There are several different ways you can go about capturing your VR gameplay with the Quest 2. You
can record directly to the headset or you can cast your gameplay and record it with a PC.
The easiest way by far is to record directly to the headset so let's take a look at that first.
This method can be used to record both stand alone and PC VR gameplay.
I'm just going to be demonstrating it with some stand alone games because
for the purpose of this video it's just gonna be quicker and easier to do that.
Ok, so the first thing we need to do is press the Oculus button on our right controller to
bring up the menu bar. We then want to press the Camera button here and that will bring
up the camera menu. In the upper right here is the Recording button. Mine has the little red
light showing here because I'm recording this right now so I can show you this.
If I were to click this right now it would stop my recording which I don't want to do,
but you'll want to click on this button and that will bring up the Record Video window. This toggle
switch here allows you to choose whether you want to record the headsets mic audio or not
along with your gameplay, so you can narrate or commentate as you're playing and not have
to worry about recording your voice separately. Once you're ready to start recording you can
click the Start Recording button and the Quest will begin recording your gameplay.
By default the Quest 2 captures at 24fps at a resolution of 1024 x 1024 using a bit rate
of 5Mbps, while this looks ok you may prefer your captures to be in widescreen and thankfully Oculus
has made this fairly easy for us to do. If you click on the time here on your menu bar that will
bring up the Quick Settings menu. You'll then want to click on the Settings button here at the upper
right, then click on System, and then on Camera. These first couple of options we're not going to
worry about, what we're interested in is these guys down here at the bottom. Under Aspect Ratio
we can switch to Landscape which switches the capture resolution to 1920 x 1080. As I'm sure
you know, this is your normal, widescreen 1080p TV resolution like the capture you're watching
right now. And the other option is for Portrait mode, which in my opinion is a complete and total
abomination and should never be used because... Motion pictures have always been horizontal.
Televisions are horizontal. People's EYES ARE HORIZONTAL!!!
But anyway if you want to defy the laws of nature and make Instagram
reels or whatever, the option is there for you.
I love vertical videos!
Nobody cares about you!!!
So below that we have our frame rate which there's only two options here 24fps and
36fps and below that is probably one of the most important options, the bit rate. The higher the
bit rate is the better the image quality of your capture will be. There is of course a trade off,
that being the higher the bit rate the larger your video files will be, but in my opinion it's always
best to capture the sharpest image possible so if it were me, I would set it to 20Mbps.
There is a way to record at even higher resolutions, higher frame rates and higher
bit rates, but it's a bit more complex than this. If you're interested though,
I have a video showing how to do that popping up in the cards right now.
As for some of these other options, there's Eye Selection, which can be important depending on
the type of game you're playing. When recording you're either capturing what is being displayed
to your left or right eye you don't get the nice centered view like you get in real life or with
a flat screen game. Where this typically makes a difference is when looking through the scope
of a sniper rifle or something like that. If you sight through a scope using your right eye and
you have left eye selected in the capture settings here, when you're looking through your scope this
is what your recording is going to look like. If you're wanting your capture to show the crosshairs
lined up on the target and stuff like that, then you'll want to select right eye in this setting.
The other option, Image Stabilization, helps your recordings look smoother when people are
watching them back. It's just a fact of life that we don't hold super still. There's a
lot of very small amounts of jitter to our head movements so turning this on can help stabilize
your footage making it more tolerable for those people that are watching it.
Coming back to our recording now, once you've captured the gameplay you want, you'll press
the Oculus button on your right controller again, click on Camera, and this time when you click on
the Recording button it will end your recording. Like I said earlier you can use this same process
to record PC VR footage too, however it's a little bit more of a pain because you have to exit Quest
Link, come back to the Quest home environment, start up your recording, launch Quest Link again,
play your game and then exit all the way back out again to end the recording.
Once you've captured the footage you want though your videos will show up here in the camera roll
and you can click the tree dots and share them to Facebook if you want but more than likely you're
going to want to copy these to your PC and edit them, so let's show you how to do that.
Just like recording on the Quest, this is super easy. You just plug your Quest 2 into your PC
using a USB cable, then you'll need to put your headset on real quick because we need to allow
our PC to access the files on our Quest 2 so we can copy them over and edit them. Now when we go
to File Explorer we should see our Quest 2 on the list here. We can click on that, then on Internal
Shared Storage, then on Oculus, then Video Shots and here's all our recordings. You can then copy
them over to your PC, load them up into your video editor of choice and do with them what you will.
If your Quest 2 doesn't show up in File Explorer after you've
allowed your PC access to your headset files a simple restart of your Quest 2
and plugging it back in to your computer and granting access again should fix it.
While this is all great for making videos for YouTube,
you might be wanting to live stream your Quest 2 gameplay to Twitch or YouTube..? Rather than
drag this video on any longer though, that you can learn how to do in this video right here.