Encoding 4K Longplays

Last updated on 3 years ago
Spazbo4
While we have new consoles that output to 4K for games, specifically all PS5 and Xbox Series X games being recorded for longplays and PC games that are available for those consoles should also be recorded in 4K. This thread isn't for helping to record or edit the footage, but to get the best encoding for them since 4K encoding is not something that can be handled on just any old PC. Assuming you have your footage already edited from editing software and fully rendered and ready to be encoded, currently the best settings for encoding are:
Handbrake vs MeGUI

If you are going to use MeGUI for 4K encoding it is rather simple as long as you already know how to use MeGUI and have used it with x.264 encoding before. For 4K longplays we will need to require x.265 as the encoder instead so here are the settings I recommend:
i.imgur.com/35Cc813.png
However using MeGUI for CPU encoding is rather slow, even if you have the best CPU out there it won't take full advantage of it, so there is also Handbrake. Handbrake isn't recommended for regular 1080p longplays or lower as the quality from MeGUI for x.264 is still the best option but for 4K it is a different story.

Now I have to say that for 4K longplays being encoded with Handbrake it is REQUIRED that you have an NVIDIA RTX graphics card, either the 20 or 30 series are good enough at the time of making this post so anything that comes out after these cards should work too. I don't have experience with AMD graphics cards, however, since they don't have the same hardware encoder as NVIDIA RTX cards do.

So for Handbrake encoding my recommended settings are:
i.imgur.com/axqar7X.png

and make sure audio settings are set to AAC with a bitrate of 192
i.imgur.com/DBZNRPU.png


As of right now these are the best ways to encode 4K longplays and since Handbrake uses the hardware built into the RTX NVIDIA graphics cards it uses them a lot more effectively than just CPU encoding with MeGUI, so when encoding a 4K longplay that is say 10 hours long MeGUI would take days or weeks to encode the 4K footage to x.265 where Handbrake would take 20 hours or less for the same 60fps 4K footage.
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