**Understanding Chroma Subsampling in Video Processing**

Chroma subsampling is a normal part of video processing that compresses the color of an image, allowing for more efficient compression and transmission of high-quality videos. In essence, it involves reducing the amount of color data in a video without sacrificing too much overall quality. This technique is essential in video streaming and recording, as it helps balance quality and file size.

**How Chroma Subsampling Works**

Chroma subsampling uses a ratio to represent how much color information is kept. The most common ratios include 420, 422, and 444. These ratios indicate the amount of brightness data and color data horizontally and vertically. For example, in a 420 ratio, four parts are allocated to brightness data, with two parts dedicated to color data horizontally. This means that for every four pixels, only two pixels worth of color data are kept horizontally, while no extra color data is added vertically. This technique saves space and still provides decent color quality.

**Balancing Quality and File Size**

Chroma subsampling is all about finding the right balance between quality and file size. By reducing color data without compromising brightness data, chroma subsampling enables videos to be encoded at a lower bitrate, resulting in smaller file sizes. This is particularly important for streaming services, where bandwidth constraints are often a limiting factor. However, when recording, it's essential to keep as much color data as possible to ensure the best possible image quality.

**Common Chroma Subsampling Ratios**

The most widely used chroma subsampling ratio is 420. This ratio provides a good balance between quality and file size, making it suitable for most video applications. However, some higher ratios, such as 422 and 444, can be used in specific situations to achieve even better image quality. For example, the 444 ratio offers lossless chroma subsampling, which is ideal for professional applications where high-quality images are essential.

**Chroma Subsampling in OBS Studio**

In the context of OBS Studio, chroma subsampling plays a crucial role in recording and streaming high-quality videos. When recording, it's essential to use a chroma subsampling ratio that balances quality and file size. OBS Studio supports various color spaces, including 420 and 444. The default color space is usually set to 420, but for professional applications or when recording at high resolutions, the i444 color space can be used. However, this requires more processing power and can result in slower encoding times.

**Scaling and Chroma Subsampling**

When scaling video sources within OBS Studio, it's essential to consider chroma subsampling. The scaling algorithm used can significantly impact image quality. Nearest neighbor scaling is generally considered the best option for pixel-preserving scaling, especially when working with UI elements or text. However, this method can result in a less smooth image when scaling. Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro offer alternative scaling algorithms that can produce better results but at the cost of increased rendering times.

**Mastering Chroma Subsampling**

To truly master chroma subsampling in OBS Studio, it's essential to understand its limitations and benefits. By using the right chroma subsampling ratio and scaling algorithm, you can achieve high-quality videos with minimal file size. Additionally, using video editing software like Adobe Premiere or After Effects can help refine your workflow and produce even better results. The author recommends exploring different techniques and experimenting with different settings to find what works best for your specific needs.

