Recording gameplay is easy with O B S, but if you're new, you may not
know how to actually add audio to the recording or maybe you aren't
sure what the right settings are for your equipment.
But I'm gonna show you all that fun stuff today.
Hello, my YouTube friends, OBS has a lot of settings that can make it
confusing for someone new to figure out how to set up and properly
record your screen.
So let me show you the things that you need to know so you can record
your gameplay really easy.
So you know what?
Let's get to it.
When you first start O B S, it might open to this auto configuration
wizard.
You can go ahead and just click cancel on that.
We're gonna set up everything on our own.
You may also have some stuff down here in your audio mixer and let's
take care of that first.
We're gonna go to settings and then we're gonna go to our audio and
just make sure that your global audio devices are all disabled.
Some people will tell you to set this up.
I would rather add this stuff individually on my own so it is not
confusing and I know exactly what is in each of my scenes.
So once all your global audio devices are disabled, what we're gonna
do is go to video here and we just want to set this up to the actual
resolution that we wanna record at.
And you want to set up your output scale resolution to the same as
your base canvas resolution.
And then you want to set your frames per second.
Now if you're doing video games, you're probably gonna set it to 60
frames per second.
It's gonna look a lot smoother if you do.
The next thing we're gonna want to do is go into our output.
Now when you first show up, yours is probably gonna look like this and
we're gonna go up into output mode and we're just gonna change it over
to advanced.
Very simple.
Then we're gonna go to recording since that's what we're trying to do.
And you don't need to change any of this.
This is the standard recording, the way it's set up.
So you can set your recording path however you want.
You can send your videos to whatever location you would like.
You can leave your recording format at M K V.
I will tell you why later.
We're gonna drop this down and select our stream encoder.
Chances are you will either have uh, X 2 64 or Nvenc.
You can choose either one of those.
Nvenc is generally speaking, what you're going to choose if you have
an NVIDIA graphics card and there is really good reason to do so if
you have an Nvidia graphics card, the actual encoding is built in on a
little chip, which means that you can do your video games and
everything else.
And encoding for your recording is not going to affect anything else
on the machine.
However, if you are doing your recording in X 2 64, that uses the cpu,
which means that the same CPU that's going to basically run the game
and all the other background functions of your computer also has to do
the encoding.
Now some people think that it actually looks better, but you also need
basically a supercomputer to make it look that good.
Whereas if you're using Nvenc, maybe the quality is slightly lesser,
but it doesn't affect anything on your computer to use it.
And that is why using the Nvenc encoder is definitely the right
choice.
So we'll set it up with our Nvenc encoder first.
You don't wanna rescale the output, you don't need to do any of these
other things.
You're gonna come down here to rate control and you're gonna select C
Q P and your CQ level can be 20.
That's just fine.
You want to go ahead and set your preset to the best quality that you
can possibly do it.
I would start at the default at first just to make sure everything
works.
High quality two passes perfectly fine profile high.
All of this stuff can stay exactly the same.
You want to uncheck look ahead and you want to check psycho visual
tuning and the max B frames and everything here is set up for us to
make a great recording.
Now, if you were going with the X 2 64, we're gonna come down here and
CBR is a constant bit rate.
You can select some other ones.
CRF is probably what you're going to choose, but generally speaking, C
R F 20 is about the right number.
You don't need to change anything in your keyframe interval.
We're gonna go down here to profile and we're going to set it to high.
You don't need to do anything with tune.
The CPU usage preset is where most of the magic happens, and you're
gonna have to test around with this on your computer.
So the first thing you should do is start up your game and have it
running in the background.
Then what you're gonna want to do is go down here, right click and go
to task manager, and you just want to click on performance and go to
cpu.
Now you want to take a look at your CPU settings and where they are,
and then go ahead and record just a little bit and see where your CPU
stuff ends up when you're doing X 2 64.
If your CPU is pegged at 90% while you're trying to record it, well
you're pretty much maxed out and you know that these are maybe the
best settings that you can get.
In fact, you might have to dial it down a little bit.
However, if you're at 20% or something like that in your cpu, and you
can certainly come in here and you can just start going down the list
until you get to one that you know starts to tax your machine.
So the lower you go on this list, the higher the quality, and I
honestly don't think it's really even necessary to go much past fast.
