OBS Settings for Resolve

So you have an Nvidia card and want edit-ready recordings that scrub like butter/prores in Resolve without taxing your CPU?

Open https://www.displayhz.com/ in Chrome on the screen you want to capture and figure your actual panel refresh rate. See if it's closer to a fraction/multiple of 60.00 or 59.94. Then set OBS Common FPS to 60.00, 59.94 or half of it (30.00, 29,97). Adjust resolution to whatever you want.

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Then start with these settings. They work on a low end 1050 GTX at 60fps without dropping frames and will yield a lossless 4:2:0 recording that seeks instantly in Resolve.

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Any bit rates for audio / video are ignored, which is why I put them to zero or lowest (32 for audio)

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Data rate to high? Here is a visually lossless alternative: Put

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preset=slow rc=vbr_hq qmin=0 rc-lookahead=32 cq=12

in Video Encoder Settings and set Keyframe Interval to 8 (lower does seem to create artifacts with lossy NVENC). Start with cq=12. This is considered "visually lossless" with some headroom and should even be good enough for pixel peeping single frames. Lower down until 0 for "better quality" (nearing mathematical lossless) and larger file size or raise up to 51 for lower quality and smaller files.

Don't like 4:2:0 chroma sub sampling when zooming you screen cast content? Change color format from NV12 to I444. This still uses full hardware encoding, however decoding in Resolve will use the software decoder. So if you don't have the CPU power this may ruin your "seek like prores experience". And in case of lossless, you really need a fast SSD. With 60 fps this may yield data rates beyond 250MB/sec.

iGPU? I'll post a variant when time permits.

AMD GPU? I can't help with that. From what I know it's barley supported in FFMPEG and quality in lossy modes is bad. Search YouTube for EposVox. He has done some comparison.

Great tutorial, Peter! Interesting to hear that changing the framerate to match the monitor is important.

I've always just used 30 or 60, though that website you linked tells me that my displays are around 59.94 - 59.95. Though I have multiple monitors and I'm not certain I'm getting a single value for all of them, or if it's adjusting according to which display it's on. I do seem to get slightly different values, though: my 4K display seems to top out at 59.94, where my secondaries get to 59.95.

Also, do you have any experience of how this compares for AMD GPUs? Any caveats or different setup required when AMF is used instead of NVENC?

I put answers in the original post. Each screen is separate. Put Chrome on the display you want to record.

AMD GPU? I can't help with that. From what I know it's barley supported in FFMPEG and quality in lossy modes is bad. Search YouTube for EposVox. He has done some comparison.

Thanks for the details, I watched his most recent encoder comparison. Pretty damning for AMD as you say. NVENC is clearly the place to be for HW encoding. Although he does note that it normalises at higher bitrates; his emphasis is on streaming, where low bitrates are vital. For platforms where 10-12+ Mb/s is possible, the differences are more marginal it seems. And AMD does a bit better with HEVC, at least on the new Navi cards. Though it's still pretty much always behind NVidia.

Pretty amazing to see NVidia's new Turing NVENC beating even x264 Slow.

Wish I could go NVidia, for several reasons actually, but wanting to run macOS keeps me tied to AMD for now.

Here's the video if anyone else is interested:

Tweaked lossy mode settings. Unfortunately, I can't upload more than three files, so this little guide ends here.

Resuming this old thread as I wanted to optimise my OBS settings for Resolve.

The lossless settings are a bit too much for me - but the alternative throws an error.

FFMPEG doesn't seem to like

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rc=vbr_hq

and I do not see mention of it on the documentation I found

https://gist.github.com/tayvano/6e2d456 ... 35478a3a50

Maybe it's changed over the years? Any help, @peterjackson?

EDIT: on the OBS forum they advised the option has now changed to:

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 rc=vbr tune=hq

Thanks!