**Resources and Support**

For those looking to further their knowledge of chroma subsampling in OBS Studio, the author offers a definitive guide course that covers everything from basic recording to advanced editing and encoding techniques. By taking this course, you'll gain hands-on experience with OBS Studio and develop the skills necessary to produce high-quality videos at any level. As an added bonus, new students can save 50% on the course price by using the exclusive coupon code GLITCHOBS.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enI've got a confession to make I'm no fo oh wait not that one my favorite program to make tutorials with actually isn't OBS Studio it's Camtasia a screen capture program that I've used since the early 2000s I may even have an old box copy lying around somewhere from back in the day it has awesome features like easy zooming in and out on your cursor cursor highlighting cursor Ripple effects and so on however I rarely actually use Camtasia to make my videos due to the limited quality options control and audio capabilities I'm I'm used to you know getting the best well good news if you want to make tutorials you can do a lot of that live within OBS rather than spending hours recreating it and editing like I do doing it this way instead of during the edit is also advantageous because you can then still use overlays like frames or face cams without needing to record them separately to zoom in on your desktop and have to like crop them out or something this video is an excerpt from one of the later chapters of my OBS definitive guide course if you are confuse what's going on if you want the best resource to get up and running with OBS Studio to go from any starting point of knowledge to being a master of it my OBS definitive guide course is the way to go we are running a discount here which is why I wanted to get this clip uploaded you can use coupon code spring to save 50% off of it at glitch. o/ OBS linked below for this we'll need a display capture scene setup with show cursor enabled and two OBS Python scripts Python scripts work a little differently than the normal Blu scripts in OBS and you'll have to actually you'll actually need to download and install python here with OBS closed before we launch OBS and do any of this make sure you download python before doing any of this you need specifically python 3.10 not 3.11 you got to go down to the April downloads to actually get an installer for it that is what we will need here for these scripts go ahead and install python choosing add to path in the options and let it do its thing then relaunch your OBS installation after installing python use the Windows key plus r to run and type CMD in the command prompt run python DM pip install P input as it shows on screen if this gives you an error about not recognizing the command try doing python 3-m pip install P input then do the same thing but for pwin CTL after these install download those two scripts that I linked and launch OBS I recommend keeping a general stream files folder in your user folder in Windows and then a script sub folder in that folder I like keeping these fixed purpose folders in my user folder so it's easy to back up and keep syndicated and synced across multiple PCS or multiple windows reinstalls whatever you need to do without hassle or downtime zooming in on small details is super helpful for tutorials especially if you have a high resolution or ultrawide monitor where things can be pretty hard to see for the viewer go to tools scripts click to the python settings tab browse to your python install directory which is probably going to look like mine rather than like the program files then go back to the scripts Tab and add a new script choose the Zoomin follow script should be a py file now you'll need to set up hotkeys for zooming in on the mouse and following the mouse these are independent functions but you can map them to be the same thing or set them up with matching hotkeys or whatever or a combo macro button on a stream deck that kind of thing cuz most of the time you probably wanted to do the same thing in the script settings choose the source that you want to zoom into this would normally be your display capture Source but it could be a Game Source if you wanted to do a cool like zoom in effect when you're sniping or something weird here you also change the size of your Zoom window set stretch to Inner bounds and now you're ready to rock you can make copies of the py file probably with different names and add them as multiple scripts in OBS if you want to do this for multiple sources for you know if you had multiple monitors going or something like that one of the other tutorial Focus Features of Camtasia is the ability to highlight your cursor to draw attention to it I tend to make extra large cursors in windows with high contrast colors specifically to help make it stand out from my you know windows and things like that but this doesn't always work there are two options I recommend for doing this here one is my preferred way the other way is just eh the first is separate from OBS the program Mouse pointer highlight in the Microsoft store this adds a basic customizable highlight circle around your cursor and it's picked up in obs's display capture Source about as simple as it gets the second is the OBS Studio mouse cursor skin script this is another python script this one uses the pi input module we installed earlier and requires you to duplicate your display capture Source set a tiny crop on it to something like 64x 64 something that's just like based on your cursor and then choose update crop for it to follow your cursor and then choose a transparency image of your source that basically just moves around the source with your cursor as a solution this is honestly pretty Jank if not incredibly clever and it won't support multiple monitors or even probably certain resolutions or aspect ratios but it's an option something to also consider if you're making screen capture