If you manage to get to fast and your machine is still not pushing
very hard, I think you're probably set, you're gonna be very happy
with the quality that you get.
With that being said, if you are pegged at 90%, your machine might
struggle to record, especially if you're playing a game, you may have
to go to super fast or ultra fast in order to give yourself a little
more headroom on the cpu.
And all you have to do of course, is just keep an eye on this when
you're recording to test it out.
Now the last thing I really want to say about the recording settings
here in your output mode are about the recording format.
Now I selected MK V and the reason why you might wanna leave MK V
selected as well is if your machine happens to crash while you're
recording, if you select something like mp4, everything in that
recording will be lost.
Whereas if you're recording in M K V, everything will be saveable and
you'll be able to recover that.
And O B S has something built in to convert that file so easily.
And of course, I'm gonna show you how to convert your M KV files in
obs in a couple of minutes.
The last thing I want to talk about here is the audio tracks.
This is amazing stuff when you want to edit because it allows you to
put your game audio on one track, your microphone audio on another
track, so you can basically select how many tracks you wanna record
right here in your audio track.
So just keep that in mind and I'll show you later how to assign your
audio devices to each audio track.
In my case, we're gonna select two.
One is gonna be for the game and two is gonna be for my microphone.
After we're done setting all this up, I'm gonna click apply and okay,
all right, so now we need to add our game.
I have a game running in the background.
You'll see we have a scene here, I'm gonna click plus, and there are a
couple of different ways that you can add game.
So the first thing and the best way is to go ahead and go to game
capture.
You can name the game, whatever you want, make it easier for you to
remember, and then just click okay.
And now we're going to capture any full screen application and you can
set that up that way if you like.
But most people will go here and they'll capture a specific window and
then bring this down and select the window that they want to capture.
And there we go.
And you don't really need to change any of this other stuff.
You can just click okay and you're ready to go.
Now depending upon the size, you want to go ahead and right click
transform and fit to screen.
And there we go.
So now we have our game in here, but of course you can see in our
audio mixer we have absolutely no audio.
So the next thing that you're gonna want to do, click on here and
you're gonna want to go to audio output capture.
And we're gonna go ahead and click okay and just select where we're
listening to the audio for the game.
So in my case, I'm listening to it on my headphones right here, and I
can click okay.
Now you can see there's no audio coming from the game, but when I go
ahead and select the game, there we go.
We can see that the audio is now playing perfectly fine.
It will stop playing whenever I click off of it.
The last thing we of course would want to do is go ahead and add our
microphone.
So I'm gonna click the plus and I'm gonna go to audio input capture.
And you probably want to name these if you can, so you remember what
they are.
I'm gonna call this mic, then I'm gonna drop it down and select my
microphone that I'm using to record this.
And there we go.
So now we could see that my microphone is in here and ready to go.
Now there could be occasions where game capture does not work.
If game capture shows up as a black screen, the first thing you want
to do is make sure that you go over and highlight the screen to make
sure that you're moving stuff around.
And a lot of times that will bring up your game capture, but if game
capture does not work, there are a couple other ways to capture it.
So let's go ahead and remove our game capture.
And the next method would be the window capture.
So all you have to do is select window capture, open it up here in the
properties window, you just select the window for your game.
In my case.
There we go.
Capture method, automatic.
You can actually capture the cursor and you're gonna see right now if
I go over here, you don't really see the cursor, but depending upon
what type of game, you may actually see the cursor.
We'll click okay, we'll go ahead and right click and transform fit to
screen.
Here we go.
We still don't see my cursor, so this is not the type of game where
you would be using a cursor, but as you can see, when I select it, we
have audio coming from our game capture just the same.
So loading it isn't any different no matter what method of capture
you're using.
Now, sometimes people may suffer from some sort of negative experience
from using window capture, which I think is probably one of the best
ways to capture it.
If you are using a laptop with only one monitor, window capture is
easily the easiest way to do it.
But there is one other way, we'll go ahead and remove this and we're
gonna click the plus and we're gonna go to uh, display capture.
And then all you have to do is select a display where your game is
playing and click okay.
Now needless to say, I have it running on a seven 20 monitor, which is
why I have to fit it to the screen will obviously look a lot better if
you are playing it on a 4K monitor.
If you're trying to do a 4K recording.
