Howdy, I’m wondering what software people like to use for recording their screens when making a tutorial video for youtube? I have a 4K 21:9 monitor, so fullscreen is probably not a good idea for me.
-Sterling
I personally use the recorder from camtasia studio 
I’ve found that OBS works great for me - lots of options, streaming capabilities, cross-platform, and able to capture individual windows as well as monitors and input devices.
If you have an Nvidia GPU, you should try ShadowPlay, I previously used things like Camtasia and Microsoft Expression Encoder, but both of them either took forever to render, or couldn’t capture my screen at a high FPS. Shadowplay can pretty much capture the FPS that your game/software is running at, and does not need to render. I can now record at 1080p 60 fps using Shadowplay.
Nvidia Shadowplay. Part of Nvidia Experience. Take that AMD
first i used Nvidia Shadowplay but now it not work(don’t know why) so now i use fraps and convert files to mp4 in after effect
Shadowplay
It’s built into the video card I bought so no need for fancy software unless I want to edit.
Tip
Set all settings to quality (bit rate for sure) and let YouTube worry about converting it. You will land up wit ha large source file that seems to take forever to upload but the results are worth it.
The file size really isn’t too big is it? My 2k monitor will be arriving tomorrow, it’ll be awesome recording on that, and even better when the parts to my new PC build arrive next week, I’ll have a capable GPU for once 
Make sure to check the tiny checkbox that say “Allow desktop capture”. It’s above the spot where you set you keybinds and right below the place where it lets you set where the FPS counter and stuff will appear.
It screwed me up too.
+1 to OBS (Open Broadcaster Software). UI looks bit plain (doesn’t bother me though) but the software works great and is quite easy to configure. Good bang for the buck since it’s completely free.
At full resolution 1920X1200 50Mbps 60 FPS Using H.264 a 45 minuet recording generates about a 6 gig video file.
How long it takes to upload to YouTube I don’t know as I usually start the upload before I go to bed and it’s done by the time I get up in the morning. Either way though you would want anything associated with your game to be as high in quality as possible as YT does chew out some of the quality as part of their process and a sub-quality upload lands up making you “quality” looking game look bad so it’s well worth the effort get the quality uploaded even if it takes a day or two.
I used to use camstudio and obs but for some reason they don’t work on my newest but luckily it has shadowplay so now I use that although the file sizes can be quite large, I think when I turned it on it said something like a 5min video could be up to 1.5GB but you can set the framerate it records at so you can just lower it to make the files smaller, you can also use a video converter to reduce the framerate or even change the format allowing you to reduce the file size even further so it will still be good quality picture but wont take as long to upload.
Camtasia crapped out on me and CamStudio gave me poor quality.
I’m probably going with ShadowPlay. I’ll have to record full screen, and then crop out the game window. My monitor is 3440x1440, but I can play in a new editor window set to 1920x1080. For most of my videos (live action), I set my bit rate to 18-22 bitrate when uploading to YouTube.
As for quality, my game isn’t high quality to star with. I just want to post what I did in 30 days from start to finish, having never opened Unreal before. Turns out one can get a fair amount accomplished. Does it look great, not AAA standards, but good enough for rock and roll!
-Sterling
Fraps ftw! If all you want is to capture video in order to edit and then upload to youtube. It’s not a streaming application though, and the file sizes are… well, its not compressed video. It was designed to record video footage to put into an editing program to edit down and render / compress. Multiple compressions in a video makes it look terribad.
Shadowplay for me too.
quality is great, performance is outstanding, files are small…
I made my first recording, and I did it with ShadowPlay. Frankly, I’m not happy with the quality. It must be my settings. I recorded at 30FPS at the maximum bitrate. I had to capture then entire desktop 3440x1440, and then Premiere cropped it to 1920x1080, which the game window was set to. I encoded at 25mbs. Do you really think it would make a difference on Youtube with higher settings?
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+1 for OBS.
Currently I’m using OBS, but Camtasia is also quite nice.
Which GPU do you have? And make sure that your settings are set to the highest in Geforce Experience.
I use Action! Gives me great quality and a good amount of options.