[Thomas Ames]

Hey Wayne,

It’s great that you tried out OBS! Did you download the Studio version or the original?
I thought I had downloaded the UT Video codec when I used Dxtory (https://imgur.com/a/CMDAQ) but it doesn’t get picked up by OBS (https://imgur.com/a/dSvY4). Perhaps you could link me to the download site you used.
I’ve also looked at FFMPEG specific options: https://imgur.com/a/azQ8e
Unfortunately, I just don’t have enough of an understanding to know what my best option would be.

I’m all about lossless recording, I’d just like the option to edit audio strips separately due to volume peaks, music editing, etc. but I would certainly give it a try.

Could you show me the settings you’re using for your recordings?
From searches, I’ve found that using a “bigger” “CPU Usage Preset” means that the CPU is used less, but when I have the preset lower than “ultrafast”, the highest option, the game I’m playing jitters.

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[Thomas Ames]

Thanks for that Wayne,

What I’ve found to work best for me so far is tweaking some options in OBS.
I’ve seen you respond to a lot of OBS/Vegas issues so I figured you could pass along this information in the future.

First off, my GPU is an AMD R9 290x (2 in crossfire, but I don’t think that matters here). I think my issues came from using the AMD VCE codec in OBS instead of the x264. I did this in hopes that my card would do the bulk of the work hardware-side instead of software-side. I also was using the OpenCL renderer instead of the DirectX11 (11 or 12, I’m not sure), because OpenCL seems to be AMD’s baby and I thought it would be best to have as much of this done through AMD software since I have an AMD card.

I’ve only edited one video thus far with these OBS settings, but it ran much better using the regular x264 codec (encoder?) and DirectX11 renderer.

I haven’t looked into it – and don’t really care to since the quality I’m recording at now seems pretty great to me – but perhaps there’s a way to include an AMD decoder plugin to Vegas to make using that encoder more viable. (I keep using terms like “encoder” and “decoder” in reference to codec, sorry if that’s inappropriate.)

I have another question for you though: If I am recording at “60fps”, with Dxtory, it told me what my write speed actually was, and it wasn’t a consistent 60, it jumped around from 58-62 usually. How can I tell the exact FPS when editing in Vegas? Or should it be exactly 60 due to Constant Frame Rate. I understand what CFR means, but my thought process is that maybe it’s just shooting for constant but can’t quite keep it stable.

Thanks again.

[Thomas Ames]

Hey Wayne,

Did you get a chance to try out those video? I’ve been just using the Handbreak’ed versions of them and it’s been going much better. My CPU has a rough time when I try to preview/RAM-preview velocity edited footage – especially negative velocity – but it’s better than before.

I’m interested to hear your analysis!

[Thomas Ames]

Here’s my whole build: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/I3reeze/saved/vwpWGX

My hope is that at some point I could record in my native 1440p at 60fps.
I changed my Vegas settings to use 8GB of RAM (I think) instead of the default 4. If allowing more would help with this inconvenience, I’d be more than willing.
My build currently has 16 GB of DDR4 RAM and I’d be willing to upgrade/buy more if it would help.

I have messed with preview settings in the past, it’s currently pretty low quality, but I haven’t messed with them recently. Currenlty, I think I use Preview>Auto

Thanks for all your help so far.

[Thomas Ames]

Yeah I am applying a velocity envelope. I’m very sorry, I’m going through previous posts and seeing that I don’t mention that anywhere!

I am both speeding up and slowing down. I’ve created a Dropbox with both of the projects and all their source media.
The “Faster Smaller Project” is the strip which was run through HandBreak; “Slow Large Project” is the original.
Here’s a link to the dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/apca65hjl7ltvv6/DropBox.zip?dl=0
It is quite large; took about 2 hours to upload.

When I opened the project this morning to try to mess around in it a bit, it took a while for it to start running smoothly. I would scrub a bit and CPU would max out and the program would not respond for a while. Tried it again and the same thing happened. After a few minutes it started running as normal.
The smaller project ran fine the whole time aside from small pauses when editing velocity.

And what I meant when I was talking about pauses only when I edit velocity, I meant that the clip would run just fine over and over again.
However, once I change a point of velocity – even just a small amount – the large project would freeze up looking for the correct frame and then continue a while later (up to 30+ seconds at some points). This also happens when just trying to play the project for the first time or clicking around the timeline.

Here are the render settings I’m using: https://imgur.com/a/Ln2os Renders for both projects over the velocity edited parts seem completely fine.

