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

[uncle_rufus]

What do people use to trim dxtory/lagarith clips without re-encoding?

I think you could try vdub (virtual dub) but it's been a while since I last used it (which was to merge multiple ~4Gb FRAPS clips together - it auto splits the recording)... I don't think it re-encodes everything but you may have to mess with the settings

Currently in the process of upgrading our setup - mostly because we'd like to go from 1 PC to 2 PCs, which will allow us to play a bigger variety of games together by opening up games which support only online co-op (rather than local co-op)... It's been ages since I last had to buy and entire PC outright though (usually sell a bunch of parts from the previous machine to fund it, and don't require new peripherals etc.)

Think I've got pretty much everything sorted apart from the audio (i.e. so we can do some game recording but on 2 PCs at once)... which is confusing the heck out of me - so much conflicting information... Between a thread in the sound section of OcUK, and on /r/audioengineering I am at a bit of a loss when it comes to the mic + audio interface part

 

[uncle_rufus]

The video ended up about 1.2GB in size recording at 1440p so it could be worse, it just took me ages to upload it to Youtube lol!

Stoner I usually just upload mine whilst playing single player games or off doing something else

Most of our videos end up around the ~3Gb mark... takes about 15-20 mins to upload depending on the time of day (the one good thing about our new-build house - FTTP internet!)

I tried Virtual dub but the smart render option is greyed out when using lagarith codec and from the length of the export I am guessing it is doing some form of reencoding (even with direct stream copy). It also just takes the first audio stream for the new file

Ahh, that's a shame... In that case I'm not sure; perhaps Lagarith can't just be chopped up like that at all

 

[uncle_rufus]

I've noticed that occasionally I'm getting audio crackling in my videos. I believe my audio settings pre-render are fine, so should I point the finger at on-board audio and a cheap but in theory well made set of Logitech 2.0 speakers? I can't think of anything else.

What does it sound like through headphones? That at least eliminates the speakers from the equation... Does anything else sound crackly or is it purely your videos?

 

[uncle_rufus]

Thankfully, it rarely happens now, but I did automatically think if I was asking too much of the on-board audio processor.

Maybe, but unless I'm mistaken when you record audio direct from the PC it isn't actually going through the sound-card/on-board audio at all... The job of those components is to convert the digital sound signal from the PC to an analogue signal to be sent to an analogue device (speakers/headphones)... But when you're recording game footage all you're doing is capturing the digital sound signal; no need for it to pass through the sound-card at all

When you're also recording a mic you are relying on the sound-card (but usually if it's a USB mic it's built into the mic itself) to do the opposite conversion for the mic signal (analogue -> digital) at which point the quality of that processing becomes important

This makes your crackling a little bit of a mystery - I wonder if it could actually be an artefact of the rendering somehow?

 

[uncle_rufus]

Does anyone know why YouTube stopped providing suggested tags in the basic info section, and do any of you enter your own?

Hadn't noticed, but as far as I can tell they were absolutely terrible tags it was suggesting anyway... so we've always done our own. I wonder why they removed it though...

We're like 90% of the way there with our new recording setup and so far it seems like it's going to be absolutely incredible; really pleased with how it's going

 

[uncle_rufus]

When you write your tags, do you use all of the available character space or just lay down the essential words?

I try to use as much as possible, but I think rather than going for words try to go for phrases or word combinations that are likely sorts of things someone might be searching for... For instance if it was a video on say Doom:

Doom, Doom Gameplay, Doom PC Gameplay, Doom Walkthrough, Doom Let's Play, Doom PC, PC Doom Gameplay

You get the idea... I think this is what you're supposed to do (not evidence to back it up though )

Well done. So, more space, better quality equipment and pc hardware?

