So using obs (and I'm sure it's my settings), it looks really shitty and I wondered if I could use Shadowplay. what I've noticed is that it apparently doesn't pick up LiveSplit. Any way I could get it to show my splits, alternate methods of recording, or just some better OBS stuff? Could I link my splits in the splits.io thing or something?
I mean if you want a TL;DR on OBS Studio quality settings (note that I'm in advanced mode, so I'm reading that off from there and adding explanations):
- Rescaling the output is useful if you want to local record in native (your screen's/the game's) resolution, but only stream in a lower resolution, let's say for example your game runs in 1920x1080px, so you could rescale it down to 1280x720px.
- Bitrate is probably the most important one. For streaming you want that to be at least somewhere above 1000kbit/s for Portal. Twitch allows up to 3000kbit/s (afaik at least, might be higher nowadays), but you should only go above that if you have quality options. Of course for streaming the other factor is your upload speed, if that can't keep up, you'll have to scale down the bitrate.
- You can use a custom buffer size to try and get your bitrate to stabilize better, note that this heavily depends on the stability of your connection
- CPU Usage Preset is pretty self explanatory. You want that as high as it'll go without making the game run worse or making the recording skip frames.
In the local recording tab in OBS Studio you can actually have different settings to your stream settings, for example I use NVENC H.264 here, so my nvidia graphics card encodes the local recording, while the CPU handles streaming. Here you can of course set much higher bitrates (and a better Usage Preset if you're using your GPU to encode). Recommended file formats are mkv and mp4. If you don't want to use video editing programs to cut out the other run attempts before, I'd recommend checking out the Hotkey settings and setting hotkeys for starting and stopping recordings.
Your run does not need a video unless its in the top 10, so demos are suffice for verification purposes, any additional videos or splits are not required
Regarding a top 10 run, we've had a scene in the past of a time not showing the livesplit timer. Straight gameplay footage will NOT apply for top 10 verification, and livesplit has to be shown for the duration of the run. For this reason, I would recommend using a program other than shadowplay
Starting today, runs that require video proof (top 25) and runs beyond that where video is the only form of proof, now require audio, as recording audio for only the game is now a native OBS feature.
