** Official Recording/Streaming Tips & Tricks Exchange **

[Cromulent]

I do between 4-7 videos a week, and fitting it in with work and streaming is a tight push at times.

I normally set 5-6 hours aside for vidoe creation - Recording Gameplay and doing commentary around it is easier then doing some other video's

Then I just bulk upload over night with them scheduled on go live dates.

All my videos go live at 8am in the morning so they are there for people 1st thing or later on.

I only started YouTube this may ish, and in that time I've gone from 0 to 150 odd followers o I'm, pretty happy with that. Also thanks to you guys here I've made a lot of changes and Improvements I hope - Audio has really improved with the next step being a proper Mic and pop filter etc - though I need to make some changes to my stream room / office first for that.

As Valk keeps telling me - Stick at it and push through!

Thanks for the information. It is really good to hear that you have got so many followers it makes me hopeful that if I keep going at it I'll achieve some level of success. I think I'll stick to 4 videos to start out with because I need to learn how to use Adobe Premiere and that will probably take a few days of doing lynda.com tutorials to get comfortable with using. The same goes for Photoshop and After Effects so I might not start making videos for a week or two.

I've just configured OBS to handle all of my game play recording which should be better than using FRAPS which is what I was using before. It certainly has more features and I like the fact that it supports multiple audio tracks.

 

[Cromulent]

Not sure if OBS does such a thing, I'm on what's now called OBS classic since I've used OBS for years and allowed it to auto update.

Heard OBS Studio has some substantial features that the Classic version doesn't have.

Any idea.

I can't answer your main question but I can say OBS Studio is way better than OBS Classic. I started out using OBS Classic to stream to Twitch ages ago but I've just downloaded OBS Studio to record my game play footage for YouTube videos and it is much better. I'd say give it a try and see what the difference is.

 

[arc@css]

I need to learn how to use Adobe Premiere and that will probably take a few days of doing lynda.com tutorials to get comfortable with using.

I'm not an advanced user, but if you have any questions about Premiere Pro then let me know.

 

[uncle_rufus]

Indeed +1 for OBS Studio... although currently I still use DXTory for a lot of my recording, as I'm waiting on a particular feature to be made available in OBS (at which point I am probably going to switch to OBS exclusively)

FWIW the feature I'm after is simply the combination of two features which currently can't be used together: the custom ffmpeg output option (which allows you to output proper high-quality capture instead of stuff that's already compressed) and the multiple audio streams... ffmpeg itself definitely supports multiple streams so I think it's just that someone needs to plug the two together in the GUI

 

[Cromulent]

Indeed +1 for OBS Studio... although currently I still use DXTory for a lot of my recording, as I'm waiting on a particular feature to be made available in OBS (at which point I am probably going to switch to OBS exclusively)

FWIW the feature I'm after is simply the combination of two features which currently can't be used together: the custom ffmpeg output option (which allows you to output proper high-quality capture instead of stuff that's already compressed) and the multiple audio streams... ffmpeg itself definitely supports multiple streams so I think it's just that someone needs to plug the two together in the GUI

Hmm. It would indeed be useful to have multiple audio tracks with lossless video on OBS. I did buy DXTory but decided I didn't have the hard drive space to record in lossless which is why I switched over to OBS Studio in the first place. So far though I have to say I am happy with it after using both FRAPS and DXTory it seems to have far more options and there are some really good tutorials out there on how to use it.

The strange thing is that ffmpeg itself supports all those features that you want. I used to use it on Linux all the time and it is some really advanced media software. Have you tried making a feature request in the OBS Studio forums? That might help your case or at least the developers will be able to tell you that they are not planning on implementing that feature.

Personally though I am just using the Nvidia encoder because I have a laptop CPU and it isn't all that powerful so I need to offload as much stuff as possible to my Nvidia 1070.

 

[uncle_rufus]

Hmm. It would indeed be useful to have multiple audio tracks with lossless video on OBS. I did buy DXTory but decided I didn't have the hard drive space to record in lossless which is why I switched over to OBS Studio in the first place. So far though I have to say I am happy with it after using both FRAPS and DXTory it seems to have far more options and there are some really good tutorials out there on how to use it.