We're moving from having one main PC which we play local co-op games on to having one PC each on 2 desks next to each other so that we can also play general online co-op games (and hopefully do something creative with the editing). Going to put up a vlog type video showing some of what we did and maybe talking about how we've set things up or something once it's all done

Exciting stuff though - off to bed now as a full day of building PCs tomorrow

 

[uncle_rufus]

Anyone know a way of equalizing volume over several audio clips? Did about 20 mins for a vid and not hugely happy despite adjusting the volume manually. Audacity was used too. Guess recording in one sitting would be best next time. link to vid I'm talking about.

Normalised, equalised etc in audacity, have done the same in Sony Vegas 13 but between clips I think the volume jumps a little. Doesn't help that I've got poor hearing though I guess lol

What about compression? I generally find (also use Audacity) that the best way to get fairly consistent sound especially when going between recording sessions is something like:

* Use a hard limiter to chop off any massive volume spikes (i.e. not just parts where you happened to speak loudly but more like gigantic outlying pops/clicks) make sure it's not too agressive and doesn't actually affect the voice sounds at all
* Could also EQ at this point if you have particular settings which you've tuned to make your voice sound its best. Also noise removal if you want (but honestly if you can get away without it I think it's worth it - really depends on how noisy your room etc. is)
* Then compress... something like a -20dB thresh, -40dB noise floor, 6.5:1 ratio and standard sort of 0.2 1.0 for attack + decay, also check the "peaks" setting but not the other one. That should get the audio nice and balanced in terms of volume
* Normalise - setting the maximum amplitude to something which results in audio which isn't too loud or too quiet (peaking somewhere just above +/- 0.5 is usually good)

Doing it in that order for me usually gets the audio to end up pretty even in terms of volume, and consistent from one recording to the next. Of course other things can affect it too like having good mic technique etc. and the general quality of the mic (which can't really be fixed in the software!)

Hope that helps - I'm not an expert at all but just passing on what seems to work okay for me

Edit: Also assuming you've recorded your mic separate to the game sounds (very important to do this) you might also want to compress the game sounds - I find doing this and then dropping the volume on the game sound quite a bit and applying auto-ducking generally results in something you can be sure won't drown out your voice. You can go a bit wider on the compression for the game audio (i.e. maybe more like -35dB thresh + 5:1 ratio)

Will look forward to the vlog.

Haha I'm a bit nervous about it but hopefully it turns out okay; might be a little while before it's ready

 

[uncle_rufus]

If you'd rather keep it a little more private, what you could do for the video is to show footage of your new set up rather than yourself?

True, although the slightly hidden agenda is to try and make the channel a bit more personable... We thought it might be interesting but also a chance to try and get any viewers who stop by slightly more invested in us a people rather than just voices. Could backfire horribly of course!!!

A bit late to stay hidden as well as we've already filmed a few bits (including some continuous long-shots of shuffling the furniture in the room around which I'm planning to turn into a sped-up little montage)

 

[uncle_rufus]

I got Dxtory yesterday as i wanted the ability to record multiple audio, it's so good but god damn the file sizes. That was with the Lagarith Lossless Codec and 4minutes of footage was like 20gig+ but the quality was exceptional.

I had a look around and found out what JackFrags uses as his videos are always good quality and he uses Matrox codecs. Found Here and the quality is still pretty damn good but for a 4 minute video it's under 3gig.

Hmm, perhaps I should have another try with Matrox - when I last tried it I couldn't get it to work at all - the OSD would turn orange but the frame rate of the disk (on the right) never came up; it just said "INIT" forever, and when I stopped recording and checked the directory it hadn't recorded any footage

At the time I thought I'd narrowed the problem down to the audio streams, as disabling one device (leaving just one audio track) seemed to fix it (but recording to one track is not an option for me and one of the reasons I like DXTory). Have you got it working with Matrox + multiple audio? If so I should give it another go...

