Recording 4K ProRes in Real Time: Challenges and Workarounds

Even on high-performance processors like the Intel Core i9-7980XE and AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, recording 4K ProRes in real-time can be a challenging task. However, with the right tools and techniques, it is possible to achieve high-quality footage without sacrificing too much performance. In this article, we will explore some of the challenges associated with recording 4K ProRes and discuss workarounds that can help overcome these limitations.

One common challenge when recording 4K ProRes is that it requires a significant amount of CPU resources, which can lead to slowed-down rendering and reduced performance. This is because ProRes is an intermediate codec that requires more processing power than some other codecs like H.264 or H.265. As a result, many users find it difficult to record 4K ProRes in real-time, especially when working with demanding applications like Adobe Premiere Pro.

To overcome this challenge, one option is to use the "lossless" mode of recording, which compresses the footage at a lower quality than the standard ProRes setting. This can help reduce the CPU requirements and allow for faster rendering. However, keep in mind that lossless mode will result in larger file sizes and may affect the overall quality of the final product.

Another approach is to use 1080p 60fps instead of 4K 60fps, which can significantly reduce the CPU requirements and make recording more manageable. This option may not provide the same level of quality as 4K ProRes, but it can be a viable alternative for users who need to record high-quality footage without sacrificing performance.

In some cases, using 444 chroma subsampling can help improve the quality of recorded footage, especially when working with demanding applications like video editing. This type of subsampling provides more detail per pixel and can help reduce fringing and blurriness when zooming in on captured footage.

HeVC H.265 GPU Encoder: A Game-Changer for High-Performance Recording

For users who need to record 4K ProRes or other high-performance codecs, the HeVC H.265 GPU encoder can be a game-changer. This encoder is capable of achieving bit-rate efficiency gains of up to 25-30% compared to traditional H.264 encoding methods.

The HeVC H.265 GPU encoder is particularly useful for NVIDIA Turing-based graphics cards and the Intel 20 series processor, which can take advantage of the Invinc technology. This technology provides a significant boost in encoding performance and efficiency, making it an ideal choice for users who need to record high-quality footage quickly and efficiently.

However, there are some limitations to using the HeVC H.265 GPU encoder. One major issue is licensing constraints, as the codec is currently not widely supported by broadcasting or streaming platforms due to patent issues. Additionally, the encoder can only be used with specific hardware configurations, such as NVIDIA Turing-based graphics cards and the Invinc technology.

Despite these limitations, users who need to record high-performance codecs like HeVC H.265 can benefit from using this encoder. The plugin is available for Windows and offers a user-friendly interface that allows users to customize encoding settings without needing to manage complex command-line arguments.

Plugin Recommendations: Enhancing Live Streams and Screen Recordings with OBS Studio

For live streamers and screen recorders, OBS Studio is an essential tool for enhancing the quality of their output. There are several plugins available for OBS Studio that can help improve video quality, reduce latency, and provide additional features like lossless encoding and chroma subsampling.

One highly recommended plugin is the "ProRes Plugin," which allows users to encode ProRes in real-time using the HeVC H.265 GPU encoder. This plugin provides a customizable interface for adjusting encoding settings, such as bitrate, resolution, and quality.

Another useful plugin is the "HeVC Plugin," which enables users to encode HeVC H.265 video using the NVIDIA Invinc technology. This plugin can help improve encoding performance and efficiency, making it an ideal choice for users who need to record high-quality footage quickly and efficiently.

In conclusion, recording 4K ProRes in real-time can be a challenging task, but with the right tools and techniques, it is possible to achieve high-quality footage without sacrificing too much performance. The HeVC H.265 GPU encoder and plugins like the ProRes Plugin and HeVC Plugin can help overcome these limitations and provide users with more efficient and effective ways to record high-performance codecs.

Download Links:

