What's up guys is Pete here once again for
the Gaming Careers YouTube channel and
today we're going to be going through
the NVIDIA shadowplay software or as
it's now known the NVIDIA GeForce
Experience and specifically within that
the share function. If you've never heard
of the software either by it's old name
Shadowplay or his new name Experience
until today basically what it does is it
allows you to record your gameplay
through a number of different functions
without actually using too much of your
CPU as all of the encoding is done on
the GPU instead.
In this tutorial we're going to be going
over the instant replay function, so you
can press a hotkey after the action
has happened and it will automatically
save the last X minutes of gameplay.
We're also going to go through manual
recording just for your normal videos as
well as being able to record your
desktop if you want to use the NVIDIA
software for recording tutorials such as
this one.
So why would you use this software as
opposed to something like OBS? Well for
me there's a few reasons as to why I'll
choose to use this software to record
something.
Firstly it's very very easy to use and
setup as I'll show you in this tutorial.
Secondly the quality is very good, you
can customize what bitrate you want to
record at and because you're offloading
that from your CPU to your GPU you can
actually set a very high bitrate and get
some really good quality recordings.
Thirdly you can offload all of the video
processing from your CPU onto your GPU,
so there is really such minimal impact on
the performance of your computer, so if
you've ever tried to record gameplay whilst
playing and you notice dropped frames or
little bits of input lag, those should go
away if you're going to use the NVIDIA
software because you're offloading all
of that task from the CPU so your CPU can
concentrate on running your game at a high
frame rate. All of this is thanks to some
clever technology that NVIDIA have
developed, it's called the NVENC
microcontroller, which is a
microcontroller that's attached to some
of the newer NVIDIA cards. This
microcontroller basically allows the GPU
to record all of the rendered frames
that it's rendering anyway for you to
play the game, it can record them onto
one of your hard drives so the CPU
doesn't have to do any of that
converting to the h.264 format.
Now there are a few minimal requirements
so that you can use the NVIDIA
software so not everybody with a NVIDIA
card will be able to use this. If
you have one of the newer cars then you
should be in luck.
OK, so what we're going to do firstly is
open up the GeForce Experience
application, which should open up a window
like this showing you all the different
games that it has detected you have
installed. I'm currently just on my home
system back at my parents house, so I
only have a few different games
installed but that's not to matter, we'll
still go about setting up the GeForce
Experience. So I'm going to maximize this
window so it's a bit clearer for you guys to see, and
this is the button up here this share
button, this is the actual application
that used to be called shadowplay but
first we need to make sure that this is
enabled so if you click the settings cog in the top
right, you should see down here this box
called share and you want to make sure
that the option is enabled it's green
here, if it's not enabled it will be
grey like that,
just click it again to enable it and it
should go green.
Now we'll be able to open up the share
part of the GeForce Experience so you
can either click the share button up here
or whenever you're in any application
and in a game you can press the key combo
which is defaulting to "Alt+Z" so I'm
just going to tap that now and you're
going to see the GeForce Experience
share window open over the top of
whatever you have open.
It's just quickly worth noting actually
that any of the shortcuts and keybinds
that I talk about in this video are the
defaults but we'll be able to edit them
to whatever you like later on in the
video. We're going to be moving through
the options here from left to right but
I will have time stamps down in the
description below this video, so if you want
to skip ahead to a certain section feel
free to click the timestamps in the
description to skip ahead in this video.
So the first thing that we're going to be
talking about is the instant replay
function which used to be called shadowplay,
this basically constantly records a
buffer of your gameplay the last X
number of minutes and then when
something good happens in game, you hit
the key combo which default is "Alt + F10",
and it will then save the last X
minutes of your gameplay for you to then
later edit and upload to YouTube.
Once you've saved the last few minutes
of your gameplay using the
instant replay function, it does allow
you to then trim and instantly upload
this video to YouTube if you'd like. I
would actually recommend putting in a
bit more production value to your videos
on YouTube because you want to be
providing some quality to your viewers,
so what I like to do is I wait until
I've got quite a few of these instant
replays saved and then maybe I'll open
up an editing suite such as Adobe
Premiere Pro or Sony Vegas or Final Cut
something like that, and I'll drag all of
the clips that I've recorded over the last
week or month and I'll cut them together
and maybe add some effects and some
music and release that is a video, so
it's a little bit better for your
viewing experience rather than just one
clip from that one game that you played
today. I'm also going to quickly plug the
Gaming Careers YouTube channel, if you want
some more in-depth tutorials on any of
those editing suites; Premiere Pro, Sony
Vegas those kind of things, we do have
video playlists set up with tutorials on
how to use them and how to render and
export from them. Right let's jump into
the settings
specifically for instant replay, so if
you click the instant replay box and
then go down to customize you should get
this new window.
