How To Record Gameplay On PC With Streamlabs (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 streamlabs all the settings to make that quality amazing crisp and clear to make your microphone and 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 at the same time inside streamlabs without burning the webcam over the top of your game this is so important because it gives you clean footage meaning you can focus on one or the other edit or zoom in on either without issue and it makes your edits far more engaging for viewers so let's go obviously to do all of this you need to install streamlabs so head to streamlabs.com I'll link it in the description and download it for your operating system click install and once it's done you're ready to go but look streamlabs is a good tool for a beginner but if you're starting out I want to strongly encourage you to use OBS instead it will be less intensive on your PC because streamlabs is really really just a skin that uses OBS as a base and then locks important tools behind pay walls or removes them entirely this exact same video you're watching now but for OBS is linked in the description but look if you still want to use streamlabs that's totally fine I am not here to judge you I'm just here to help you after all you can still 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 thanks to our sponsor owned who is doing a giveaway on this video you can get much more professional fully animated overlay packs as well let me show you how to enter that giveaway in the comments own has given me dozens of to give out to you guys these work alongside their Global sale as well which means right now you could go over there and grab pretty much any of their overlay packs Graphics YouTube social banners you name it for either free or just a few dollars as I said I'm giving them away in the comments all you have to do to enter is comment # own giveaway and what you would grab if you won massive thank you to own.tv for supporting this Channel and this video if you want to support me guys go support them with the link in the description or by entering the giveaway and now back to the video once you have streamlabs installed you're going to open it skip through a dozen popups trying to sell you and see this big black box called a preview window this is where your gameplay camera and Graphics will be but first I like to set up our video settings because it's the most complicated but once it's done you never have to worry again 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 the difference between these two settings is essentially base canvas is your preview window size and the output is what your final video size is going to be the two main resolutions you'll pick between are 1920 by 1080 or 1280 x 720 AKA 1080P or 720p these days 1080p tends to be the standard but if you're on a low-end computer 720p might be a better option for you so if you find streamlabs is struggling later you can come back here and drop your output to 720p and that way you're also scaling down 1080 to 720 for better quality but it won't be as intense below that is our FPS or frames per second you'll set this either to 30 or 60 most of the time that is however if you're say in Australia Europe 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 that said I'm in Australia I still use 30 or 60 because it doesn't matter most of the time cuz it's all going to YouTube with that we're moving on to our output personally I use advanced mode I do recommend you do as well so select that here in the output mode since we're focused on recording today we'll click this tab here but if you want a guide on streaming settings subscribe and ask me nicely in the comments and I'll do that soon let's go down to the settings one at a time first is recording path this is where any recordings you do will end up being saved I recommend making a folder called streamlabs recording somewhere that you won't forget about and then changing this setting to that location below that is recording format the most common you'll know is MP4 or potentially mob but we're not going to record as either of those because if we did and your streamlabs or PC crashed turned off or generally stopped recording when you didn't want it to the file would corrupt and be unusable later meaning you might lose hours of your work between you and me streamlabs is going to crash pretty often so we're going to be using MKV files instead and I'll show you how to convert these to MP4 files later for editing or sharing without without any issues it's easy don't worry 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 damn computer Engineers trying to improve our Hardware look I'll try to keep this simple for you the three I'm focusing on are 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 and if you're using a graphics card from before that you'll likely use x264 which will be using your CPU to encode and decode instead finally av1 is a newer encoder and I'll be honest I am still learning the best case for using it I will link directly a video in the description by OS vo who has done extensive testing if you want a deep dive just don't tell them you're there after watching a streamlabs guide below that you have audio tracks and did turn on all six audio tracks which means I can split my audio up so my mic and game aren't burned together in my footage later very recommended and you'll see why at the end of the video now depending on if you use nank or x264 you will need to use different settings below specifically for bit rate a lot of people get bit rate confused because it is 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 rate means more information or higher quality but it also means it'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 but that is actually kind of a low bit rate for