So now we have it going, we can select it.
You can still see that our audio is functional with the game selected.
So display capture, window capture, and game capture all basically
work the same way, but you're probably going to get the best results
from game capture when you can get it to function properly with the
game you're trying to play.
The last thing that we want to do is set these up so the game capture
audio comes in on one track and my microphone comes in on another.
So all we have to do is click the little three dots over here and then
we're going to go into advanced audio properties.
And over here on the right you can see that we have some advanced
audio properties where it shows the tracks and they're all checked.
But we're gonna uncheck all of those tracks right here so that we can
select where we want this to be recorded in the final recording.
So we have audio output capture, which we know is our game audio, and
we're gonna record that on track one.
We want our microphone to be recorded on track two.
And that's it.
Now we have it all set up so that it will record our audio on two
separate tracks and it's gonna be absolutely perfect.
So all you have to do then is click start recording.
And bada bing, we are now recording our game footage.
We can do whatever we want.
And once we are finished, all we have to do is click stop recording.
Now, you can also pause your recording right here if you'd like, and
it will of course pause your recording.
Then you can click the unpause to unpause it and it will start
recording again.
Now you can see right here it says our encoding is overloaded.
Consider turning down your video settings.
This is what it's going to tell you if you're running into problems.
Now I'm running into that because of course, I'm recording all of this
screen on another recording so I don't have multiple nvenc encoders in
order to do it.
But let's go ahead and stop our recording.
There we go.
And what we can do is go up here to file and show recordings, and it's
going to show us the recording that we just created.
So here we go.
This is what our recording looks like, and we obviously can't hear any
sound because it's going through the headphones.
But what you notice is that this recording is an MK V.
So we want to go ahead and make this into an MP4 file.
The easy way to do that is to go to file and go to remux recording.
And we're just gonna click these three little dots here.
We're gonna go ahead and select that MK v, click open, and it tells us
what the file recording is going to be called.
We can click remux.
Then all we have to do is when we take a look, we now have an MP4 file
that is the exact same file as our MK V.
Now the last thing that I wanna show you is, especially for people who
aren't super familiar with O B S, you can add your camera in here as
well, but maybe you want some scenes with the camera and some scenes
without, well, it's really easy.
We're gonna create a second scene here.
You can call whatever you want, makes it easier to identify.
We're just gonna leave it blank.
And our new scene has no audio or sources.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and click the plus and
we're going to add our game capture again.
And it already exists.
So all we have to do is select it and click okay.
And we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna resize it by going transform
and fit the screen.
And there we go.
And then what we're gonna do is add our camera.
So in order to do this, we're gonna go to our video capture device,
and we're gonna just click, okay.
You can name this obviously, and we'll select the camera that we're
using right there.
And then what I'm gonna do is go down here and I'm gonna select a used
custom audio device.
I wanna select the microphone that I'm using.
There we go.
And so now we have a camera in here.
I can just adjust the size of this camera, but we don't yet have our
audio in here for our video game.
So what I'm gonna do is go ahead and click the plus, and we're just
going to go to that audio output capture.
And we already have our audio output capture in here.
I'm gonna go to add existing.
It's gonna take the one from the other scene.
And there we go.
So now my microphone is working and we have our audio capture for our
game working when I select it.
Now you will notice right here that if we go into advanced audio
properties, the video capture device, which is different because it is
coming from the camera and using the same microphone is selected with
everything.
So what we're gonna do is just fix this.
So now we have our game recording on track one, and this microphone's
recording on track two.
We can click close and we're all set, makes it really easy for us to
record this scene.
And then when we wanna switch over to a scene with a camera in it, we
can just click this scene and we will easily just switch back and
forth between the two scenes to show us the one with our camera and
without.
Pretty easy stuff, I can't wait to see the amazing content that you
create from the recorded footage.
If you wanna see some simple editing tricks for making your footage
into videos, you should check this video out.
Big thanks to the sponsors that support this channel, you can find
their links down below in the description, under the headings
sponsors.
I couldn't possibly do this without them or you.
So thanks.
And if you're always looking for tools, tips, and tricks to help make
you a better live streamer or YouTuber, subscribe to the channel.
My name is Michael Feyrer Jr.
Thank you so much for watching.
Have a great day and I'll see you in the next one.