Think about it this way. Every time you encode something, there is a small loss in quality that will happen regardless of your settings and you can't get back that lost quality no matter what you do. Your video will always be encoded at least twice, once in your editing program (Premier/Vegas etc) and again when you upload to Youtube.



Youtube already mangles the video as it is, so ideally what you want to do to avoid excessive quality loss is to provide Youtube with the best possibly quality you can. The easiest and least insane way of doing that is to capture at the highest bitrate you can initially, as close to "lossless" as possible (very few people capture true lossless footage because of the insane requirements of doing that at 1080p60), put your audio in clean as a separate track recorded in a separate application (keep everything separate and clean until you absolutely have to combine them together) and then encode at a much higher bitrate than Youtube will finally transcode it to. By doing this you minimise the overall loss and keep the quality as high as possible.



That's all going to be limited by the kind of hardware you have as well as your upload speed (I encode my videos at 20mbps 1080p60 because my upstream just isnt good enough to handle anything higher, I'd prefer to encode them at better quality than that) but the golden rule is "Youtube is already going to make it suck, don't make it suck even more by feeding Youtube something thats already sucky to begin with". If you use something like OBS, you CAN record high bitrate sure, but really OBS is designed to encode a very lossy low bitrate stream, not a very high bitrate "close to lossless" piece of footage. Here's a kind of example. I stream 720p60 from Xsplit, a very similar program to OBS, at 3700kbps. Looks pretty good for a stream.



However, compare that to the footage I recorded of Volume via FRAPs. That 1080p60 footage was recorded at 1491456kbps, so yes, a minute of footage is about 3 gigabytes of storage. Obviously uploading that to Youtube would be insane and I have to encode it down in Premier, but if I used footage from OBS it would be lower quality unless I ramped the bitrate up to insane levels. So that's the general rule of thumb. Record at the best possible quality your system will allow, then encode down when you produce your final product, don't encode down to begin with because you can't get that lost quality back.