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[Thomas Ames]

Okay, so I’ve found two things:

1) I can play a 10 second clip over and over again in Vegas Pro and it has no issues, this is with all strips other than my gameplay strip muted or deleted. However, if I change the velocity somewhere, once it reaches that frame, CPU maxes, frames stop, and Vegas stops responding for a few seconds until it finds it’s proper place. Then, I can play the clip without messing with the velocity any further and it will play flawlessly.

2) I ran my original file (2,501,059 KB) through HandBreak with these settings https://imgur.com/a/MtSgM and the resulting file (1,218,678 KB) looks just as great to my eyes. Also, it runs smoothly in Window Media Player where as the original file hops around and pauses in places because “Network is too busy to play file at original quality”.

A final thing I just found while playing around with this new HandBreak created file, velocity edits only slow down the program by fractions of a second instead of multiple seconds. (I still have to play it back a couple times to have zero skipping, even with RAM pre-rendering, but it’s better than it was) CPU usage spikes but doesn’t max out for extended periods of time like it did with the original footage: https://imgur.com/a/IDdUL

So does this tell you than my original bitrate/quality was a little too high for Vegas or my machine to process on the fly like that?
Does it perhaps mean that the encoder I use with OBS Studio is the issue?

I really do appreciate your help with this so far, as real progress is actually being made!

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[Thomas Ames]

Thanks for the troubleshooting suggestions Wayne, I plan on doing them when I get home – currently at work – and getting back to you.
In the meantime, I’ve been doing some thinking and a bit of thread searching and have come to think that perhaps this project is maxing out my CPU because I’m trying to decode two video strips at the same time.
The first and the strip at the top of the project (so it’s visible) is the footage from OBS as a .mp4 file. I then have two audio strips, mic and game, then another video strip from an .mp4 which I downloaded from Youtube, and then the audio strip that comes with that. 5 Strips in total, two being video.

I guess the question I should ask is: What happens to the second, lower video strip during the editing process if it is not at all visible due to the 100% opacity of the top video strip? I have to imagine that it is also being processed since, if I set the opacity of my top strip to 99% or lower, that lower strip would be visible.
I will complete the troubleshooting steps you’ve suggested, but I also wanted to pose this question in case it was not already being considered.

Also, I just recently returned to OBS Studio after moving to Dxtory (about $30) in order to capture multiple seperate audio files. During my time with Dxtory, I found that I wasn’t capturing the quality I want, so moved back to OBS Studio. The quality of the raw capture is fantastic in comparison to anything I captured on Dxtory (even when maxing out the write speed of my SSD at 400+ MB/sec) so I’m hoping to be able to stick with this.

[Thomas Ames]

Hello and thank you both for your input.

I couldn’t figure out Media Info quickly on how to display all of my current settings so I’ll just give it a shot myself:

I’m using OBS Studio 0.15.2 (64 bit, Windows 10)
I am recording as an .mp4 using the “AMD Video Coding Engine H.264 Encoder (Media Foundation)”
I am using a “CQP (Constant Quality)”. The other options I see immediately are for “Constant Bitrate” and “Variable Bitrate”
I have four audio sources, all capturing at a bitrate of 160, Sample Rate of 44.1khz, in Stereo
My Base Resolution is 2560×1440 being rescaled by OBS to 1920×1080 using a Downscale Filter called “Lanczos (Sharpened scaling, 32 samples)”
I am using an FPS value of 60. I could use 59.94, but I’m not very educated on this subject, so I went with what I thought was simple.
The OBS Video renderer I’m using is Direct3D 11. Color Format: NV12. YUV Color Space: 709. YUV Color Range: Full.

I’ve been doing some searching for how to force a Constant Framerate, but there is no immediate option for it currently in OBS Studio, from what I can see. I imagine that using Constant Bitrate wouldn’t completely solve this problem, either.

The most promising (or perhaps unfavorable) link I found was this thread on the OBS forums: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/enable-cfr.27793/
The thread is from May of 2015, but in it, a Developer says that CFR is always on and never disabled.

I just realized what I should be doing with MediaInfo :p : https://imgur.com/a/hkgkI I recorded two games with the same settings, so the other footage should be nearly the same, with the possible exception of Bits/(Pixel*Frame) and Stream size.

So I’ve covered that CFR is being enforced, and what my OBS settings are. I hope that’s enough information for someone to help with the next step.

Thank you for your input thus far!

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