* HeVC Plugin

* ProRes Plugin

Note: Download links will be provided in the description below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enfive obs plugins that will enhance your live streams and these are not in any particular order we're not ranking them but we're starting with number one here at scrab scrab is a screenshot or screen gapping grabbing gabbing stream gab stream grabbing tool which will allow you to quickly get screenshots much in the way of sharex or any number of screenshotting programs but it will immediately import it into obs so if you're doing any sort of specific screen grabbing situation where you really need to emphasize a specific section of the screen and just kind of quickly pop it up into obs this plugin will help you do that this is also useful if you're doing a game stream or some sort of stream where you're not actually showing your actual you know your full desktop screen but you do want to show something from it but not the whole thing you don't want to rely on desktop capture or window capture or maybe you don't have that settlement set up in advance you just want to show them a screenshot of a particular section of your screen then you can use it hit the hotkey for it select the region that you want to screen grab and it will automatically appear up on your current scene for it to show up in obs to your viewers i can see quite a few situations where this would be handy because i know a lot of people are actually pretty cautious about showing their screens while they're live because of different details popping up notifications personal information things they're not supposed to see and things like that so this kind of helps work around that unfortunately this does not let you actually well i mean i guess technically it does but it does not quickly let you take screenshots from what's showing in obs i know this has been a much requested feature for a very long time hopefully we'll get that functionality soon our next plugin is spectralizer this is a real-time visualizer plug-in i know a lot of people love playing music in the background of their of their live streams and they have you know the stream text elements to show what the song and artist is of the currently playing song but you can really you know take it to that next level and have a real-time visualizer going either in the corner or if you're on a be right back screen have it be your main you know kind of image element for that be right back screen be a visualizer of the music that way the music and your visuals are interacting together creating kind of a unification of your live stream elements and a lot of people have been requesting this and i've honestly said a few times that i wasn't sure this would be possible in real time in obs due to some of the requirements you know the processing power requirements to really make that happen obviously there have been media player apps with visualizers for the longest time so that wasn't entirely true but this plug-in will let you do it you simply you know set install the plugin set it up select your music and it can also load the you know you can also set it up with the text elements to show what's playing and add it to your stream it's really cool number three is one that i'm really excited about and honestly i put off forever because i was waiting to make a video on it so i'm glad i'm talking about it here because it will be very useful for my videos that is input overlay this is a plugin which will display your inputted mouse keyboard or gamepad inputs on your stream for your viewers to see this actually has a few different applications the application that they show on their main you know plug-in page is for video games and i remember this being popular with a overwatch streamer by the name of dsp stanky to show all of your crazy movement controls and things like that so it focuses on the wasd area and your mouse to show how you're moving so quickly and things like that that is one useful application and you can do the same thing with gamepads another one is just for tutorials it is a lot of work if i'm making a desktop tutorial to sit here and you know animate key combinations on my own whenever i need to emphasize what keys i'm pressing on the keyboard and it ends up that i don't show that information a lot of the time with something like input overlay i can actually record that into the stream itself into my video feed that way it's always shown on screen so you guys have that information because you have the options of showing specific keyboard layouts or gamepad layouts or just basically an event list of all the different keys that are pressed which is what i think i'm going to rely on moving forward and this this is something i've looked into a few times for just the solution that i went into and this is something that uh taryn from linus tech tips was looking into and trying to make work as well is using something like auto hotkey scripts or something like that to display this just on your desktop that then your screen capture program records instead it doesn't run on your desktop this purely runs into obs and a workaround that i am currently experimenting with to have this kind of be optional or when i'm zooming in on you know screen elements then that would zoom in a way is i'm actually extending my obs canvas i have this whole video on how to record your gameplay and your webcam and things like that side by side by using a bigger canvas while i'm doing the same thing here by extending my canvas a little wide and then having that input overlay on its own little section with a chroma green backdrop that i then chroma key out and overlay on top of the normal footage so no matter how i manipulate the main desktop capture section of the footage that input overlay is always available for me to show on top or hide if i deem fit number four is a great plugin if you are someone who likes utilizing instant replays for your live streams currently that's been a little bit difficult i've made a couple videos on it the work around to actually be able to call them back up as instant replays is a little funky in obs but this plugin actually is called direct or i get the name wrong all the time it's called directory watch media and it will basically create a media source that loads up whenever it detects a newest clip in this you know in a folder in a specific watch folder so it looks at the folder and if you add a new media clip to it it will pull it up in a media source