For those tech-minded, here's an account of what happened. I record in fairly high bitrate. It's not lossless but it's much closer to lossless than what a lot of captures cards or software like Xsplit push out, which is very lossy in formats not really designed for editing. A lot of people on Youtube make the mistake of recording their original footage lossy, then they lose detail again when they encode it and then AGAIN when they upload it to Youtube. You generally want to start with the footage that is closest to what you're trying to capture as possible and then minimise the number of steps down in your transcode.



So prior to this I was using Lagarith in multi-threaded YUV12 mode with DXtory as the capture program. At 30fps this is totally fine and completely reliable. No drops ever and unlike fraps it doesn't have the annoying habit of saying "oh, game dipped to 59 fps? ROUND DOWN TO 30 THEN!", which is the reason I stopped using FRAPs to begin with. Framerate impact overall was like 2 or 3, never anything bothersome. What I found was that when moving up to 60, in high detail games it was dropping frames, so instead of capturing at 60 it was varying between around 52 and 58. Not good, that variance is noticeable on video. I first thought it might be my harddrive not being fast enough to keep up with the sudden increase in MB/s write, but that turned out not to be true, benchmarking the drive indicated it was adequate and filming to my SSD which was benchmarking as 5 times faster, had the same results, so it clearly wasn't an i/o issue. I messed with Lagarith encode settings to no avail, there's not much you can really change with that codec in DXtory outside of a few presets and none of them worked. My conclusion at that point was that there must be some ineffeciency in the way that DXtory is encoding which is preventing it from hitting 60 all the time (it was able to hit 60 in Hearthstone, but that is a much less visually complex game so there's less to encode per frame). I checked cpu usage, changed affinities and priorities, no dice.



At that point my decision was to try another codec. I did some research and happened upon UTVideo YUV422 BT.709 - it was touted as being faster on the encode than Lagarith was, downside is it takes up more space, but that's fine. It also gives you an option to prioritise decode speed over compression ratio, which is again fine, because I have plenty of spare space, but I need it to encode at consistent 60 and not drop frames and I also need it to work smoothly with Premiere. So I benchmark it in several games and to my delight it's staying at 60, even in very intensive games like Lords of the Fallen. The filesize per second is more than double that of DXtory, clocking in at about 400GB per hour of footage, but that's entirely fine. I can't playback the source files in VLC but I couldn't do that with Lagarith either and Premiere accepts the file no problem. I've even noticed that it encodes it faster in the final product than it did for Lagarith, even at 60fps.



So there's my little techy tale in regards to codecs. The Ziggurat clip I showed you was with Lagarith, the Borderlands clip was with UTVideo YUV422 BT.709. With Borderlands I upped my final encode from my regular which is target 12 max 14 VBR 2-pass at max bitrate max quality, to target 16 max 20 2-pass with the same settings. This results in a larger file but that has to be the case to give each frame enough space to properly fill out its data without artifacts. Since I upload overnight these days, it shouldn't really delay uploads and the encode time was surprisingly speedy. So yeah, those are my settings and software for reliable 60fps software capture with good quality results. Your mileage may vary depending on the power of your setup.