Screen recording settings that actually matter
Four settings decide whether your recording looks sharp, stays smooth and stays a reasonable size. The rest can be left alone.
By Hasnain Butt Akhtar, founder and developer ·
Most screen recording software presents a dozen settings and explains none of them. In practice four of them decide how your recording turns out, and knowing what each one trades away makes the choice obvious.
The four that matter
Resolution. Record at the actual size of what you are capturing, and never larger. If your screen is 1920 by 1080, recording at 4K does not add detail, it just invents pixels and quadruples the file. If you are recording a window rather than the whole screen, capture just that window so the detail is not wasted on empty desktop.
Frame rate. How many pictures per second. Thirty is right for anything where the screen mostly sits still: tutorials, walkthroughs, presentations, code. Sixty is worth it when motion is the point, which in practice means games and anything with continuous scrolling or animation. Sixty doubles your file size, so use it deliberately rather than by default.
Bitrate. This is the one people ignore and it matters more than the other three. Bitrate is how much data per second the recording is allowed to use, and it is what actually determines whether the picture looks clean or breaks into blocks during movement. A 4K recording at a low bitrate looks worse than a 1080p recording at a generous one, which is why resolution alone tells you very little.
Encoder. Whether the compression is done by your processor or by dedicated hardware built into your graphics card. This is covered below, and it is usually the answer when recordings stutter.
Starting values
| What you are recording | Resolution | Frame rate | Bitrate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tutorial or presentation | 1080p | 30 | 8 Mbps |
| Software demo with fine text | 1080p or native | 30 | 12 Mbps |
| Gameplay | 1080p | 60 | 20 Mbps |
| Gameplay at 1440p or 4K | Native | 60 | 35 to 50 Mbps |
| Footage you will edit heavily | Native | As above | Higher than you need |
These are starting points rather than rules. Record thirty seconds of the hardest thing you will capture, look at it properly at full size, and adjust. Fast motion and fine detail both want more; a static slide deck needs far less.
For rough planning, a megabit per second is about 7.5 megabytes per minute. So 20 Mbps gives you roughly 150 megabytes for every minute of gameplay, which adds up quickly.
Why recordings stutter
A recording that drops frames is almost always one of four things, in this order of likelihood.
- Software encoding. Compressing video is demanding, and if your processor is doing it while also running a game, something has to give. Switch the encoder to your graphics card's hardware encoder. NVIDIA calls it NVENC, AMD calls it AMF or VCE, Intel calls it Quick Sync. All of them do the compression on a dedicated part of the chip that is otherwise idle, so the cost to your game is close to nothing. This one change fixes most stuttering.
- Writing to the same drive you are reading from. If the game and the recording are both hammering one drive, the drive becomes the bottleneck. Record to a different drive where you can, ideally an SSD.
- A bitrate the drive cannot keep up with. Less common now, but a very high bitrate to a mechanical hard drive will drop frames no matter what else is right.
- The game running at your monitor's limit. If the game is already using every bit of the graphics card, recording has nothing left to work with. Cap the game's frame rate slightly below what the machine can manage, and both become stable.
Audio, which is where recordings are really lost
People forgive a slightly soft picture. They stop watching when the audio is bad.
Record your microphone and the computer's own sound on separate tracks if your software allows it. It is a single checkbox and it means you can fix a quiet voice or lower loud game audio afterwards, instead of being stuck with whatever balance happened at the time. Mixed into one track, those decisions are permanent.
Check the microphone level before a long recording rather than after. Aim for your normal speaking voice to sit comfortably below the top of the meter, with room to spare when you get animated. Clipped audio, where the level hits the ceiling and distorts, cannot be repaired.
Turn off anything that will interrupt: notifications, message sounds, calendar alerts. Windows has Focus Assist for exactly this, and it costs nothing to switch on before you press record.
Small things that make a tutorial much better
Turn on cursor highlighting and click indicators if the software has them. Viewers cannot see your mouse the way you can, and a visible ring around the pointer removes most of the confusion in a demonstration.
Increase the display scaling or zoom before recording, rather than expecting people to squint. Text that is comfortable on your 27 inch monitor is unreadable on a phone, and most people will watch on a phone.
Record a few seconds of silence at the start and end. It gives you room to trim cleanly and to fade the audio, and it costs nothing.
One rule covers the whole thing: record better than you need, then compress at the end. Quality thrown away at capture is gone permanently, while an oversized recording can always be made smaller when you export. Disk space is cheap and re-recording is not.