Hello, I was wondering what your render settings are for all the longplays. I was looking at the PC longplays section and I was really shocked by some of how small the file sizes are.

I know you use h264/aac, but what are the exact settings?

Thanks c:

Simple answer; it varies.

Some people use too high bitrate, some people use too low. Some use very good settings. There really should be some guidelines on this, but alas, there isn't.

When I do PS3 games (720p, like PC games are supposed to be), I basically only tweak the quantizer setting to something that looks "nice enough". Usually turns out to be around 1GB/hr, or about 2500-3000kbit/s. Games with little motion will get lower bitrate, games with lots of action will get higher. That's the beauty of the quantizer, it is a measure of "quality" and shouldn't need to be modified once a good number is found.

Thanks, I know about fiddling with bitrate, but I'm scared to do it because of low quality video, and I'm way too lazy to render again.

I usually test-render a minute or so of gameplay video (where stuff actually moves around) to make sure the bitrate is good.

On the other hand, I usually look through the complete video once before I upload it, and often I find edits I don't like and have to re-encode the whole thing again anyway. Doesn't bother me that much. It bothers me more to upload half-assed videos.

The inbuilt x264 profiles are good enough. I use Staxrip encoder so terminology may be different in others.

As a general rule I just go with 'Medium' Quality setting upto 640x480 (Q22) and 'Higher' Quality setting 720p+ (Q20) (there isn't usually anything in between ;) )

For Preset I use 'Veryslow' for video that's under 2 hours and 'Slower' for longer videos. This keeps file sizes low (Best compression and quality) but does need some processing power behind it else you could be waiting a while.

I'm still using an old Intel Q6600 @3600mhz and the encoding speed is perfectly acceptable at these settings.

@Connor That's not a bad idea, thanks.

@MadMatty Thanks!