First up is replay length, so this is
exactly what I said earlier, this allows
you to drag and choose how much of the
previous gameplay you want to record so
for example if you have it left on the
default which is five minutes, when you
hit the key combo it will then save the
previous five minutes from when you
pressed the key combo. So feel free to set
this to whatever you want, I personally
set it to about two minutes because the
majority of games that I play are quite
fast paced, so when I hit the key combo
that's probably after an amazing moment
that actually only happened in the last 30
seconds but I want to have a little bit
of wiggle room either side of that. So I'm
going to set mine to 2 minutes here and then
we'll move down to quality, now all the
quality presets actually do is change
the bit rate down at the bottom you can
see the bitrate moving from something
like 15 to 20 to 50 there and custom
obviously allows you to set it to
whatever you like. The quality presets
here don't actually affect the
resolution or the frame rate so I would
recommend setting it to custom and then
we can choose exactly what we want to do
in the options below. For resolution I
recommend having this on in-game, you can
up and downscale the resolution that
it records at if you wish to, but
I imagine the majority of people here are
going to be playing at 1080p and wanting
to record 1080p or maybe playing a 1440
and wanting to record at 1440 so I leave
this at my ingame resolution and then
let the software decide. Frame rate you
have the choices of 30 or 60 as I've
said in many videos now, really the standard
for YouTube videos is 1080p and 60
frames-per-second now so I'd recommend
leaving this at 60. You can drop it to 30
though if you're having any kind of
performance issues. So for bitrate we can
select anything from 10 to 130
megabits per second, so you really have
quite a lot of customization as to what
bitrate you want to record at.
Personally I use 70 megabits per second
just purely because I think that's a
really good balance between very very
very high quality, because obviously when
you upload to YouTube eventually it will
get compressed anyway so you really want
to start with the highest quality that you
can, but I've found that anything above 70
really doesn't improve any quality at
least that I can see and it just takes
up more hard drive space. Obviously if
you're having some performance issues or
if you have less space on your hard
drive you can lower this down, if you
remember from our presets high
actually it's 50, medium is 20 and low is
15, so anything really above 50 is
considered at least by NVIDIA as over
high so I leave this at 70 but feel free
to play around and choose whatever you
like.
Once you're happy with all your settings
it's worth having a quick look at this
little stat here,
this takes into account the replay
length, the resolution, the frame rate and
the bitrate to give you an estimate as
to what the file size will be. So this is
telling me that if I want to record two
minutes of my previous gameplay, at in-game
resolution which is 1080p, 60 frames per
second and at 70 megabits per
second bit rate, it's gonna take it
roughly 1.1 gigabytes of space. If you
change your replay length or any of the
other settings you can see that this
changes alongside it. Once you're happy
you can click Save and this will save
all of your instant replay settings so
now all you have to do is to turn it on
play a game and then hit your key combo
when something awesome just happened.
The next function within the GeForce
Experience share application is the
record-setting. This is a much more
simple and probably what you're used to basically
you hit a key combo to start
recording and you hit a key combo to stop
recording and anything between those is
saved to your hard drive. If we go into the
customized options for this it's exactly
the same as the one that we just did for
the instant replay, but quickly I'm just going to show you
my settings. I have custom quality in
game resolution, 60fps and again
70 megabits per second.
Click Save to save these. To start
recording your gameplay you can either
just click the start button here or you
can hit the key combo which by default
is "Alt + F9". The third option from within
the GeForce experience application is
the broadcast option.
This allows you to stream your gameplay
to Twitch or to YouTube.
Currently I wouldn't really recommend
using this as I feel like OBS or Xsplit
offers a much better experience and far
more customization and you can also
still use the NVENC microcontroller to
get the performance benefits from within
OBS, but I'll quickly show you the
customize options just so you can get
familiar with the interface. So as you
can see up here you can choose between
Twitch or YouTube, you can set your
quality, resolution, frame rate and your
bitrate but really in terms of overlays
and things like that you're gonna get
far better experience by using something
dedicated to streaming such as OBS. Up in
the right-hand corner we have gallery
this basically opens up a folder of all
your recent recordings. From here you can
select a video and trim it as I talked
about earlier and upload it straight to
YouTube but as I did mention earlier I
think it's much better to take these
video files and edit them in a dedicated
application such as Sony Vegas or Adobe
Premiere Pro. The microphone option
allows you to change your microphone
settings, whilst recording replays. You can
set it to push-to-talk, always on or off.