and display it on your screen so that means that if you save a an instant replay in obs then it will wait you know it will see once that file is saved to your replay folder and immediately pull that up for playback or i believe you can manipulate when it's shown and things like that which is really handy gives you a lot more control over how you display replays and things like that without having to actually manipulate obs with your mouse a whole lot because then you can set up a stream deck button or a hotkey just to show that specific source and it will always pull up the most recent instant replay and then instead of like the first one you created or something like that which is a big frustration i've run into with these instant replay things is actually getting it to show the most recent one you've done without overwriting all the ones you've made and this this makes this whole process a lot easier lastly is a plug-in that i've kept mostly a closely guarded secret even though you know it's publicly available until this video that i'm pretty stoked to share with you and this is the ffmpeg encoders plugin by zaymar zamar is actually the the developer of the amd uh amf for vce plug-in for obs that now ships with it for amd hardware accelerated encoding users this uses all of the available encoders within ffmpeg which you do have available under the custom ffmpeg output options but the ui is not catered towards specific codecs and there's some hiccups getting all of them to work it's not super user friendly this plugin adds a list of already tested and configured encoders that you can then manipulate a little bit easier into obs so i use this for two purposes firstly is recording uncompressed prores and four two two hq or four four four depending on my needs this is what i use for most of my capture card testing so that i can record the most lossless uncompressed copy of capture card footage to give them the best representation in my videos instead of having some pre-compressed mess where most capture cards already look the same now even on my well i'm not using it right now but even on the i9 7980xe 36 thread cpu i was using before and definitely on this 3900x i'm using right now i was not able to record 4k in prores in real time very easily i could do 4k 30 most of the time but 4k 60 was out of the picture however 1080p 60 was not a problem so that was one option that i used for it which made it a lot easier to get pro res lossless uncompressed it's also easier to edit on the timeline perez is considered an intermediate or mezzanine codec that is a lot easier to scrub through on your timeline for video editing so it just made my life a lot easier but when i'm not using prores and especially when i am recording 4k60 or i'm recording ultra wide over here i am also using it for recording hevc nvidia's hevc h.265 gpu encoder this isn't talked about a whole lot because there's not a whole lot of ways to actually use this encoder outside of this plugin but on the turing graphics cards the nvidia 20 series where they got the new invinc pump which i've talked about extensively on this channel and h.264 which is what most people are using it got a roughly 15 bit rate efficiency bonus from pascal deterring from 10 series to 20 series but on h.265 it got closer to a 25 to 30 bit rate efficiency bump that is significant this encoder this hevc encoder for nvidia is freaking phenomenal the only problem with it is that there's no real way to use it and hevc is mostly dead in the water for broadcast purposes for streaming purposes and things like that because of licensing issues there's a whole patent war that's been going on ever since the kodak was introduced and virtually no one wants to support it because they can either be sued or have to pay a lot of money per individual user who uses the program this plugin kind of works around that with some hush you know technically it's fine uh workarounds which allows you to use it now there's two different versions there's the hardware only mode and the software mode he has an explanation on his github as to the full hardware encoding because this is actually pretty impressive that he implemented entirely hardware excel you know only using the hardware never touching your cpu but i had some issues getting it to work and it only works in 420 specifically i needed this to record 444 chroma subsampling this is something i've talked about in my capture card reviews but this is important because when you're zooming in like 500 times on your screen captures especially like i am and especially since i'm not using 200 dpi scaling which helps with a lot of these tiny details since i'm on an ultrawide instead of 4k now when you zoom in you end up with a lot of fringing and you know blurriness as a result of your video editor having to interpolate what you know that text would look like zoomed in 500 times since it's not recorded that way 444 chromosome sampling helps with that a lot because it's a lot more detail per color and per pixel that can be preserved and thus look better when you blow it up and the only way to do this effectively and efficiently has been you know for the best possible quality for me has been with the software even though that's still running on my gpu hevc invinc encoding with this plugin set to i444 and rec.709 and i do use full uh color range here even though i don't recommend that for streaming in obs advanced settings run the screen capture here set it to lossless mode i get really big files like these can be upwards of one gigabyte per second i believe or one gigabit per second i don't remember which it competes with blackmagic's uncompressed codec which is insane but it gets me the quality that i need to be able to make the screen tutorials that i want because i'm a quality freak anyway it'll let you record any number of codecs all pretty much everything ffmpeg supports but with a more customized per codec ui so you don't have to manage you know command line arguments and things like that i highly recommend it download links to all of these will be in the description below and that's been it five obs plugins which can help enhance your live streams or screen recordings with obs studio are there any imits that you use regularly that you think i should check out let me know in the comment section down below i'm eposvox thank you for watching stream guides be sure to check out our sponsor raid shadow legends also linked in the description below hit the like button if you