OBS Studio - BEST Recording Settings! 2023 [Full Guide]

hello and welcome today I'm going to show you the best recording settings for OBS studio version 29 and above I'm on version 29.1.2 and you guys really liked my previous video on the best streaming settings be sure to check that one out if you haven't already in the description below and I got a bunch of requests wanting the best recording settings for OBS so that's what we'll be talking about today and I'll basically structure this video into three sections the first section I'm going to show you the absolute highest quality best settings if you have the best of the best hardware these are super unnecessary but if you want the best the first section will be for you section number two is if you have a slightly lower end PC or an average PC and you just want a good looking video and low file space needed so doesn't take up much storage and pretty easy on your hardware and then Section 3 will be my personal settings what I prefer and why so stick around to the end because I've got some really great tips here all right let's get started alright so before we get started with section one of this video we're just going to go into OBS and into the settings uh in the bottom right hand corner of the screen and into the advanced tab here we're going to set some settings that are going to remain consistent and the same throughout all the remaining three sections of this video so process priority you're going to want to make sure that's as high as possible set it to be as high as possible without impacting your game's performance too much or whatever it is you're doing on the computer so I always have it set to high but maybe for your PC if it's a little bit lower end you could select above normal or normal but yeah the higher the better and then the rest of it is all default aside from some streaming settings but we're not going over that in this video so one thing though one exception for the first section if you really want the best of the best you can select 10-bit color instead of 8-bit color but totally unnecessary so I just leave it at all default 8-bit and that's all good to go all right let's get started with section one all right so starting off here in OBS studio for section one which is going to be the best settings you can possibly have right now I have an Nvidia 4090 GPU and an Intel 13900k CPU so I'm able to demonstrate this I'm going to assume that if you're still watching this section right now that you have similar Hardware but if not you can skip to section two so we're going to start out bottom right hand corner click the settings and then click the video section here you're going to see the base canvas resolution which is the resolution of your monitor or screen you're recording on and then the output scaled resolution which in my case is just going to stay at 4K my base is 4K and the scaled resolution is 4K because we're doing the best of the best section here if you have an 8K monitor by all means go for it you're definitely going to need a lot of power to try to record something like that um and then we have 60 frames per second obviously for a video like this I could totally get away with 30 frames per second but I'm assuming that a lot of you might be Gamers or whatever in which case I definitely like to do 60 frames per second for all of the games that I record just a much smoother image for more action-y type shots and then there is no down scaling required in this case we'll go over down scaling in section number two so now for the output section that's what you're going to head to next and you'll want to make sure that this is on the advanced tab it will probably be on the simple tab you'll want to just hit that little drop down and select Advanced and then we're going to head over to recording since that's what this video is about so you'll obviously want to select the path where your recordings will be saved and then best of the best settings here again totally unnecessary you're going to select the recording format as QuickTime or dot mov and then your video encoder is going to be Nvidia and vank h.264 and the audio encoder is going to be 32-bit float so I'll explain these settings here the dot mov allows for a bit higher quality resolution and a bit better audio than MP4 now OBS 29 and above also allows you to do fragmented MP4 and fragmented mov so previously you had to choose MKV if you actually wanted to kind of save your file in case OBS Studio crashed so fragmented mov and MP4 will allow that to happen in in the case of OBS Studio crashing whatever you've recorded up to that point will be saved but in doing fragmented mov here we're actually not really able to use 32-bit float audio it keeps giving us a whole bunch of Errors so maybe OBS will fix that but you could try fragmented mov I've never had OBS crash in the middle of recording so I've always been totally fine you can also use h.265 or hevc as it's called but again it just gives us a whole bunch of errors especially for the 32-bit float audio the reason 32-bit float audio is so amazing and if you can select it is because I could scream into the mic and I could still edit everything after and it would sound fine it basically is like completely lossless completely uncompressed audio so you're gonna get the best audio sound if you select this which is important and I may go over audio in another video if that's requested now scrolling down a bit in the encoder settings you're going to select CBR for constant bit rate and if you're filming in 4k at 60 frames per second you're going to want to select 120 000 kilobits per second it is a stupidly High number but the bitrate directly correlates to a higher quality video and a much larger file size but that's assuming you do not care if you're still watching here in section one so the general rule of thumb for bitrate and what actually makes sense you definitely don't want to go over this is to take your frame rate and if you're filming in 1080P you'll take your frame rate and multiply it by a thousand and that's your bit rate so if I was filming in 1080P at 60 frames per second we would do 60 000 kilobits per second but then the general