Edit: p.s. I've also heard that different codecs are suited to different graphical styles - Lagarith is supposedly very good for 8-bit/retro or generally cartoony styled visuals, but not quite so good for full 3d first/third person style games. (Seems to be true in our experience; simple cartoony games can sometimes be ~60-70Gb for over an hour of footage, but full 3d games can exceed that after ~10-20 mins)

Heads up though if you view your files in VLC this codec won't work with it, something to do with it not supporting this codec.

That surprises me - VLC not supporting a codec?

I'm currently still annoyed at myself for a couple of stupid mistakes - since we just upgraded PCs I *thought* I had copied my usual DXTory settings to the new machine and it looked like they were all there, but because I'd had to re-install Lagarith too, it's settings were reset (including things like multi-core encoding etc.)...

The result? We recorded a 45 minute long preview of a new game and then found the footage was un-usable with a framerate of about 10-15fps ... It really sucked because when we re-recorded it we effectively lost a lot of the fun and reactions since we'd already played the game...

Live and learn...

 

[uncle_rufus]

Not had that issue at all, try using the codec i'm using maybe it was because you were using another one.

Yeah i had it recording my Mic, Game sound and Discord under three different sources and it worked fine. They all showed up fine in Sony Movie Platinum fine and i could mute ones and play others etc.

Hmmm... Either I'm doing something wrong or something is fudged up as if I install the Matrox VFW codecs from the above link DXTory will just completely refuse to startup

 

[uncle_rufus]

I gave up recording gameplay footage on DXTory to use due to desync issues, couldn't get it to work after about 48 hours messing so just moved back to shadowplay.

Since I've been Googling the crap out of all this stuff this morning I might have a suggestion (if you've not given up on DXTory at this point). I read somewhere that you can get desync issues if for any reason your audio quality settings in DXTory don't match what the device is actually using (so for instance if you've got 48000Hz, 16-bit stereo set in DXTory but in the Windows sound panel the device is actually set to 48000Hz 32-bit stereo, or 96000Hz stereo or whatever). Just a thought..

That's a weird one, I just installed then loaded the codec and all worked fine. Not sure how or why that has happened, tried checking google see if anyone else has had that issue?

Not sure... a few mentions of it being missing a .dll but as far as I can see it's there. Have tried re-installing things a few times now and it just won't work - which is a shame. I did get UT Video codec working and that seems pretty good so might do some testing with that instead...

I also installed Magic YUV which seems great but I can't get my video editing software (Blender) to import the result

What settings you use to run it through handbrake and keep it at a constant 60? I want to use handbrake to do things but whatever i do it always butchers the quality.

For Shadowplay stuff when I was still re-encoding it in handbrake it's the RF slider you want to set it right down to zero if you don't wan to affect the quality during the re-encode

 

[uncle_rufus]

if i'm going all out with high bitrate videos and better customization then OBS is usually my go to for recording

I feel like I must seriously be missing something with OBS... we've used it for streaming but when I've tried to look into it for recording it just seems to have barely any settings/features at all (at least, comparing it to DXTory...). I couldn't see any options to change codecs or customise any settings - am I looking in the wrong places?

Anyone running Two PC setups? I want to test my Xeon out with just the task of streaming on the slowest possible preset It can go, So i'm after a recommended capture card that can do 1080p 60FPS.

We're running a 2 PC setup but (at the moment) not in the sense you're talking about... we're actually going to be capturing co-op games on 2 machines at once (for two perspectives) and then using a multi-cam type approach in the editing (hopefully - haven't got it all tested just yet)

 

[uncle_rufus]

So we've done the first few recordings with our new audio setup (2x Shure SM-58s into a Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 interface) and I'm really pleased with the quality of the audio, though it raises an interesting issue and so I wonder what you guys think:

How do you go about setting the volume of your commentary + audio in general?

My previous approach was (in audacity) to pretty much try to maximise the volume (of the vocals) without any clipping (so getting the waveform close to +/-1.0 throughout via a combination of limiting, compression and normalisation)

But lately and especially with our new audio it seems to sound best if I aim a little lower than that - with the general waveform ending up between the +/-0.5 and +/-1.0 marks. I think it sounds pretty good but it's noticeaby less loud than our previous work when you compare them side by side...