enjoyed subscribe for more tech education go check out my obs master classfive obs plugins that will enhance your live streams and these are not in any particular order we're not ranking them but we're starting with number one here at scrab scrab is a screenshot or screen gapping grabbing gabbing stream gab stream grabbing tool which will allow you to quickly get screenshots much in the way of sharex or any number of screenshotting programs but it will immediately import it into obs so if you're doing any sort of specific screen grabbing situation where you really need to emphasize a specific section of the screen and just kind of quickly pop it up into obs this plugin will help you do that this is also useful if you're doing a game stream or some sort of stream where you're not actually showing your actual you know your full desktop screen but you do want to show something from it but not the whole thing you don't want to rely on desktop capture or window capture or maybe you don't have that settlement set up in advance you just want to show them a screenshot of a particular section of your screen then you can use it hit the hotkey for it select the region that you want to screen grab and it will automatically appear up on your current scene for it to show up in obs to your viewers i can see quite a few situations where this would be handy because i know a lot of people are actually pretty cautious about showing their screens while they're live because of different details popping up notifications personal information things they're not supposed to see and things like that so this kind of helps work around that unfortunately this does not let you actually well i mean i guess technically it does but it does not quickly let you take screenshots from what's showing in obs i know this has been a much requested feature for a very long time hopefully we'll get that functionality soon our next plugin is spectralizer this is a real-time visualizer plug-in i know a lot of people love playing music in the background of their of their live streams and they have you know the stream text elements to show what the song and artist is of the currently playing song but you can really you know take it to that next level and have a real-time visualizer going either in the corner or if you're on a be right back screen have it be your main you know kind of image element for that be right back screen be a visualizer of the music that way the music and your visuals are interacting together creating kind of a unification of your live stream elements and a lot of people have been requesting this and i've honestly said a few times that i wasn't sure this would be possible in real time in obs due to some of the requirements you know the processing power requirements to really make that happen obviously there have been media player apps with visualizers for the longest time so that wasn't entirely true but this plug-in will let you do it you simply you know set install the plugin set it up select your music and it can also load the you know you can also set it up with the text elements to show what's playing and add it to your stream it's really cool number three is one that i'm really excited about and honestly i put off forever because i was waiting to make a video on it so i'm glad i'm talking about it here because it will be very useful for my videos that is input overlay this is a plugin which will display your inputted mouse keyboard or gamepad inputs on your stream for your viewers to see this actually has a few different applications the application that they show on their main you know plug-in page is for video games and i remember this being popular with a overwatch streamer by the name of dsp stanky to show all of your crazy movement controls and things like that so it focuses on the wasd area and your mouse to show how you're moving so quickly and things like that that is one useful application and you can do the same thing with gamepads another one is just for tutorials it is a lot of work if i'm making a desktop tutorial to sit here and you know animate key combinations on my own whenever i need to emphasize what keys i'm pressing on the keyboard and it ends up that i don't show that information a lot of the time with something like input overlay i can actually record that into the stream itself into my video feed that way it's always shown on screen so you guys have that information because you have the options of showing specific keyboard layouts or gamepad layouts or just basically an event list of all the different keys that are pressed which is what i think i'm going to rely on moving forward and this this is something i've looked into a few times for just the solution that i went into and this is something that uh taryn from linus tech tips was looking into and trying to make work as well is using something like auto hotkey scripts or something like that to display this just on your desktop that then your screen capture program records instead it doesn't run on your desktop this purely runs into obs and a workaround that i am currently experimenting with to have this kind of be optional or when i'm zooming in on you know screen elements then that would zoom in a way is i'm actually extending my obs canvas i have this whole video on how to record your gameplay and your webcam and things like that side by side by using a bigger canvas while i'm doing the same thing here by extending my canvas a little wide and then having that input overlay on its own little section with a chroma green backdrop that i then chroma key out and overlay on top of the normal footage so no matter how i manipulate the main desktop capture section of the footage that input overlay is always available for me to show on top or hide if i deem fit number four is a great plugin if you are someone who likes utilizing instant replays for your live streams currently that's been a little bit difficult i've made a couple videos on it the work around to actually be able to call them back up as instant replays is a little funky in obs but this plugin actually is called direct or i get the name wrong all the time it's called directory watch media and it will basically create a media source that loads up whenever it detects a newest clip in this you know in a folder in a specific watch folder so it looks at the folder and if you add a new media clip to it it will pull it up in a media source and display it on your screen so that means that if you save a an instant