Yeah it takes up a lot of space - our 2 recording machines both have dedicated 2TB recording drives so it's not such a big deal to record lossless (well, *nearly* lossless; diminishing returns after a point!). In terms of features and user experience though I really like OBS - the first time we had to use it was for recording Dead Space 3, which DXTory refused to work with (I think the Origin overlay was confusing it)... and I actually found once I got the custom settings right for the ffmpeg output mode the recording was superior to DXTory (from a performance perspective, with the same codec - UTVideo). Luckily for Dead Space 3 we didn't need the multiple audio either because we recorded both POVs and mics, so OBS was fine...

The strange thing is that ffmpeg itself supports all those features that you want. I used to use it on Linux all the time and it is some really advanced media software. Have you tried making a feature request in the OBS Studio forums? That might help your case or at least the developers will be able to tell you that they are not planning on implementing that feature.

Indeed it does - I had a look around on the forums when I first used OBS and did find a thread or two mentioning support for this that suggested it was on the list of planned features. At one stage I was planning on raising a pull request and putting the plumbing code up myself but haven't gotten around to it (hard to justify working on software sometimes in your free-time when you do it for work!)

Personally though I am just using the Nvidia encoder because I have a laptop CPU and it isn't all that powerful so I need to offload as much stuff as possible to my Nvidia 1070.

Nothing wrong with that - the NVENC encoder seems to be an absolute beast performance-wise, and if you try to structure your recordings to require fairly limited editing you can get away with the quality

 

[tcfreer]

I just use OBS Classic for everything, streaming and recording, does everything I need

I keep meaning to try studio - maybe one day.

 

[arc@css]

What sort of bit rate does OBS allow you to record at?

 

[tcfreer]

Whatever you set it at.

I normally set it at about 35000

 

[arc@css]

Does Audacity allow you to record more than one audio track at once? I recorded some game + microphone footage earlier, but the sound of my voice was drowned out at times by the game audio. If anyone knows of a good tutorial for this, then that would be very helpful.

I also tried using ShadowPlay. I increased the volume & boost of the microphone, but it didn't make much, if any, difference.

I think my settings are right, but here's a couple of pics anyway:

Spoiler

 

[uncle_rufus]

Does Audacity allow you to record more than one audio track at once? I recorded some game + microphone footage earlier, but the sound of my voice was drowned out at times by the game audio. If anyone knows of a good tutorial for this, then that would be very helpful.

I also tried using ShadowPlay. I increased the volume & boost of the microphone, but it didn't make much, if any, difference.

I think my settings are right, but here's a couple of pics anyway:

Spoiler

I don't think Audacity can multi-track, but you can launch more than one instance of Audacity... I'm not sure that's what you need here - probably better to do something like:

1. Set Shadowplay not to record your mic - this will give you the game audio on its own as part of the video file
2. Record your mic with Audacity
3. Do a manual sync - once both applications are recording but before you start your intro you want to do an action in-game that you can easily match up to something you say; for instance say you're at the main menu, maybe you'll say out loud:

"Okay, I'm at the main menu now - going to be flicking between "New game" and "Load game"... 1, 2, 1-2-3, 1, 2, 1-2-3... and again... 1, 2, 1-2-3, 1, 2, 1-2-3"

As you're doing the above counting move the mouse or hit up/down on your controller so that the menu options change in the same rhythm.

4. When you come to edit that's how you can line up the audio and video in your editor - make sure you always move the game audio with the game footage, as they are already lined up, but find the sync point in the footage and in your mic recording and then carefully line them up. If your editor has a way of displaying the waveform for the mic audio that can usually help as you can line it up partly using the peaks in the audio from your speaking.

