Inability to record in 8-bit (NV12) and be color accurate to the source
Yesterday I fiddled around with OBS for some time to dial in more refined settings to fit my needs
However I quickly discovered that running either NVENC H264, HEVC or AV1 in NV12 Rec. 709 Limited ends up largely impacting the output's color accuracy as I view it in a fresh install of VLC after.
From what I gathered thus far, seeking help from a few other people, is that 10-bit P010 Rec. 709 Limited with AV1 results in exactly the result I am looking for.
The strange part here however is that both my displays are in 8-bit SDR mode, one of them being HDR capable but turned off. This makes me to believe there's something fishy going on behind the scenes that possibly tricks OBS into needing a 10-bit color format in spite of the source being in 8-bit for colors to match.
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With a simple game like Minecraft as an example, I directly color picked from in-game and compared that to the end result of a quick 10 second clip I recorded using the settings above
I bet bitrates and all, however it is especially noticable with the RTSS overlay I have up that colors are generally a lot more dull when using NV12 for 8-bit AV1 encoding
using P010 with the same old settings as previously does get close to the source but isn't quite there yet, perhaps I should have color picked before
nevertheless the accuracy improves by a whole lot to an acceptable level
Have you tried another media player? I wouldn’t trust VLC’s color accuracy
Also considering trying sRGB instead of rec709
I ran MPC-HC at stock setting before and it remained the same
GG @John, you just advanced to level 1 !
even messing around with screenshots taken with both ShareX and the snipping tool I noticed colors being off slightly with a gray fog across the entire image which might be related but I cannot tell for sure
either way I can try recording in sRGB
Source and output at NV12 sRGB Limited
I even lowered CQ level to 10 for an even more indistinguishable image
looks fine to me
green and really small text are the first to be affected by 4:2:0 chroma subsampling
you could see if you have the horsepower to try recording I444 for 4:4:4 lossless color, but then your final export and youtube upload would still be clamped back to 4:2:0 so in the end it wouldn't change much
had to switch to HEVC for I444 to work but damn, the end result has significantly improved for everything on display (also swapped back to Rec 709)
the performance hit however is also quite substantial which is to be expected with a 7600 and 4070 Super
maybe some tweaking could be done to reduce the load as in this example I get a close to 10% performance penalty whilst recording
turn off two pass, turn off psycho, use P1
Now it has improved to about 5% which is within reason I feel like and something I can most definitely accept
I am very much satisfied with the changes as by no means would I have figured out a solution to this annoying little problem
Appreciate you taking the time to help me out as I also learned a thing or two along the way <3
Glad to help