When it comes to recording gameplay footage for Youtube, you are likely looking to record your facecam and gameplay at the same time. Of course, you can have a simple set-up where you record in OBS with your gameplay in the background and facecam in the corner. However, in this situation, you don’t have much freedom in the edit.
If you want to zoom in on your facecam it will become distorted. You can’t move your facecam to a different section of the screen. This isn’t a great option if you want the best production quality in your videos.
In this article, we are going to show you how to record gameplay and facecam, both in full resolution at the same time. You will then be able to edit the footage on a separate track in your editing software. Let’s jump in and get started.
Warning: This works for recording only and will not work if you are streaming at the same time.
How To Record Gameplay & Facecam Separately in OBS Studio
For this tutorial, we will be using OBS Studio to record our footage. OBS is a free open-source software that anyone can download and record their gameplay footage. If you don’t have OBS installed on your computer download it here.
Once you have OBS installed follow the steps below to set it up to record gameplay and facecam.
- Open OBS and navigate to Controls and click on Settings in the bottom left-hand corner.
- In the settings panel navigate to the Video Section and change your Base Canvas Resolution to 1920 x 2160. Change Output Scaled resolution to 1920×2160 as well.
- Click “Apply” to finalize those settings
- You will now essentially have two 1920×1080 canvases on top of each other. In the top half, we will add our gameplay, and in the bottom half our facecam. To do this navigate to sources and add a Game capture Source by clicking “+” –> Game Capture Source. Make sure that your game is running.
Set the mode to “Capture Specific Window” and then select your game from the “Window” section. You will now see your game in your scene. Adjust this so its fits in the top half like below:
- Next, we want to add our webcam/camera to the scene. To do this navigate to the sources section and click on the “+” –> Add Video Capture Device. Give your device a name. In the device section select the webcam or device that you want to record from. Click OK to add the camera to your scene.
Your camera will now be added to your scene and you can adjust it to fit the bottom half of the scene.
- You will now want to ensure that you have your audio sources set up correctly. You can do this by adding an audio output capture source and also adding an audio input capture source to add your microphone.
- We now need to change our file format to MP4 so the footage will be easy to edit. To do this click on the settings button. Navigate to Output on the left-hand side. Go to the recording section and change the recording format to MP4.
You can also change where you want your recordings to save by changing the recording path.
The last step is to click on record. This will record your video and audio to an mp4 file which we can then edit in our editing software. I am going to be using Premiere Pro for this example but you can use any editing software to edit your footage.
How To Edit The Footage In An Editing Software
Now that you have recorded your footage you will need to edit it in editing software. Here I am going to show you how to set up the file we just recorded for editing.
- Open Premiere Pro or the editing software of your choice.
- Drag the file you just recorded onto the timeline of your editing software
- You will see your footage in the main frame. As you can see due to the aspect ratio we have black bars along the sides. The first thing we want to do is duplicate our footage on the timeline and layer them on top of each other.
- Right-click on the timeline footage –> Copy. Select V2 as your active video track and paste the footage on the timeline. You will now see the footage layered on top of each other. If you keep Audio track 1 selected the audio will paste over the top of the existing audio track leaving you with a single audio source.
- We can now crop the footage so we have one track as our webcam and one as our gameplay. To do this in premiere pro search for the crop effect. Drag it onto both of the pieces of footage in the timeline. Crop one of them 50% from the top and the other 50% from the bottom. You are now left with separate tracks for your gameplay and footage.
You can now edit your footage as you wish. This allows you to adjust your camera in certain sections of the video to full resolution without losing any quality. In other sections, you can have just your game showing and vice versa.
When To Use Gameplay & Facecam Separate Recording
If you record your videos and don’t live stream this is the best way to record. Having these split completely allows you to have full-quality video of both your gameplay and facecam.
When it comes to editing, this gives you so much more freedom in the edit. You can do face zooms without having the quality distorted and you can have full gameplay scenes not covered by the camera.
This method is also a really good way of recording tutorial videos.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, this tutorial has helped you to record your gameplay and camera footage separately in OBS Studio so that you can have full freedom over your edit before uploading it to Youtube.
Let us know your thoughts down below in the comments.
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