You can also customize the input device
as well as the volume and boost options
to get your microphone recording at the
right level. Personally though, I
recommend leaving this as off and
actually recording your audio separately
with a program like Audacity you can
then combine the audio from Audacity
back with the video from your gameplay
in some editing software and this will allow
you to have a bit more control over the levels
as well as cut out any mistakes that
you made.
Maybe you got really sick gameplay
moment but actually in the voice-over
your dog was barking in the background
and if you had your mic option enabled
in the GeForce Experience app you would
really be able to remove that without
also removing the gameplay audio. This
way if you recorded separately with
Audacity, you can lower the levels of
your microphone whilst you did the sick
moment and your dog was barking and then
combine them together later in the final
recording. The camera option just lets you
toggle your webcam on or off and then
the settings option brings up lots of
different settings that we're going to
go through one at a time now. So firstly
in Connect, this is where you can connect
your Google, Imgur, Twitch and YouTube
accounts so that you can instant upload.
So Google and Imgur is so that you can
upload screenshots instantly and Twitch
and YouTube is obviously so that you can
go live with your gameplay and also so you
can upload any of your highlights.
I don't link any of my accounts here as
I've said many times through this video because
I like to actually edit my videos much
more than just straight out of the
recording and so I will upload to
YouTube manually after I've rendered out of
Premiere Pro. Next is the Overlays option,
this allows you to have a few different
overlays in corners of your screen.
So Status Indicator, this just shows a
little green icon when you're recording
live and this won't show up in your
recordings so it will basically allow
you to know when you're recording just
to make sure that you are, but it won't
actually show up in your recordings,
so it's quite a useful overlay to have. You can
choose where you want this to be
positioned on your screen or if you
wanted to be switched off. FPS counter is
just a useful little counter to show
that you're getting a good framerate,
again you can choose which corner you
would like to have that in or choose it
to be off and viewers is just if you are
streaming live on Twitch from the app or
YouTube you can show your view count in
the top left, top right, bottom left or
bottom right.
The next option is Keyboard Shortcuts,
this is where you can customize all of
the keyboard shortcuts for recording and
broadcasting, you know activating instant
replay all those kind of things can be
customized here.
Next up we have recordings this is just
the default location that recordings
will be saved in as well as where
temporary files will be recorded, so how
I have mine set up is the temporary file
is recorded to my SSD which is a really
quick drive and then once it's finished
it actually gets moved as a full file to
my hard drive which is sort of a 3
terabyte massive drive, so I don't clog
up too much of my SSD. Next option is the
Broadcast option this is just where you
can set where you want to stream to if
you want to use the application for
streaming as well as allowing you to add
a overlay but again I just don't think
this is enough customization to
warrant being used over OBS. After
Broadcast the next option is Gallery,
this just allows you to choose what you
want to do with screenshots, if you want
to just save them to your pc or upload
them to Google Photos or Imgur.
Next we have Notifications, this just
allows a little slide in notification as
you've been seeing throughout this video
for when you share your gameplay or when
you've saved your instant replay, or when you
started or stopped recording. It's just
useful really as a little pop-in to make
sure that you know that you're recording
before you start your gameplay. And the
final option is the Privacy control, now
this is how you enable desktop capture,
so if you want to be able to take
screenshots or recordings of your
desktop or of Google Chrome or any
application that isn't a game, then you
want to make sure this is set to Yes. If
it's set to No which I think is the
default then you'll only be able to
record your gameplay so any games that
it detects are running. And that's it
for options. If you've enjoyed the video today
please give it a thumbs up because that
really helps us know which kind of
videos you guys enjoy, and for the question of
the day today I'm going to be asking:
Which piece of software did you use
before using the NVIDIA GeForce
Experience software to record your
gameplay? I remember in the olden days
using things like FRAPS and bandicam,
and the quality wasn't very good and the
frame rate was even worse! And for a
second question of the day I want to
know: Which feature are you using more often? Are
you using the instant replay feature or
are you using the manual record? I find myself
mixing between the two depending on what
kind of video i'm creating. Finally if
you knew his the gaming careers YouTube
channel, be sure to subscribe and have a
look around at the other videos we've
got loads of different tutorials on how
to grow your YouTube channel and your
Twitch audience to turn your gaming
passion into a profession.
Until next time, peace!