tutorials is the scaling quality of your text and small sources first and foremost if you're at 1440p or higher resolution for your computer desktop use higher scaling percentages in Windows settings display scale 150% for 1440p is usually better and 200% for 4K is usually better even if you don't use these higher scaling factors for your daily usage turning it up before you open OBS will render your programs Windows UI and text at a higher cleaner size that makes things significant ly easier to see in your screen captures and cleaner in presentation some Edge case programs may be unaffected by this change or even look worse afterwards if so sure just don't use the higher scaling percentage or do the override setting in your compatibility menu but most programs these days are built for higher DPI displays like this and it will work fine next we have to preserve the quality of your text and other elements when scaling and compressing your actual footage while the zoom in follow script we show here will scale losslessly within OBS if you plan on up scaling or doing any additional punchin zooming in during editing you might quickly discover that your text and fine lines and those kinds of things end up looking quite blurry there's a couple things you can do about this the higher DPI scaling setting in Windows absolutely helps keeps thing cleaner and rendered brighter bigger not brighter in the first place and potentially keeps you from needing to zoom in as much during your editing or capture in the first place but you're also being held back by something called chroma subsample chroma subsampling is a normal part of video processing that compresses the color of an image chroma subsampling compresses the color information without compressing the sharpness or brightness information of an image imagine you're painting a picture you have two types of colors brightness luminance and color chrominance you need more brightness details to create a sharp image but you don't need as much color information chroma subsampling is a way to reduce the amount of color data in a video without losing too much overall quality chroma subsampling uses a ratio to represent how much color information is kept you'll often see ratios like 420 422 and 444 these the first number represents the amount of brightness data and the other two numbers represent the amount of color data horizontally and vertically let's break down the common 420 ratio four parts brightness data two parts color data horizontally zero Parts color data vertically this means that for every four pixels we keep two pixels worth of color data horizontally and don't add any extra vertically this saves space and still provides decent color quality so chroma sub sampling is all about balancing quality and file size and image compression and video streaming it reduces color data while keeping brightness data so we can enjoy smooth high quality videos without using too much bandwidth basically every video you encounter in the wild YouTube videos Netflix streams Blu-rays Etc are all presented in 42o color space that's fine because the final delivery that extra information won't be useful for but when you record in OBS Studio capture is just the first step of processing that your video goes through you still usually have to edit your video apply effects compress it again to export and then upload it to YouTube to be compressed again keeping a higher chroma subsampling level as far into the chain of events as you can helps keeps these smaller details preserved as much as possible for streaming you have to keep OBS in the nv12 or i420 color spaces with nv12 being most widely supported in the default as streaming sites don't support anything higher but for recording you could use the i444 color space to achieve 444 lossless chroma subsampling this is supported in the software CPU encoder x264 and the Intel and Nvidia GPU encoders amd's encoder will let you use it but it can only produce 420 color in the end so there's no real point the downside is that it's much more difficult to encode 444 I showed my crazy 444 HC encoding profile that I use for screen captures in one of the videos earlier in the course but here's a quick glance at those settings again this works for screen captures on RTX 20 and 30 series cards but I can only keep up with fast-paced G camera and gaming encodings with these settings on the RTX 40 series cards at least at 4K a work around for this is to upscale your video past your native resolution within OBS since OBS will be scaling your sources losslessly if your screen is 1080p set OBS to record in 4k still an nv12 and scale your display capture source to fit or just set a scaled resolution of 4K using the area scaling Factor instead of by cubic area is closer to nearest neighbor that provides a better result I tend to recommend using by cubic for camera and action-based sources as a scaling Factor but area is a much better choice for screen captures it uses nearest neighbor scaling as a as close as it can get to a even percentage interval which is the best pixel preserving option for UI elements in text and then interpolates the rest of the way should you be at a non you know even scale this will result in the cleanest possible feed from there I recommend using D Vinci resolve to edit where you can specify the nearest neighbor scaling algorithm where Premier scaling algorithm is blurry and just destroys the footage if you need to stick with Adobe Premiere you could bounce the video through Adobe After Effects to be scaled in their way and then set it to I believe draft quality us as nearest neighbor that's a lot slower to render and a lot more complicated to do for every video with all of this you'll be producing the cleanest possible tutorials in no time thank you so much for watching this video and for your support on all of these OBS guides over the past we're approaching 11 years now I think we are at it means the world to me again if again if you want more guidance if you