Noob looking for best 4K settings for YouTube

Help
1

Good day everyone, noob here.

I’ve been searching sources but some of them suggest settings that doesn’t exist in my Kdenlive installation, and I don’t understand them even with explanations.

I’m using Kdenlive 25.12.1 on Windows 10 Pro 22H2

CPU: i7 4790K

RAM: 16GB

GPU: GTX 1070 8GB

STORAGE: SSD

SCREEN: 1080P 24"

My specs aren’t great but that’s what I’ve got to work with for now and I don’t mind waiting for a file to generate.

I’ve got an 11th gen i5 laptop which I will be using for editing via Kdenlive to quicken the render and an 8th gen i5 laptop for uploads tp YouTube.

All I’m interested in is being able to record footage in OBS from some old games but no matter what I try, I get terrible image quality, if someone can guide me into the correct path for selecting recording settings that will look great on YouTube up to 4K quality in Kdenlive.

Some extra questions I’ve been wondering about:

Should I record in 1080P with OBS and then upscale in Kdenlive or record directly in 4K from a 1080P native display?

Should I record in avi and then convert to MP4 in Kdenlive? I will be recording ±1 hour videos and with avi it generates enormous files like 800+GB files, will it be better to record in MP4?

Some people say 8000 bitrate is good, others say quality will be lost when uploading to YouTube and should compensate with 12000 bitrate, shat is correct considering I want good 4K quality with as little as possible noise and smooth animation fluidity when characters move.

I’m not doing anything special like special effects or anything, just cutting unwanted pieces of footage out and maybe add an intro.

​I chose the NVIDIA NVENC H.265 ABR encoder because of my NVIDIA GPU, is that the best option?

​I’m using free software so something like Kdenlive is what I’m looking at unless you have a better alternative. The problem is that there are so many settings that doesn’t make sense to someone like me and would like a simple set of settlings that will work for what I’m looking for if possible.

​Thank you in advance.

2

I dont do gaming but I do use OBS for screen and USB camera captureing and do all my stuff in 4K so I can try and help a bit:

I use a GTX1660 and NVENC H.265 ABR in Kdenlive rendering with no issue - output is great quality.

It looks like I have OBS output (in Settings) set to NVENC H.264, High Quality, Medium File size, 6000kps.

Since you said you have poor video quality, is it poor coming out of OBS (play the OBS output file with vlc) or poor only after rendering from Kdenlive?

If its poor out of OBS, thats where you should put your efforts first - upping the output quality from OBS or increasin gthe bit rate (one at a time) to see what makes a diference. If your CPU will handle it, try software encoding for comparison - seems unlikely it would be better though.

Similar for kdenlive - if the quality from OBS is good, but poor after kdenlive rendered it, look in its rendering settings and experiment with differemnt codecs etc.

A few other things:

Make sure the frame rate - fps is the same for OBS and kdenlive to prevent the need for frame interpolation with may worsen things (and slow down kdenlive).

Upscaling from 1080p to 4K. Where you do it (OBS or kdenlive) could change the output quality if one or the other has a much poorer upscale algorithm. You will have to experiment - and you might even find it makes littledifference.

A few more considerations: You may find upscaling in real time in OBS runs into CPU or GPU issues since it has to keep up with things in real time. Kdenlive has no such limitation since rendering can be slower that than the desired fps.

So bottom line: test to see which the quality loss is occuring, and then try different rending/output settings in that program to make it better.

Good luck! And please post your results here so others can benefit from you findings!

3

Thank you Peter for your reply I appreciate it, it did come out poor from OBS but I will be testing what you said especially with regards to bitrate and output quality, I will respond once I’ve had a chance to run through it with all possible combinations until it looks perfect.

Thank you for your help I appreciate you.

4

Happy to help! Just be sure to try different settings one at time so you know what makes a difference and what does not. OBS is a great tool even if somewhat awkward to configure at times (the price of flexibility) so you should be able to get good output from it.

One more thing - whatch the CPU and GPU utilization - if either is at 100% when captureing back off the bit rate or resolution.