I stream / record using the El Gato HD (before anyone asks why id use such a crap capture card, it was a gift from my girlfriend like a year ago before we knew anything about capture cards) and when i begin my runs, i noticed upon watching the recording that the timer starts and stops at the wrong time in my video. This is because of the 2-3second lag that the El Gato has. Capturing the video into OBS alongside the timer causes obvious issues because of this lag. My question is if there's any way around this? Also if my timer starts and stops at the wrong times, does that invalidate my run? Obviously the early start of the timer is balanced out by the early stopping so my runs are still timed accurately in the end.
Basically, most games won't particularly care about this minor lag since the time evens out (you start 2 seconds before game appears to start and finish 2 seconds before it appears to finish). It's not inaccurately timed, it just looks strange to a viewer.
The way to fix it is to set "split delay". Livesplit (assuming you're using Livesplit, idk if other timers have this feature) has a feature somewhere in its settings called "split delay" and you can set that to be whatever the delay in the video is. So, if you have a 2.5 second delay from when you split to when the Elgato video catches up, then Livepslit will delay the actual split that amount of time.
This way, when you hit the split key, the split won't actually register for a few seconds so it'll look like your timer is in sync with the video.