want more direct resources on how to really Master OBS from any starting point of knowledge glitch. m/ OBS is my definitive guide course it is the absolute best course on OBS available on the planet and you can save 50% with coupon code spring at checkout glitch. o/ OBS thanksI've got a confession to make I'm no fo oh wait not that one my favorite program to make tutorials with actually isn't OBS Studio it's Camtasia a screen capture program that I've used since the early 2000s I may even have an old box copy lying around somewhere from back in the day it has awesome features like easy zooming in and out on your cursor cursor highlighting cursor Ripple effects and so on however I rarely actually use Camtasia to make my videos due to the limited quality options control and audio capabilities I'm I'm used to you know getting the best well good news if you want to make tutorials you can do a lot of that live within OBS rather than spending hours recreating it and editing like I do doing it this way instead of during the edit is also advantageous because you can then still use overlays like frames or face cams without needing to record them separately to zoom in on your desktop and have to like crop them out or something this video is an excerpt from one of the later chapters of my OBS definitive guide course if you are confuse what's going on if you want the best resource to get up and running with OBS Studio to go from any starting point of knowledge to being a master of it my OBS definitive guide course is the way to go we are running a discount here which is why I wanted to get this clip uploaded you can use coupon code spring to save 50% off of it at glitch. o/ OBS linked below for this we'll need a display capture scene setup with show cursor enabled and two OBS Python scripts Python scripts work a little differently than the normal Blu scripts in OBS and you'll have to actually you'll actually need to download and install python here with OBS closed before we launch OBS and do any of this make sure you download python before doing any of this you need specifically python 3.10 not 3.11 you got to go down to the April downloads to actually get an installer for it that is what we will need here for these scripts go ahead and install python choosing add to path in the options and let it do its thing then relaunch your OBS installation after installing python use the Windows key plus r to run and type CMD in the command prompt run python DM pip install P input as it shows on screen if this gives you an error about not recognizing the command try doing python 3-m pip install P input then do the same thing but for pwin CTL after these install download those two scripts that I linked and launch OBS I recommend keeping a general stream files folder in your user folder in Windows and then a script sub folder in that folder I like keeping these fixed purpose folders in my user folder so it's easy to back up and keep syndicated and synced across multiple PCS or multiple windows reinstalls whatever you need to do without hassle or downtime zooming in on small details is super helpful for tutorials especially if you have a high resolution or ultrawide monitor where things can be pretty hard to see for the viewer go to tools scripts click to the python settings tab browse to your python install directory which is probably going to look like mine rather than like the program files then go back to the scripts Tab and add a new script choose the Zoomin follow script should be a py file now you'll need to set up hotkeys for zooming in on the mouse and following the mouse these are independent functions but you can map them to be the same thing or set them up with matching hotkeys or whatever or a combo macro button on a stream deck that kind of thing cuz most of the time you probably wanted to do the same thing in the script settings choose the source that you want to zoom into this would normally be your display capture Source but it could be a Game Source if you wanted to do a cool like zoom in effect when you're sniping or something weird here you also change the size of your Zoom window set stretch to Inner bounds and now you're ready to rock you can make copies of the py file probably with different names and add them as multiple scripts in OBS if you want to do this for multiple sources for you know if you had multiple monitors going or something like that one of the other tutorial Focus Features of Camtasia is the ability to highlight your cursor to draw attention to it I tend to make extra large cursors in windows with high contrast colors specifically to help make it stand out from my you know windows and things like that but this doesn't always work there are two options I recommend for doing this here one is my preferred way the other way is just eh the first is separate from OBS the program Mouse pointer highlight in the Microsoft store this adds a basic customizable highlight circle around your cursor and it's picked up in obs's display capture Source about as simple as it gets the second is the OBS Studio mouse cursor skin script this is another python script this one uses the pi input module we installed earlier and requires you to duplicate your display capture Source set a tiny crop on it to something like 64x 64 something that's just like based on your cursor and then choose update crop for it to follow your cursor and then choose a transparency image of your source that basically just moves around the source with your cursor as a solution this is honestly pretty Jank if not incredibly clever and it won't support multiple monitors or even probably certain resolutions or aspect ratios but it's an option something to also consider if you're making screen capture tutorials is the scaling quality of your text and small sources first and foremost if you're at 1440p or higher resolution for your computer desktop use higher scaling percentages in Windows settings display scale 150% for 1440p is usually better and 200% for 4K is usually