rule for 4K is to take your frame rate and double it and then multiply it by a thousand so we're filming in 60 frames per second so we're gonna double it which is 120 multiplying by a thousand so 120 000 this is totally Overkill but it is going to give you the best of the best then you're gonna select your keyframe interval to two seconds and then the preset obviously the best quality why not single pass and then profile is High um these are just again best of the best settings We're Not Gonna check look ahead uh it sometimes helps with lower end Hardware but I find that it just does not do a difference at all it just tries to predict kind of uh like it looks ahead and tries to kind predict the next frames and stuff it kind of just makes it a little more laggy if you actually have higher end Hardware psycho visual tuning this you definitely want to have checked this is pretty cool it basically just optimizes the bit rate and increases the perceived visual quality of the video by just like kind of looking ahead and utilizing your your GPU a little more to make a better quality image and then Max B frames is set to two GPU is set to zero so those are the best of the best settings and at the end of this video I will put a little clip of valheim which is the game that I record on this channel most side by side using each one of these sections one from section one here one from section two and one from my personal uh favorite settings in section three so you all can see the difference so stick around for that and now let's move on to section two alright so now jumping into section two here for if you have a mid-range to low end PC and you don't want a super big file size and you want it to be pretty friendly on whatever Hardware you have in your computer and you'll already notice that the video quality here is a little bit less than it was in section one because I'm obviously recording this section on the best settings for lower end PCS so going to the settings again then going to the video you'll see that I have a output of 1080p so we're doing the output scaled resolution if your monitor is only 1080p which I'm assuming maybe it is if you're watching this section you will not need any down scaling required but if your monitor is 4K and you want to downscale to 1080p which is pretty average for the settings here you'll want to use lancos scaling for the 36 samples that's going to be the best quality one but if your computer can't quite handle that you can use the 16 samples and it's going to be pretty good we're also doing 60 frames per second 30 frames per second will still work as well but if you're doing gaming we're going to stick with the 60 frames per second now going to the output Tab and then making sure you're in the advanced mode still going to recording and then we're going to select the recording format as fragmented MP4 as I was explaining in section one fragmented MP4 will allow it so that if OBS crashes then everything you've recorded up to that point will still be saved and then we're going to use the video encoder nvinc h264 or whatever your graphics card I have in Nvidia so it's Nvidia and vinc h264 and then audio encoder is just the ffmpeg AAC for the audio there and now moving on to the encoder settings our rate control is going to be set to CBR for constant bitrate and then that bit rate is going to be 12 000 kilobits per second so much less than the 120 000 kilobits per second from section one uh this is a really good bit rate you don't need to go over this for 1080p at 60 frames per second and I'll put up on screen a screenshot of what YouTube recommends for your bitrate and your frame based on your resolution and frame rate what you should set the bitrate as these recommendations are actually really really good I've used them they work really well so I'd say for 1080p at 60 frames per second could really use anything from about 8 000 to 12 000 kilobits per second um or again if you're on 1080p at 30 frames per second you could probably get away with four to six thousand kilobits per second so yeah it's uh it works really well looks pretty good again you're seeing it on screen right now how it looks when I'm just recording my my screen you'll see it at the end again when I put all the clips side by side of how each of these settings looks and then if you can set your preset to be the slowest quality or the slowest and best quality but if you can't that's another thing that you can also select six five four three two one until you get one that works for you so that's just kind of trial and error depending on the hardware you have setting the keyframe to two and then cycle visual tuning as as I explained in section one make sure that's checked and then I found personally uh before I got my higher end PC and I had a lower end computer for the first half of when I started this channel I found that look ahead being checked actually helped a little bit I just made it slightly better but with higher end uh Hardware it just doesn't really do much and I always leave it unchecked because it just adds to the lag a bit once you have higher end High Hardware so you can experiment checking that and leaving it unchecked at the very least make sure that psycho visual tuning is checked and then GPU is 0 and Max B frames is set to two so these are really good General intermediate settings and again you could use fragmented mov here you could use the hevc or h.265 those are like slightly you know if you have a slightly better computer you can try those and then again your bit rate directly correlates to your quality and your file size so if you want a small file size be sure to set your bitrate on the low end of the recommendations there because the higher your bit rate the higher quality your video yes but the much larger your file will be as well so for a lot of you asking those questions in my last video definitely play around with your bitrate if you're not happy with your file size so now let's move on to my personal favorite settings and what I think if you have the hardware for it is going to be best it's what I use on this channel and it's kind of the happy medium of what looks really really really amazing