[Tutorial] Recording ingame footage with OBS Studio

[Sombs]

Introduction

---

People often see my YouTube Channel and ask me how I record the stuff. It's a bit difficult to explain, thus I think it is time to write a simple tutorial about how you do it, step by step. First of all, you don't need a high-end computer to record what you do in Discovery. There are however certain things you should be aware of. In this tutorial I show you how I record stuff using Open Broadcaster Software Studio, short OBS Studio.

Requirements and Download

---

Your computer should be able to handle simple recording if you can move through the Cayman system without FPS drops. Cayman has two big nebulae with HD textures, and other than vanilla, those will slow your PC down significantly on low-end machines. If you actually have one such low-end PC, you might better mount your smartphone infront of the monitor screen and use it as camera if there is the desperate need to record something. Either that or you make screenshots.

OBS Studio is an open source software, completely free to use. You can download it from the official OBS website, here. Don't download it from other websites, you might end up downloading weird versions or even worse, third party software add-ons for your browser or other shit. You can select different ways of downloading it and also get OBS Studio for Linux and the vegan starbucks converse beard hipster operating system. You also find the non-studio version of OBS on that page, but since they don't update it anymore as OBS Studio is better and free as well, just go for OBS Studio.

Installation and Setting Up

---

Install the OBS Studio like any other program. The installer will ask you about installing a plugin for OBS Studio to capture internet browser pages, which is not really necessary for our means here, but it is up to you if you want to install it anyway or not. The basic OBS Studio is way enough for us. Once you installed the program, start it!

The first thing you will see is the OBS Studio main screen in the background while the Auto-Configuration Wizard pops up and asks you if you want to use it. It is by the time I write this tutorial in a beta state, meaning it works fine already. You can use it or not. I'd advise to do it, because that wizard will probably know your PC better than you if you have to rely on a tutorial to record stuff. ;3

It will ask you wheter you want to optimize it for streaming or for recording. Unless you want to stream Discovery like for example @sindroms does on his YouTube channel, optimize for recording.

The Auto-Configuration Wizard will ask you then about the monitor resolution you want to capture in, as well as the framerate. If you experience problems with the capture performance, you can alter these settings later, but usually the optimal settings are already suggested by the ACW. It looks like this on for me.

OBS Studio will now test your settings and give you the results.

Alright! Now we're at the main screen!

Technically we can start now already. However, one important thing to check before we start setting up the Scene and Source. In the lower right corner is the controls menu, with "Start Streaming", "Start Recording", "Studio Mode", "Settings" and "Exit". Click on "Settings"!

In the new popping up window, select output. This is probably the most important settings window here. For Discovery, recording with the Recording Quality "High Quality, Medium File Size" should totally suffice. This way you record in an okay quality while the recordings don't eat up too much space. If you choose "Indistringuishable Quality, Large File Size", the quality will be three times better and the videos will be three times as large. For comparison:

One minute of 1440x900 Discovery recording in "High Quality, Medium File Size" setting = ~8.3 megabyte
One minute of 1440x900 Discovery recording in "Indistringuishable Quality, Large File Size" setting = ~25 megabyte

One hour of 1440x900 Discovery recording in "High Quality, Medium File Size" setting = ~500-600 megabyte
One hour of 1440x900 Discovery recording in "Indistringuishable Quality, Large File Size" setting = ~1500-2000 megabyte

The quality difference will be like a comparison between a .jpg picture and a .png picture, meaning the "High Quality, Medium File Size" will look a bit less saturated and maybe even a very little bit blurry. It will be totally alright, though. However, when you upload it to YouTube, for example, the recording will have a little loss of quality based on the YouTube video converter. Thin letters ingame will become a bit hard to read that way, so I suggest you use "/set chatfont default bold" ingame to make sure the letters in the chat are bold. The higher the quality, the more frames per second will be used for the recording, so the video will actually look smoother than your ingame view.