Some people like to do a manual sync at the end of their recording session as well, or even mid-way through it - this can catch problems with the sync drifting over time (although fixing them can be tricky if not impossible)

Hope that helps

(p.s. also thinking of your settings - they look fine although you could give it a test record with the mic set to "Mono" - microphones aren't generally stereo devices, unless the AT2020 has 2 drivers inside it or something to allow it to pick up directional sound... and to be honest even if it does you'll probably get a cleaner sounding recording on mono anyhow; you don't want your voice to sound like it drifts from left to right in the balance)

 

[Raumarik]

Does Audacity allow you to record more than one audio track at once? I recorded some game + microphone footage earlier, but the sound of my voice was drowned out at times by the game audio. If anyone knows of a good tutorial for this, then that would be very helpful.

I also tried using ShadowPlay. I increased the volume & boost of the microphone, but it didn't make much, if any, difference.

I think my settings are right, but here's a couple of pics anyway:

Spoiler

Hi Arc

I know it's not specifically what you requested but it sounds as if you're looking to do something that I did previously, or at least a version of it (with a few program changes). This little vid I may might help a tad.

Alternatively, before I started using OBS Studio I'd use dxtory to record all of the audio channels (using the same voicemeeter/virtual audio cable setup) and simply record a 1pixel by 1pixel video so it's using very little resource and continue using shadowplay for in-game video. Then I simply sync'd them afterwards which was easy as the audio track from the game was in both shadowplay and dxtory outputs.

The only reason I dumped Shadowplay eventually is the audio sync issue where video and audio get out of sync, doesn't seem to affect everyone but on a 1 hour session my audio would desync by about 1.5s, it was randomly out of sync so no way of getting it back in. Oddly if I used the DXtory gameplay audio I could re-sync it but it was too much of a faff when OBS would keep it sorted. After many hours of investigation I'm convinced it's because Shadowplay outputs at a variable bit rate to keep file sizes smaller but editing software prefers to use constant bit rate, so you can run them through handbrake to correct, but it's an additional step I couldn't be bothered with.

 

[uncle_rufus]

Nice tutorial I can only echo the recommendation to use something like OBS rather than ShadowPlay (I should probably have mentioned that) - ShadowPlay is really only ideal (at the moment) for footage which you don't intend to edit; unless you're using an editor which can cope with the variable-frame-rate it produces (or as Halfmad says; you're happy to process everything you record to make the frame-rate constant)...

Also worth mentioning though that the VAC / voicemeter stuff is only really needed if you need to split the output from one device into 2. By default your speakers or normal sound listening device is already a separate device to your mic, so you can record these separately with any program that can record multiple tracks. Where the virtual cable stuff comes in is if you've got 2 separate programs (for instance a game and the sound of your mates talking on skype / teamspeak / ventrillo / mumble)... By default both sounds are coming from the same device (e.g. your speakers)... the virtual cables let you re-route the two separate bits of audio so that they appear to be coming from 2 separate devices (which a different program can then record as separate tracks)

 

[arc@css]

Thanks very much for the information, chaps. Plenty for me to watch and digest.

I don't think Audacity can multi-track, but you can launch more than one instance of Audacity... I'm not sure that's what you need here

I wonder if producing two individual tracks would result in each one still having both the game audio and mic commentary wrapped up together? Maybe it is configurable from there. I might look into that.

1. Set Shadowplay not to record your mic - this will give you the game audio on its own as part of the video file

Done.

3. Do a manual sync

A little while back, I practiced this a few times just to get an idea of what I was doing, and that seemed to go okay.

(p.s. also thinking of your settings - they look fine although you could give it a test record with the mic set to "Mono" - microphones aren't generally stereo devices, unless the AT2020 has 2 drivers inside it or something to allow it to pick up directional sound... and to be honest even if it does you'll probably get a cleaner sounding recording on mono anyhow; you don't want your voice to sound like it drifts from left to right in the balance)

When I read your post this morning, this part of your post suggested to me where I think I could be going wrong. I tried it, and the good news is that it sounded (imo) better than expected; I was actually quite pleased and rather surprised how clear and crisp it came across. I was certainly satisfied with it for a first effort.

The bad news was that after I had done some noise removal & attempted to clean up some of the mouse clicks - though I'm still unsure of how to do the latter effectively, I exported the audio to a format that could be imported to Premiere Pro. The problem now was that it sounded like my voice was drowned out again. I can only assume that it was the export settings that did that.

