Is OBS the best app to use for extremely high quality screen recording?

[Splashboy3]

Hi yall-

 

 

Apologies for this monster post. Really looking for some clarity here.


So I've been wondering this for YEARS- in my line of work I'll be often asked to get screen recorded footage of any number of things-


I take that footage (presumably screen recorded in 4K) and plop it into After Effects, and ideally zoom in to 150%-200% or skew it with 3D cameras and have it look crystal clear, especially text.

This is not the case. I've seen loads of YT videos that are exported in 4K, so you would think they obviously screen-recorded in 4K, but when I record in OBS, and zoom even 30% past 100% in After Effects, the text crispness is noticeably lossy.

I am severely fucking overthinking this and would love to know a PROPER method to get really high quality screen recordings.

That being said, I do have a 21:9 monitor- that is a nontraditional 3440x1440. So, I could record in 3440x1440 in OBS and then stretch just a bit in AE, right? Well sure, but the same issue arises as stated above^

I also have a second monitor, that IS a traditional 4K (3840x2160) but it is 60hz and the color accuracy is notably worse. This doesn't matter for a screen recording though, correct? Especially if I record in 59.94 in OBS.

My obs settings for recording as of now are attached-

Mind you- im not tied to OBS! Just looking for the best/easiest possible solution here, and I know there is one since I've seen hundreds of YT videos do so with seemingly no hassle.

Thank you so much


 

[WereCat]

I don't exactly understand what you want but if you're using x264 there is basically no reason or scenario where you should use a Full color range as most if not all video editors will mess it up and you end up with a different than original color.

(You want to use Full for your monitor settings though).

 

 

I presume you want to zoom in and have no quality loss? If that's the case, it's impossible.

You will always have a lossy quality after zooming. The higher the base resolution, the more perceivable quality will remain after a certain amount of zoom.

3440x1440 is just a wide QHD so you can't directly compare it to UHD as they are different aspect ratios and WQHD just had extra pixels horizontally.

 

UHD (8,294,400 pixels) is roughly 2.25x more pixels than QHD (3,686,400 pixels) so you perceive way less quality loss after zooming in and you can't compare it to WQHD (4, 953 600 pixels) because by zooming you're still dealing with the QHD base quality as by zooming you're stretching the image horizontally and vertically but WQHD has only extra pixels horizontally.

[emosun]

add another 0 to the bitrate and that will fix your quality problem

[Splashboy3]

32 minutes ago, emosun said:

add another 0 to the bitrate and that will fix your quality problem

wait, actually? 600K bitrate lmao? My setup is decent but nothing crazy. I have a 1st gen ryzen 1800X paired with 32GB at 3000mhz with a 1080TI. 

If I buss it all the way to 600K, wouldn't "lossless" instead of CBR be the way to go? Even a sub 10 second recording at 60K bitrate was upwards of 300MB, wouldn't 600K bitrate come close to the file size of lossless?

I almost thought it was a troll response but I mean, this makes sense in theory. Thanks!

Edit: it seems like OBS will only let me input up to 300K bitrate? Should I still be using CBR?

[emosun]

3 minutes ago, Splashboy3 said:

wait, actually? 600K bitrate lmao? My setup is decent but nothing crazy. I have a 1st gen ryzen 1800X paired with 32GB at 3000mhz with a 1080TI. 

If I buss it all the way to 600K, wouldn't "lossless" instead of CBR be the way to go? Even a sub 10 second recording at 60K bitrate was upwards of 300MB, wouldn't 600K bitrate come close to the file size of lossless?

I almost thought it was a troll response but I mean, this makes sense in theory. Thanks!

set the bitrate as high as the machine can record without running out of space or crashing.

 

if you want footage that has no compression when you zoom in then yeah it's going to need to be a pretty ridiculous size and bitrate.

[Splashboy3]

14 minutes ago, emosun said:

set the bitrate as high as the machine can record without running out of space or crashing.

 

if you want footage that has no compression when you zoom in then yeah it's going to need to be a pretty ridiculous size and bitrate.