Scenes

---

[indent]This is the last step before you can start. Return to the main screen of OBS Studio. In the lower left corner you will see "Scenes" and "Sources". Scenes for different recording set-ups to switch. For Discovery, we need only one Scene. We take the default one there. With a rightclick, you can open a little menu. Rename the scene if you want, I just renamed it to "Discovery Freelancer" as I usually have many scenes for many games. What we need to do now is telling OBS Studio to record it when we play Discovery. In order to do so, you will now start your Discovery Launcher and start up the game on any character you want. All you need is to have Freelancer running, the main menu will be totally enough for now.

Click on this picture to get a bigger version of it!

Here you see what we need to do next. On the main screen, right-click the empty white area of "Sources" and use "Add" to add a "Game Capture". A new window will pop up and show you a smaller version of the main screen which is currently showing nothing. For "Mode", select "Capture specific window" and then for "Window" select "[Freelancer.exe]: Freelancer", and there you have it. "[Freelancer.exe]: Freelancer" shows only up in that selection box if you have started Discovery already. Once you have selected "[Freelancer.exe]: Freelancer", the main screen will automatically show Discovery both in the preview and in the background on the main screen. That's how it should be!

Click "OK" and return to the main screen.

If you click on the main screen at the capture, you will see red lines framing the capture. You can resize it and move it around. Make sure it captures everything!

Record!

---

Now you can use the "Start Recording" button to record stuff. You can set hotkeys to end and start recordings in the Settings, or you do it like me and just have OBS Studio visible on the second monitor. ;3

You will find your recording usually in the video folder of your PC, wich per default is C:\Users\YourName\Videos. You can look it up in the Output Settings menu of OBS Studio, as you might have seen in one of the ealier pictures up there. Experiment around to get your best set-up! You can upload the videos on YouTube or whatever video sharing platform you might prefer. I suggest YouTube because it is simply the most known one and it is free and google gets your data anyway, so why resist? ;3

By the way, one cool thing you can do with your videos is, once they are uploaded, make gifs of them using Imgur.com.

That's it folks!

---

---

Uncharted System Stories: 18 | 32 | 34 | 37 | 38 | 85

Templates: Character | Transmissions

---

[Sombs]

[Freeroamer]

Thanks, I would be using this but I have shadowplay

---

[Kauket]

https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/o...rdings.16/

[Laz]

Something to add:

Some PCs will require the OBS to be launched in admin mode for hotkeys to work.

---

[Username removed]

Do I need to play Disco in windowed mode for this to work? Because if I go full screen I do get the sound but I get black recording.

EDIT: Even playing in windowed mode I still get the same problem: https://imgur.com/a/1lgwV

[Sombs]

No. All you need is to have a game window of Freelancer designated. If you record with monitor capture, it won't record full-screen DX applications.

---

---

Uncharted System Stories: 18 | 32 | 34 | 37 | 38 | 85

Templates: Character | Transmissions

---

[Sombs]

It sometimes takes time for OBS Studio to find the game capture window in the selection. Try to reassign that in the "Properties for 'Discovery Windowed'" menu the same way you did before, but wait a minute before closing that sub-menu. That might work.

If that doesn't work, I don't really know why. Maybe google can help, or using the non-studio version of OBS, which is what I still use over Studio except when streaming. Maybe for some reason the red frames are only 1x1 pixels wide in the capture window. Try to resize that to the full screen, too, maybe that helps. Talking about the red frames in the main screen of OBS Studio, those are in the upper left corner of the capture in your screenshot.

---

---

Uncharted System Stories: 18 | 32 | 34 | 37 | 38 | 85

Templates: Character | Transmissions

---

[Username removed]

YES YES YES!!! Launching OBS Studio as administrator fixed the problem.

Thank you so much Sombra! <3

[Nerva Regis]

Instead of Game Capture, use Window Capture. That works for me.

Edit: Welp, I'm glad it was a Run as Admin thing ^^.
Edit 2 : Late answer is late.