These were the settings I used when exporting the audio:

Spoiler

I've tried two or three others, but it looks like I'm going to require some missing dll files to allow it to export. Whether PP will accept them after that, I don't know. So, for the meantime I've used a friendlier option like WAV, but as I say, once in my editor, it sounds bad. I guess one option is to look into what PP can do to enhance my voice, which it may well be able to do, but I haven't tried that yet.

 

[arc@css]

Hi Arc

I know it's not specifically what you requested but it sounds as if you're looking to do something that I did previously, or at least a version of it (with a few program changes). This little vid I may might help a tad.

Alternatively, before I started using OBS Studio I'd use dxtory to record all of the audio channels (using the same voicemeeter/virtual audio cable setup) and simply record a 1pixel by 1pixel video so it's using very little resource and continue using shadowplay for in-game video. Then I simply sync'd them afterwards which was easy as the audio track from the game was in both shadowplay and dxtory outputs.

The only reason I dumped Shadowplay eventually is the audio sync issue where video and audio get out of sync, doesn't seem to affect everyone but on a 1 hour session my audio would desync by about 1.5s, it was randomly out of sync so no way of getting it back in. Oddly if I used the DXtory gameplay audio I could re-sync it but it was too much of a faff when OBS would keep it sorted. After many hours of investigation I'm convinced it's because Shadowplay outputs at a variable bit rate to keep file sizes smaller but editing software prefers to use constant bit rate, so you can run them through handbrake to correct, but it's an additional step I couldn't be bothered with.

I downloaded OBS Studio only the other day, so I'll probably look into that / watch your video this evening. Much appreciated.

 

[uncle_rufus]

The problem now was that it sounded like my voice was drowned out again. I can only assume that it was the export settings that did that.

I guess one option is to look into what PP can do to enhance my voice, which it may well be able to do, but I haven't tried that yet.

What processing (if any) did you do to the audio before exporting it? I know you mentioned noise removal and "cleanup" but what about things like compression, normalisation, EQ, ducking? If you check the earlier pages in the thread I'm sure there were some discussions about this you could have a look at but you'll always get better results with some proper treatment of the audio... I'll try to remember to update this post with a link when I get home (I'll have a look at your screenshot too; damn work firewall blocks out imgur etc )

Edit: what about this post: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=29347480&postcount=170

 

[arc@css]

What processing (if any) did you do to the audio before exporting it?

I did some noise removal. I don't know what the best method of achieving it is, but this is the video that I followed:

but what about things like compression, normalisation, EQ, ducking?

Twice I tried to compress the audio (as the chap does in the video above), but each time it crashed Audacity (see image below). I haven't tried using / don't know what Normalisation, EQ or Ducking are.

Spoiler

If you check the earlier pages in the thread I'm sure there were some discussions about this you could have a look at but you'll always get better results with some proper treatment of the audio... I'll try to remember to update this post with a link when I get home (I'll have a look at your screenshot too; damn work firewall blocks out imgur etc )

Edit: what about this post: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=29347480&postcount=170

Yeah, I'll have a gander at some earlier posts in this thread. Thanks.

 

[arc@css]

I've just had a quick tinker with audio gain in Premiere Pro, and that seems to have done the trick. I don't know if I'm home and dry yet, but hopefully that will be a worthy solution.

 

[arc@css]

For anyone here that is using Adobe Creative Cloud, you can currently get 40% off your membership for one year (the £45.73 per month package).

Spoiler

 

[Uncle_Gravy]

I'm soon looking to start getting back into Twitch streaming, So I'd assume the viewers/Followers I did have before I stopped would be long gone by now.

What would be a good game for a twitch beginner to start with, since its no point fighting hundreds/Thousands streamers who would be streaming H1Z1, BF1....All the big games since I doubt people would click through xxx pages of streamers.

Need something that still has a good viewership but not have to battle through hundreds of pages worth of streamers, so I'd have a chance on getting noticed.

Cheers.