better even if you don't use these higher scaling factors for your daily usage turning it up before you open OBS will render your programs Windows UI and text at a higher cleaner size that makes things significant ly easier to see in your screen captures and cleaner in presentation some Edge case programs may be unaffected by this change or even look worse afterwards if so sure just don't use the higher scaling percentage or do the override setting in your compatibility menu but most programs these days are built for higher DPI displays like this and it will work fine next we have to preserve the quality of your text and other elements when scaling and compressing your actual footage while the zoom in follow script we show here will scale losslessly within OBS if you plan on up scaling or doing any additional punchin zooming in during editing you might quickly discover that your text and fine lines and those kinds of things end up looking quite blurry there's a couple things you can do about this the higher DPI scaling setting in Windows absolutely helps keeps thing cleaner and rendered brighter bigger not brighter in the first place and potentially keeps you from needing to zoom in as much during your editing or capture in the first place but you're also being held back by something called chroma subsample chroma subsampling is a normal part of video processing that compresses the color of an image chroma subsampling compresses the color information without compressing the sharpness or brightness information of an image imagine you're painting a picture you have two types of colors brightness luminance and color chrominance you need more brightness details to create a sharp image but you don't need as much color information chroma subsampling is a way to reduce the amount of color data in a video without losing too much overall quality chroma subsampling uses a ratio to represent how much color information is kept you'll often see ratios like 420 422 and 444 these the first number represents the amount of brightness data and the other two numbers represent the amount of color data horizontally and vertically let's break down the common 420 ratio four parts brightness data two parts color data horizontally zero Parts color data vertically this means that for every four pixels we keep two pixels worth of color data horizontally and don't add any extra vertically this saves space and still provides decent color quality so chroma sub sampling is all about balancing quality and file size and image compression and video streaming it reduces color data while keeping brightness data so we can enjoy smooth high quality videos without using too much bandwidth basically every video you encounter in the wild YouTube videos Netflix streams Blu-rays Etc are all presented in 42o color space that's fine because the final delivery that extra information won't be useful for but when you record in OBS Studio capture is just the first step of processing that your video goes through you still usually have to edit your video apply effects compress it again to export and then upload it to YouTube to be compressed again keeping a higher chroma subsampling level as far into the chain of events as you can helps keeps these smaller details preserved as much as possible for streaming you have to keep OBS in the nv12 or i420 color spaces with nv12 being most widely supported in the default as streaming sites don't support anything higher but for recording you could use the i444 color space to achieve 444 lossless chroma subsampling this is supported in the software CPU encoder x264 and the Intel and Nvidia GPU encoders amd's encoder will let you use it but it can only produce 420 color in the end so there's no real point the downside is that it's much more difficult to encode 444 I showed my crazy 444 HC encoding profile that I use for screen captures in one of the videos earlier in the course but here's a quick glance at those settings again this works for screen captures on RTX 20 and 30 series cards but I can only keep up with fast-paced G camera and gaming encodings with these settings on the RTX 40 series cards at least at 4K a work around for this is to upscale your video past your native resolution within OBS since OBS will be scaling your sources losslessly if your screen is 1080p set OBS to record in 4k still an nv12 and scale your display capture source to fit or just set a scaled resolution of 4K using the area scaling Factor instead of by cubic area is closer to nearest neighbor that provides a better result I tend to recommend using by cubic for camera and action-based sources as a scaling Factor but area is a much better choice for screen captures it uses nearest neighbor scaling as a as close as it can get to a even percentage interval which is the best pixel preserving option for UI elements in text and then interpolates the rest of the way should you be at a non you know even scale this will result in the cleanest possible feed from there I recommend using D Vinci resolve to edit where you can specify the nearest neighbor scaling algorithm where Premier scaling algorithm is blurry and just destroys the footage if you need to stick with Adobe Premiere you could bounce the video through Adobe After Effects to be scaled in their way and then set it to I believe draft quality us as nearest neighbor that's a lot slower to render and a lot more complicated to do for every video with all of this you'll be producing the cleanest possible tutorials in no time thank you so much for watching this video and for your support on all of these OBS guides over the past we're approaching 11 years now I think we are at it means the world to me again if again if you want more guidance if you want more direct resources on how to really Master OBS from any starting point of knowledge glitch. m/ OBS is my definitive guide course it is the absolute best course on OBS available on the planet and you can save 50% with coupon code spring at checkout glitch. o/ OBS thanks\n"