So that's the question - is there a way to know what the "right" volume is for outputting stuff?

 

[uncle_rufus]

While I'm here, what sort of microphone or equipment will I need for commentary? I may get a headset as well, so late at night I don't have to worry as much about the volume.

This depends on how much you have to spend really - you'll likely hear a lot of recommendations for a condenser mic... but really in my experience these mics are great for recording vocals in a properly setup sound-booth - however trying to use them in the average office/bedroom full of hard surfaces which bounce the sound around you can easily end up sounding like you recorded your audio in an echo-y bathroom...

It's certainly possible to get good results but it will rely on very careful control of the input gain and mic-positioning (i.e. being very close to the mic with low gain so that it is less sensitive)...

Dynamic mics are (in my opinion) way better - they're the sort of mic a singer would use on stage or something so need to be able to not pick up too much of the sound of the band, the drummer etc. and so for voiceover work they're great in a non-ideal recording room...

The other consideration is how will you get the mic signal into the PC - some mics are USB with their own built in pre-amp, or you can buy a more traditional XLR mic and an audio interface to connect it to (which is in turn connected to your PC). The latter option is better as a lot of external interfaces have much better pre-amps than those in USB mics, but obviously it adds to the cost...

Other than that it's just about knowing what processing to do in Audacity or your audio program of choice. It is complicated for sure but quite fun messing about with (and compared to messing with video codecs etc. because you can easily listen back to your recording as you try out different things and get instant feedback)

 

[uncle_rufus]

Did anyone manage to try the Matrox after i mentioned it? Just curious to see how people have found it compared to what they were/are using.

I tried several more times but it just doesn't like something about my setup... though in the process I discovered that the "UT video" codec appears to perform pretty well, so I think I may switch to UT for all modern graphics games and stick with Lagarith for 8bit/Indie/Retro graphics (where it is unbeatably fast and awesome!)

 

[uncle_rufus]

AT2020 is a condenser though right? So be careful if you're recording in a room which has a lot of background sounds or is just generally acoustically poor. (Though if you're only recording your own voice you can generally overcome some of this with good mic positioning and sensible gain settings)

We just picked up a pair of Shure SM57s the other week - dynamic mics which are typically used for recording instruments (though the closely related SM58 is used for vocals) and I'm really impressed with the sound quality (especially as they were only ~£70 each)

Before that we used to use a Blue Snowball... quality was fine but a very sensitive mic so had the potential to sound really bad sometimes (and needing to pick up 2 of us meant we couldn't get close enough to the mic to drop the gain settings down - we actually ended up hanging a massive fur blanket across the room behind us to try and minimise echo)

Now with the SM57s we can both have our own mic positioned really nicely and they seem to pickup virtually zero background noise (even the sound of the other person in the room talking is barely audible!)

 

[uncle_rufus]

So, to clarify - it will pick up other noise, but that can be adjusted? Should I consider something else? I'm totally ignorant about this subject (in case you hadn't noticed).

Do you have a room full of noise and if you do is it loud? My friend uses a AT2020USB and he is fine as do plenty of other youtubers/twitch recorders/streamers you just have to mess with it to get it running perfectly.

Pretty much this - so for example if you're recording often in a house with screaming kids, noisy pets, or if like your PC area is kind of near to the kitchen and your washing machine might be running in the background occasionally... Also if the room isn't acoustically treated at all the size + shape of the room and amount of hard vs. soft furnishings will bounce the sound around and the if the mic is sensitive enough it'll pick up the rebounding sound waves as well creating the echo-chamber sounding effect!

