Gameplay capture settings for eventual youtube vids?

[porina]

It has been an idea kicking around my head for a while, and with the holiday season approaching I might even do something about it. In short, I've been thinking about capturing gameplay footage, and editing it into something inspired by  episodic TV content. Now I'm thinking, what settings?

 

The biggest two questions I have are simply resolution and framerate. I normally play the game in 1440p, but could bump it up to 4k, as I was thinking of making a 2nd account to use as my "camera" so can exist on a separate system. I'm thinking of mastering the output in 1080p, so the higher capture resolution would help give better quality, especially if I want to crop the frame for any reason.

 

Then there's framerate... this isn't going to be high action, so I'm debating if 60fps is worth it, or will 30fps suffice. This could allow individual captured frames to look better at a given bitrate, and also could halve the processing time.

 

Any thoughts?

[Flinty]

I've done a bit of filming and game capturing in games and I've kinda mastered the best settings. 

 

My Rig: Core i7 8700K, 16Gb DDR4 RAM, Gtx 1080ti 

 

I've found that running at 1080p is the best choice for native res, but I recommend bumping up sampling as high as possible. Anti Aliasing should be set as high as your system can handle. The same goes for texture settings, shadows etc, put them all as high as you possibly can. 

 

In terms of your FPS, you need to be hitting at the least, 60fps otherwise the video will look laggy on the vast majority of monitors. Now it entirely depends what kind of filming you're going to be doing in game, if you're sticking to a "terrain appreciation" kind of video, you can perhaps get away with 30-45fps, but if you're including lots of moving parts you need to be going higher.

 

In terms of what you use for filming, I recommend two ways of doing this. Firstly, an external capture card, this will help limit any performance degradation you may run into when filming, which is a pretty common occurrence when filming a game (lag spikes etc). The cheaper option of this, which I personally use is Nvidia GeForce experience, there's no noticeable performance drop which is extremely ideal. 

 

Any questions, hmu!

 

-Flinty  

[porina]

1 hour ago, Flinty said:

My Rig: Core i7 8700K, 16Gb DDR4 RAM, Gtx 1080ti 

I'm still debating which system to use for capture, and I'm leaning towards the system I also use for video editing:

i7-7800X, 16GB ram, GPU TBD (should move the 2070 into it, otherwise it'll be old 980ti which might struggle)

 

1 hour ago, Flinty said:

I've found that running at 1080p is the best choice for native res, but I recommend bumping up sampling as high as possible. Anti Aliasing should be set as high as your system can handle. The same goes for texture settings, shadows etc, put them all as high as you possibly can. 

I didn't say it, but yes, I would be aiming for max settings at whatever resolution I run at. Then it becomes a matter of adequate fps. Ensuring 60fps at 4k is still challenging, but 30fps is easy. I'd run fixed 30fps if I were to do that. Basically my realistic choices are recording at 4k30fps, or 1440p30/60fps.

 

1 hour ago, Flinty said:

In terms of your FPS, you need to be hitting at the least, 60fps otherwise the video will look laggy on the vast majority of monitors. Now it entirely depends what kind of filming you're going to be doing in game, if you're sticking to a "terrain appreciation" kind of video, you can perhaps get away with 30-45fps, but if you're including lots of moving parts you need to be going higher.

My thinking is, I'm not going for high action. Regular TV and film content is ok at lower rates, and I think I would be too. I love the phrase "terrain appreciation". It isn't what I'm doing, but in a way not that far off  

 

1 hour ago, Flinty said:

The cheaper option of this, which I personally use is Nvidia GeForce experience, there's no noticeable performance drop which is extremely ideal. 

This is what I'm planning on using. I could add, I've used it already and I'm ok with the output. Up to now, I've ran at unlimited fps and set capture to 30fps, and it seems ok to me. But in case it helps for more serious stuff, I was planning on fixing at 30/60fps so there is less likely to be temporal variation in frame spacing.

[Flinty]

So you mention about TV and stuff, agreed you can drop frames quite a lot because on larger screens you're less likely to notice that frame drop because of the larger image. However you are talking about a youtube production and if it's a game orientated video, it's more likely to be watched on smaller screens, so I recommend keeping the FPS higher than what you would do for TV. 

 

I would recommend using the 2070 for rendering the footage in game, with the 980ti for capture, if you can perhaps overclock it to prevent bottlenecking, you should be set. 

 

Your geforce settings can vary being honest. I personally keep it capped at 60fps, it's pretty much all you need for most things. 

 

The general rule for this stuff is max settings without compromising frames is what you want!