How to Record Better Quality Footage From Video Games

Are you trying to increase the quality of the footage that you record from video games? If you are then you may be starting to realize that it can be a little bit tricky for a number of different reasons.

Understanding Video Quality and Graphics Quality

The first thing that you need to understand is that the quality of your footage actually is going to depend on two separate factors: The video quality itself, and the graphics quality of the game.

At the end of the day that’s because when you record gameplay you’re essentially recording the video game graphics as is – so if it doesn’t look great originally then it isn’t going to look much better when it has been recorded.

Unfortunately as much as it can’t look better once it has been recorded – it can look worse. That is what happens if the video quality itself is poor, and the video may stutter, artifacts may appear, or its definition may be lacking.

Ideally you would want both the video quality and graphics quality to be good – but that can be complicated as well. Running a game at high graphics settings can take up considerable system resources – especially when you’re recording at the same time.

In short both may get in the way of each another, causing the quality to deteriorate.

Balancing Quality and Performance

Considering all of that, if you want to record better quality footage from video games you’ll have to balance the quality and performance.

For the video recording settings you should record at the same resolution as the game, and set the frame rate to between 30 and 60 frames per second. On the other hand for the graphics settings you should set it as high as possible so long as the performance of the game isn’t affected.

The best way to see whether or not the performance of the game is affected is to track its in-game frame rate. Some games will let you see the frame rate in the settings, or if not you can look at other ways to see a game’s frame rate.

Try to keep the game’s frame rate above 30 as that would be ideal. If it starts to dip below 30 then you may want to scale back the graphics settings and see if that helps.

It may be a good idea to close any unnecessary programs and other background processes as well to free up system resources. Additionally using a screen recorder that is light and optimized may help, for example Gecata by Movavi.

Basically that should give you a much better idea of how to record better quality footage from a video game. As you can see it isn’t that straightforward, but with a bit of experimentation you should be able to find a balance that allows you to record the best quality of video possible. If not – it may be time to upgrade your computer so that it is able to handle it better.