I’m planning a huge playthru of a game, and I’d like to be able to look back at it years down the line. However I’m expecting it to be 100s of hours (maybe around/over 1k, but I hope not longer than 2k) and years to finish (I’m not planning on playing 8+h a day).

What are he most optimal settings for OBS to save as much video as possible, while it’s still watchable?

I could record in 1440p 165fps. I know that’s dumb, but idk how low I’m willing to go. 1440p sounds awesome, but lower than 1080p would lose too much information. Same with lower than 60fps. I don’t have a clue as to what bitrate would do well, and what encoding is best. For bitrate I have a clue that it needs to be as high as possible. As it can be a bullethell and there are way to many particles/effects on screen, while everything that matters is small. (I’m not trying to be secretive here, game’s modded Terraria)

I’d also state that I’d like to error on the storage side, I don’t mind buying another HDD, they really aren’t that expensive. And I’m also planning on editing the video down as soon as possible, so that I delete all the boring parts. Meaning I probably won’t have all of that lenght on my disk at once.

Thank you for any aid in my crazy endeavour.

  • Pup BiruEnglish
    1·
    24 days ago

    2 pass will encode a file once, and store a log of information about what it did… then on the 2nd pass it’ll use that information to better know when it should use more or less bitrate/keyframes - honestly i’m not too sure of the specifics here

    now, it’s most often used to keep a file to a particular file size rather than increasing quality per se, but id say keeping a file to a particular size means you’re using the space that you have effectively

    looks like with ffmpeg you do need to run it twice - there’s a log option

    i mostly export from davinci resolve so i’m not too well versed in ffmpeg flags etc

    doing a little more reading it seems the consensus is that spending more time on encoding (ie a higher preset) will likely give a better outcome than 2 pass unless you REALLY care about file size (like the file MUST be less than, but as close to 100mb)