replay in obs then it will wait you know it will see once that file is saved to your replay folder and immediately pull that up for playback or i believe you can manipulate when it's shown and things like that which is really handy gives you a lot more control over how you display replays and things like that without having to actually manipulate obs with your mouse a whole lot because then you can set up a stream deck button or a hotkey just to show that specific source and it will always pull up the most recent instant replay and then instead of like the first one you created or something like that which is a big frustration i've run into with these instant replay things is actually getting it to show the most recent one you've done without overwriting all the ones you've made and this this makes this whole process a lot easier lastly is a plug-in that i've kept mostly a closely guarded secret even though you know it's publicly available until this video that i'm pretty stoked to share with you and this is the ffmpeg encoders plugin by zaymar zamar is actually the the developer of the amd uh amf for vce plug-in for obs that now ships with it for amd hardware accelerated encoding users this uses all of the available encoders within ffmpeg which you do have available under the custom ffmpeg output options but the ui is not catered towards specific codecs and there's some hiccups getting all of them to work it's not super user friendly this plugin adds a list of already tested and configured encoders that you can then manipulate a little bit easier into obs so i use this for two purposes firstly is recording uncompressed prores and four two two hq or four four four depending on my needs this is what i use for most of my capture card testing so that i can record the most lossless uncompressed copy of capture card footage to give them the best representation in my videos instead of having some pre-compressed mess where most capture cards already look the same now even on my well i'm not using it right now but even on the i9 7980xe 36 thread cpu i was using before and definitely on this 3900x i'm using right now i was not able to record 4k in prores in real time very easily i could do 4k 30 most of the time but 4k 60 was out of the picture however 1080p 60 was not a problem so that was one option that i used for it which made it a lot easier to get pro res lossless uncompressed it's also easier to edit on the timeline perez is considered an intermediate or mezzanine codec that is a lot easier to scrub through on your timeline for video editing so it just made my life a lot easier but when i'm not using prores and especially when i am recording 4k60 or i'm recording ultra wide over here i am also using it for recording hevc nvidia's hevc h.265 gpu encoder this isn't talked about a whole lot because there's not a whole lot of ways to actually use this encoder outside of this plugin but on the turing graphics cards the nvidia 20 series where they got the new invinc pump which i've talked about extensively on this channel and h.264 which is what most people are using it got a roughly 15 bit rate efficiency bonus from pascal deterring from 10 series to 20 series but on h.265 it got closer to a 25 to 30 bit rate efficiency bump that is significant this encoder this hevc encoder for nvidia is freaking phenomenal the only problem with it is that there's no real way to use it and hevc is mostly dead in the water for broadcast purposes for streaming purposes and things like that because of licensing issues there's a whole patent war that's been going on ever since the kodak was introduced and virtually no one wants to support it because they can either be sued or have to pay a lot of money per individual user who uses the program this plugin kind of works around that with some hush you know technically it's fine uh workarounds which allows you to use it now there's two different versions there's the hardware only mode and the software mode he has an explanation on his github as to the full hardware encoding because this is actually pretty impressive that he implemented entirely hardware excel you know only using the hardware never touching your cpu but i had some issues getting it to work and it only works in 420 specifically i needed this to record 444 chroma subsampling this is something i've talked about in my capture card reviews but this is important because when you're zooming in like 500 times on your screen captures especially like i am and especially since i'm not using 200 dpi scaling which helps with a lot of these tiny details since i'm on an ultrawide instead of 4k now when you zoom in you end up with a lot of fringing and you know blurriness as a result of your video editor having to interpolate what you know that text would look like zoomed in 500 times since it's not recorded that way 444 chromosome sampling helps with that a lot because it's a lot more detail per color and per pixel that can be preserved and thus look better when you blow it up and the only way to do this effectively and efficiently has been you know for the best possible quality for me has been with the software even though that's still running on my gpu hevc invinc encoding with this plugin set to i444 and rec.709 and i do use full uh color range here even though i don't recommend that for streaming in obs advanced settings run the screen capture here set it to lossless mode i get really big files like these can be upwards of one gigabyte per second i believe or one gigabit per second i don't remember which it competes with blackmagic's uncompressed codec which is insane but it gets me the quality that i need to be able to make the screen tutorials that i want because i'm a quality freak anyway it'll let you record any number of codecs all pretty much everything ffmpeg supports but with a more customized per codec ui so you don't have to manage you know command line arguments and things like that i highly recommend it download links to all of these will be in the description below and that's been it five obs plugins which can help enhance your live streams or screen recordings with obs studio are there any imits that you use regularly that you think i should check out let me know in the comment section down below i'm eposvox thank you for watching stream guides be sure to check out our sponsor raid shadow legends also linked in the description below hit the like button if you enjoyed subscribe for more tech education go check out my obs master class\n"