Would CQP be better for this, then? I only need 30 sec(ish) clips, so even if they were less than a few GB per clip, it's fine. I have the space, I don't need PURE lossless quality loss but i'm definitely looking for 90% perfect

[emosun]

2 minutes ago, Splashboy3 said:

Would CQP be better for this, then? I only need 30 sec(ish) clips, so even if they were less than a few GB per clip, it's fine. I have the space, I don't need PURE lossless quality loss but i'm definitely looking for 90% perfect

cbr is fine. just up the bitrate

[Splashboy3]

1 hour ago, WereCat said:

I don't exactly understand what you want but if you're using x264 there is basically no reason or scenario where you should use a Full color range as most if not all video editors will mess it up and you end up with a different than original color.

(You want to use Full for your monitor settings though).

 

 

I presume you want to zoom in and have no quality loss? If that's the case, it's impossible.

You will always have a lossy quality after zooming. The higher the base resolution, the more perceivable quality will remain after a certain amount of zoom.

3440x1440 is just a wide QHD so you can't directly compare it to UHD as they are different aspect ratios and WQHD just had extra pixels horizontally.

 

UHD (8,294,400 pixels) is roughly 2.25x more pixels than QHD (3,686,400 pixels) so you perceive way less quality loss after zooming in and you can't compare it to WQHD (4, 953 600 pixels) because by zooming you're still dealing with the QHD base quality as by zooming you're stretching the image horizontally and vertically but WQHD has only extra pixels horizontally.

Right, I get the difference between WQHD/UHD. I have an NVIDIA card so there wouldn't be a reason to use x264. right?

TLDR: I've seen countless tutorials/screenrecording videos on YT that are 4K and have parts in the video where they smoothly zoom in on a webpage or program and it has almost zero discernable quality loss. That's what I'm looking for. 

[WereCat]

20 minutes ago, Splashboy3 said:

Right, I get the difference between WQHD/UHD. I have an NVIDIA card so there wouldn't be a reason to use x264. right?

TLDR: I've seen countless tutorials/screenrecording videos on YT that are 4K and have parts in the video where they smoothly zoom in on a webpage or program and it has almost zero discernable quality loss. That's what I'm looking for. 

I've tried a quick test. I use Davinci Resolve though. Recorded at 25000 bitrate with AMD card using HEVC codec in OBS at 2560x1440 60 FPS.

 

200% zoom in

 

Do you get worse quality than that in After Effects? Because if yes, it's probably something to do with some settings in there instead of the capture being not high enough quality.

Have in mind that this also went trough a YT compression so the quality is lower than the output file too.

[Splashboy3]

30 minutes ago, WereCat said:

I've tried a quick test. I use Davinci Resolve though. Recorded at 25000 bitrate with AMD card using HEVC codec in OBS at 2560x1440 60 FPS.

 

200% zoom in

 

Do you get worse quality than that in After Effects? Because if yes, it's probably something to do with some settings in there instead of the capture being not high enough quality.

Have in mind that this also went trough a YT compression so the quality is lower than the output file too.

Nice; yeah, this is exactly what I was looking for. Any reason you used HEVC?

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, Splashboy3 said:

Nice; yeah, this is exactly what I was looking for. Any reason you used HEVC?

Because it offers much bigger quality than x264 at the same file size or the same quality at much lower file size. I don't need to crank up bitrate high.

[Splashboy3]

2 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Because it offers much bigger quality than x264 at the same file size or the same quality at much lower file size. I don't need to crank up bitrate high.

Though I should still use NVENC since I have an nvidia card; correct?

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, Splashboy3 said:

Though I should still use NVENC since I have an nvidia card; correct?

NVENC is NVIDIA ENCODER. (meaning you're using your graphics card to capture and encode the video)

It supports both x264 (AVC) and x265 (HEVC) you just have to select it in OBS... there

 

 

If you have a 4000 series card it also supports AV1 which is better than both x265 and x264.

 

[Splashboy3]

thanks!