recording 1080p footage heck it's even low for streaming but twitch just decided to soft cap it and tell you all to get screwed so let's try set this up properly in the encoder settings you have rate control this will be CBR by default which means you're recording at the same bit rate all the time and below that you set the bit rate of your choice I found for 1080p 60 frames per second 16,000 to 18,000 gave me excellent quality for editing my gameplay footage later but any higher I couldn't tell a difference and well 8,000 or 9,000 will still give me very usable clean footage so if your PC is struggling start at 8,000 or 9,000 and work your way up the issue is because CBR means I am recording at the same bit rate the whole time I end up with massive files and a lot of wasted data I used it because twitch preferred CBR and it just kind of stuck around but if you want to get a little more complicated in your recordings instead select 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 though in short low numbers here mean higher quality footage but bigger files and higher numbers mean lower quality footage but lower files I found recording at 15 gave me footage that was perfect and indistinguishable to viewers so zero issues but 20 also gave me totally usable footage so if your streamlabs can't handle 15 start at 20 and slowly lower it by 1 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 it's quite self-explanatory changing this up or down uses more or less Computer Resources while giving a better or worse quality finally since you're using nank leave on psycho visual tuning as Nidia recommends it but GPU is set to zero and B frames is set to two I know that was a lot of detail but hopefully you'll be be able to follow my settings and understand how to change the important ones if your PC is struggling I'll show you how to diagnose if your settings are too high in a second but first x264 CPU encoding settings are a little bit different so I want to highlight those now if you change the 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 one that's called CRF this while being called different Works kind of the same as cqp lower number better but more intense for example the other settings are very similar to nbbank as well but if you are curious I set mine to very fast and high and then adjust if needed from there but wait what does if needed actually mean how can I tell if streamlabs is struggling well the fastest way is to record gameplay and watch the footage back you'll pretty quickly be able to tell if there are any issues but the best way is to try use the streamlabs stats panel if you look in the bottom right you'll see a small graph button click this you'll get a lot of information all of a sudden such as CPU usage current FPS which are helpful sure but I want you to focus on the notification section which we'll be talking about 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 just won't happen because these are purely based on your internet or network connectivity they happen when your connectional stability is having issues imagine it is like trying to send video over the Internet through a big tube and Frames keep leaking out of the holes next is lagged frames unlike OBS streamlabs won't show you your current frame usage they'll simply pop up a notification if it starts to cause issues essentially it's not helpful unless something actually goes wrong lag frames 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 by a bit as I showed you how to earlier also in the notification section you'll be told about ski frames which are caused by high CPU usage and again lower your resolution General video settings and other encoding settings or if possible switch to nank to utilize your GPU more but with all of that congratulations the hard part is over now it's smooth sailing if you tried to record gameplay now you'd get a big black screen and no audio which isn't great so let's add our audio settings by clicking settings going to audio and once you're there you're met with six Global audio sources if you're using a microphone and want to record your voice while gaming you'll click mic Ox audio 1 and select your microphone from the list then for all your other PC audio such as gam Spotify music Etc you'll click desktop audio and set this to your default Windows system audio for me that is system bridgecast but for you it might be called something like headphones speakers or something else while recording later you can use these sliders to change how loud your voice and game are recorded the goal is for your 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 p PC will be picked up on desktop audio so if you're recording your game and watching Netflix well you've now got Netflix audio in the recording and everyone knows that you love watching Love is Blind what a freak this is a really simple audio setup just to get you started if you want a detailed video on how to split your audio sources or make your mic sound amazing they'll 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 check boxes early in settings we turned on all six tracks for recording remember this is where we say what gets recorded to each of those tracks I'd recommend turning everything off to start with and now if you're streaming normally everything is sent to track one because that's what your stream will hear but for recording you can then split these up for example I've sent everything to track one so my stream can hear it but then I put my microphone on track two and my game on track three this means if I take my footage into editing software later my game and microphone are separate on track 2 and three so I can edit them individually if we didn't do this and I wanted to make the game louder or quieter well it would affect my voice as well again you can split