But the settings will help - pretty much if you set the gain (on an interface if you using one - as dakaiez says - or just in Window's sound properties) to 100% it will make the mic pickup a lot more sound (including more background noise)... As you turn the gain down the effective range of the noises it will be sensitive to gets smaller and smaller (i.e. closer and closer to the mic)... So there's a sweet spot in the settings pretty much where enough background noises aren't picked up, but the signal of your voice is still full enough to be useful (and getting nice and close to the mic helps out with that as well)

 

[uncle_rufus]

So far, what I've noticed is that if I turn the 'monitor' setting on it up (see pic), the audio is bolder, but with too much 'interference' (if that's the right word). Reducing that reading will remove it, but make my voice sound too quiet. I've altered the volume in the control panel, too.

Can someone with experience of this / condenser microphones offer any pearls of wisdom?

"Monitor" suggests that it has some form of realtime monitoring built into it... is there somewhere on the mic where you could plug in headphones? If so then I'd wager the monitor volume will be controlling how loud the signal to them is... (I'd be surprised if it affects the recorded sound)... But I've not owned this mic so can't be sure

My advice is you ideally want to be really close to the mic - not so close that you'd touch the mic with your tongue if you stuck it fully out but maybe close enough that if your tongue was about 2-3 times longer it would just touch the mic... but have it slightly off-axis - in other words you want to be looking straight at your screen and talking directly forwards, but have the mic pointed at your mouth from slightly to the side. This will help avoid too harsh popping or breathing sounds into the mic (even with a pop filter this helps)...

Once your positioning is good do a test recording saying a decent few sentences and then another where you use your keyboard/mouse/controller a bit and be about as aggressive with the buttons as you think you're likely to get in a heated moment. Listen back to it and if you can hear the clicking a bit too well, dial the sensitivity back on the mic a bit and try again. You're looking for a balance where your voice still comes through fairly clearly but you can't hear tons of unwanted noises...

Unfortunately sound stuff is very much not an exact science - every setup, room, voice etc. is slightly different so you just have to do lots of testing until it sounds okay

 

[uncle_rufus]

The idea is that some people like to be able to hear themselves as they are recording (especially whilst wearing headphones which cancel out a lot of noise)... but you want that signal to be realtime (as even a slight delay would sound very weird) so a lot of interfaces (a USB mic is basically a mic + interface combo) provide a monitor output which sends the (analogue) mic signal straight back to headphones before it's converted to a digital signal and sent to the computer...

I would imagine this means you can also select your mic as an audio output device in windows - in which case it would send PC audio to the same monitor output (and be blended with the mic monitor signal)... if not then it seems like a slightly weird feature...

It's similar to our setup - only we have 2 of everything! Our interface has 2 mics plugged into it and it has 2 monitor outputs, but the routing is all configurable in software so we have it set so that one monitor output receives a blend of the first PC and both mic monitoring signals... and the other monitor output recieves a blend of the second PC and both mic monitoring signals (the 2nd PC is also plugged into the interface which is connected to the first PC via USB)... That way we can hear our own signals and each other's voices perfectly while both playing in headphones and recording the two mic signals... Took a lot of research and messing about to get it all working but really happy with it now

 

[uncle_rufus]

Hey Jolli, apologies no-one seemed to spot your message... I was just thinking to myself "it's been a while since there was activity in the recording/streaming thread" and 'lo and behold there is...

To answer your question at the end there - I'm on 16:10 as well but when I use OBS I have the output set to 1920x1080 and adjust the capture window to fit that area.... It helps if you just set the game resolution to 1920x1080 as well (it'll look stretched slightly to you but fine on the stream/recording)

Streaming seems attractive indeed due to not having to edit etc. but I always worry that I'm wasting time because a recorded video is on YouTube forever but ultimately a stream has a limited lifespan... We've streamed for a few hours now and again and typically get 0 viewers the whole time, where we could have recorded for YouTube in that time instead... How exactly to grow an audience streaming seems more mysterious even than how to gain viewers on YouTube!!