay on pc with obs, how to use obs, how to use obs studio to record screen, obs game capture, obs game capture black screen fix, obs gameplay, obs gameplay recording settings, obs gameplay recording tutorial, obs record games, obs recording settings, obs settings, obs studio, record gameplay, record games, record games with obs, recording games, window capture obs, OBS 2023, record games 2024

Id: aLxDKcMsRps

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2023