all this up further such as recording Discord on its own track as well which will be in 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 streamlabs on the left you will have a scenes dock rename this to game scene and right next to it is the sources dock we're adding a source to this dock that captures your game so click plus and you're met with a list of potential sources your eyes probably went straight to game capture which we can use but there are actually three options I want you to know about if we add game capture and double click it you'll mode most leave this on full screen applications 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 cursor or your mouse in the recording or not that is all you need for game capture but sometimes streamlabs won't recognize or let you capture games using game capture so instead you'll use window or if it's really dire desktop capture window capture works the exact same as game you add it as a source pick your window and you're done but again if that doesn't work you can use desktop to capture your entire desktop but be careful because doing this as I said captures your entire desktop which means if you minimize or alt tab the game you can reveal all those homework folders that you're trying to hide from Mom but what if you want to record your webcam as well so people can see your reaction when you get that sick triple collateral on Dust well click the plus button click add camera source and select your webcam if you're recording like this you'd be burning this camera in over the footage you can't remove it easily later or at all to be honest which you might be fine with but I hate it so instead let me show you the trick that giant YouTubers use instead so we're going to go to our settings and change a few things first we're going to go to video and change our resolution to be doubled the width of what we're currently recording at so if we're recording 1920 x 1080p then we're going to change this to 3840 X 1080P and 1280 x 720 becomes 256 x 720 once you've done that hit apply go to Output recording settings and if you're using CBR to keep your settings simple you'll simply just need to double or potentially depending on the the game for example if it has really high movement increase your bit rate by 2.5 times so if you're using 8,000 bit rate to record 1080p you'll double it to 16,000 or potentially 20,000 but if you're using cqp or CRF you'll drop this down a little lower so for example I found 15 still gave me great quality but obviously it's important to remember increasing bit rate and resolution will increase the load on your PC so this might not work for low-end computers but if you're going to give it a go once that's done hit apply go to your Source list and make sure your game is full full screen on the left and your camera is full screen on the right with no overlap this means essentially we now have 2 1920x 1080p files but in the same file right next to each other start your recording as normal and then once you're done stop recording but wait this file is weird and long and stretched and it's also an MKV so how do I edit any of this well first go to file in streamlabs and I'd say just remix the file from mkp to MP4 but streamlabs removed this incredibly helpful tool for some reason so instead I guess install an open OBS click file remok select the file you recorded click remx and it converts an MKV to an mp4 because remember MKV is great at avoiding corrupted files but terrible for editing you might think this is a pain but you do not want to record as an mp4 inside streamlabs you will regret it when you lose 6 hours of footage because streamlabs keeps crashing on you and you'll thank me for telling you to use an MKV or you'll just entirely swapped to OBS open your editor of choice I love Premiere Pro and drag the mp4 file in this will create a new timeline that matches its settings which isn't what we want because nobody's watching YouTube at this weird wied resolution so right click the sequence click settings and change the resolution to 1920 by 1080 or again if you're using 720 change it down to 720p now click the file and reposition it so the game is full screen over everything duplicate that file and layer it exactly on top of it and then drag the top one over so that is just the webcam on full by doing this as you can see this means my audio and my camera and my gameplay are all synced up perfectly and it only took me a few minutes if you want you can add a crop effect and crop the game off on the top layer so it's just the camera and do the exact same on the bottom but just crop the camera out so it's just the game you'll also see I have six audio tracks in my editing software that's because we set those up earlier remember and you'll see here track one is all of my audio but track two is just my mic and track three is just my game with this I can edit my game play camera and all of my audio individually easily and make the best possible videos I can and if you want to talk about making the best possible videos I can click this video right here I mastered seven content creation skills in 7 days it was considered my most valuable video I've ever made I'll see you guys next week

Channel: Stream Scheme

Views: 5,208

Keywords: how to record gameplay with streamlabs obs, how to record gameplay on streamlabs obs, record with streamlabs obs, record on streamlabs obs, streamlabs obs recording tutorial, streamlabs recording, streamlabs obs, recording games, streamlabs obs recording settings, streamlabs recording settings, how to record games with streamlabs obs, how to record gameplay on pc, How to Record Gameplay with Streamlabs, Record Gameplay with Streamlabs, gameplay capture, record games

Id: C9eH1LM0Upk

Length: 15min 14sec (914 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2023