While OBS Studio is great for live streaming and recording your games, screen, webcams
or other inputs, It’s actually capable of much more exotic functionality.
I use OBS daily as a tool for all of my recording needs, and I’m able to do this due to the
off-label recording capabilities of the software.
This episode is for you true video nerds and advanced users.
Let’s take a look.
I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun, and welcome back to my OBS Studio
tutorial course.
I have many, many more videos on the software in the playlist linked in the description.
Check that before asking questions, and check the introduction video to learn how this course
works, if you get confused.
First, let’s look at FFmpeg.
Hidden in plain sight within the “Advanced” mode of Output settings for recording is a
setting toggle that very few people even know exist, but opens a wide world of additional
recording possibilities.
Under the recording tab is a dropdown that says “Type - Standard.”
Ever noticed it before?
Probably not.
For like 99% of uses of OBS, leaving this on “Standard” is necessary.
But if you change it to “Custom Output (FFmpeg),” you can record to just about any file format
that the FFmpeg program is capable of.
Admittedly, I don’t have a ton of experience with FFmpeg’s normal tools and command line
capabilities - but there are plenty of resources available online, I’ll have some linked
in the video description.
People in the OBS Forums have used Custom Output for a plethora of different recording
modes, but I want to showcase one way that I’ve utilized this in my workflow.
That is to record using Apple’s ProRes codec.
This is a very high-bitrate and high-fidelity recording format used in a wide variety of
professional video recorders.
If you can sustain the high CPU load and high write speeds, you can use this to record ridiculously
high-quality video files.
Even with my ridiculous setup, I can’t record 4K desktop captures nor most PC games with
ProRes - the demand is just too high.
But I was able to record some webcams and console games via capture card with it.
The file sizes are HUGE, of course, reaching higher than 500 megabits per second, but the
quality is pretty great.
This is great if you’re a video junkie like myself, but for your average YouTube videos
is completely unnecessary.
But the fact that you can do this in OBS is just awesome.
To try ProRes yourself, choose the “Custom Output (FFmpeg)” type in your Advanced recording
settings, as I said before.
For “Container Format,” choose “mov”.
For “Video Encoder” choose “prores.”
Now I also recommend changing the “Audio Bitrate” to 320.
This will only record a single audio track at a time, though.
Video Bitrate doesn’t seem to actually affect anything here, but I had mine set to 500 mbps,
or 5 with 5 zeroes after it.
Keyframe interval should be equivalent to 2 seconds of video, based on your framerate.
So for 30FPS, set it to 60.
For 60FPS, set it to 120.
Other than that, you should be good to go - if your computer can handle it.
The ways I usually record higher-quality footage is to either just pump a huge bitrate into
X264, or use the hardware Nvenc encoder for my Nvidia graphics card and set it to lossless
mode.
This is great for desktop capture, but can prove to be challenging to sustain for game
capture.
Recording CS:GO at 4k, 60FPS in lossless resulted in a video feed of over one GIGABIT per second.
Faster than most computer networks could handle, and faster than most storage devices can.
If you want to experiment with this level of recording, you WILL need to dedicate at
least a standard SSD to record to - and preferably a NVME SSD of sorts if you really get up there
in bit rates.
A mechanical hard drive just can’t handle this kind of data writing without a big, multi-disk
raid.
Using Nvenc lossless requires a Nvidia graphics card, of course, changing the encoder to Nvenc
and changing VBR to Lossless and the mode to High Performance.
Sometimes it works well, sometimes it struggles, but crazy awesome that OBS can support that
at all.
This doesn’t have any practical applications, other than satiating a lust for the “best
possible quality ever,” but allows me to sometimes do ridiculous things like upscale
1080p Destiny footage to flipping 8K without any noticeable drop in quality.
ALL THE PIXELS!!!!
I hope this episode of my OBS Studio tutorial course has been helpful for you.
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Until next time, I’m EposVox, Happy Streaming!
Thanks for watching this episode of my OBS Studio tutorial course.
More videos like this and a full master class are linked in the playlist in the video description.
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