for high-end Hardware in my case and utilizing things like av1 encoding and all of that so a lot of great tips here about to come so stick around so now for my personal favorite settings here for OBS studio in the video section I have my monitor resolution at 4K I do not go down to 1080p I even stream at 4K because of something that I'm about to show you here soon and again watch my streaming video you'll learn a lot about the streaming um but yes I don't need any down scaling no down scaling required and 60 frames per second so similar to the first section where I set up the best of the best I have that the same video settings here and then for the output tab this is where I've changed a lot in the recording section and again select advanced mode I have the recording format set to fragmented MP4 again so that I don't lose my file if anything happens with OBS being corrupt or crashing or any of that and in the video encoder because I have a 4090 and if you have a 40 90 or a one of the new Intel graphics cards you will be able to do av1 encoding now av1 encoding is super super amazing for a few reasons that I'm about to tell you here um reason number one you can set your bit rate to be thirty percent lower than you otherwise would have to and maintain a visually lossless video quality from what you otherwise would have set your bit rate at so for example if I set my bit rate if I was using h.264 uh encoder here and I set my bitrate at just say a hundred thousand kilobits per second now if I set if I used av1 encoding and I set my bitrate at only 70 000 kilobits per second my video quality would essentially be the same I would not notice any downgrade in quality now again those are ridiculously high numbers but the other beauty of av1 encoding is because you can set your bit rate really low and maintain a really high quality image you can also reduce your file size which is awesome so I still I use this for streaming and again check out my streaming video if you want to know the benefits and why it's so good for streaming with saving uploads speed and everything but I also use it for recording because why not have a smaller file size if I don't have to have something super big it also edits really fast in DaVinci Resolve which is the video editor that I use so now for the audio encoder I'm still using the ffmpeg AAC I just don't see the need to go to a 24-bit or 32-bit float audio I've never had an issue with it especially if I have my audio settings set up correctly and then for the constant bitrate I have it set to 16 000 which is super super low considering that I'm doing 4K at 60 frames per second so and this is again recorded in only 16 000 kilobits per second I've found that it just looks amazing creates a really small file size and again if if you were uh if you were wanting to sacrifice your file size a little bit I might go up to something closer to like thirty thousand or sixty thousand uh kilobits per second which is still crazy crazy low again YouTube recommends that you're at least at like 68 or 70 000 um kilobits per second for 4K at 60. so this is stupidly low yet really good audio quality and really good video quality in 4k so that's what I use for recording and streaming is 16 000 seems to be my happy number of what I'm happy with but the least amount of quality being lost and then same for all the other settings keyframe interval is two slowest and best quality uh preset tuning is high quality single pass and then psycho visual tuning is checked so those are my personal favorite settings and if you have a graphics card that can do av1 encoding by all means absolutely utilize it it is super amazing I never thought I'd be using it much but I'm really really really happy with it and if you can't do av1 encoding select h.265 or hevc they're both the same exact thing um and yeah h.265 is basically what came kind of before av1 was a thing um in the newer graphics cards and it is still much better than h.264 so h.265 or hevc is basically going to still allow you to use a lower bit rate than you otherwise would with h.264 and if you can handle that which you certainly will be able to handle that especially even if you can do av1 go ahead and select that if you don't have a graphics card that can handle av1 encoding because that will still give you a small file size for a really good looking image and there definitely is a quality difference between the hevc and h.264 settings so if you're using the same bitrate hevc will give you a perceived higher quality image so with that as promised here are three three Clips on screen Each of which is using one of the three settings that I went over in the three sections of this video so that you can see the quality difference and kind of determine maybe which one works for you again I definitely would not recommend best of the best it's just super unnecessary but I figured I'd put it in there just so that you all can see it if you uh if that's the route you want to go so that's it for the best settings for recording in OBS Studio I hope you all learned something and enjoyed it again be sure to comment below I am always happy to answer questions I try to cover as much as I can think of in these videos but obviously I miss out on a whole bunch so share your other thoughts and learning and experiences with recording in the comments as well and I'm always open to new video suggestions so if you all would want like an audio video I've been getting a couple uh requests for something like that be sure to comment that below and without further Ado I will see you in the next one cheers

Channel: Chiselchip

Views: 129,869

Keywords: obs studio tutorial 2023, obs streaming tutorial, obs studio settings, obs studio settings for low end pc streaming, obs studio stream settings, obs studio streaming tutorial, obs studio recording, obs studio recording settings, how to record with obs, how to stream with obs, best settings for streaming obs, best recording settings for obs, obs studio setup, obs studio guide, obs, obs studio, obs studio tutorial, chiselchip, best obs settings, best obs settings for recording

Id: _v7cEyYEvaw

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2023