Video Unity Recorder - Custom bitrate?

Hello, we are currently using the Recorder package with the Timeline to create a cinematic from our game, and we render the timeline to mp4.

I've noticed the only setting related to encoding is the quality, which is just 3 options, Low, Medium, High. Is there any way to set up a custom bitrate for the recorder?

Even on "High" quality setting we find the output videos to be not usable for anything else than just previewing. (not sure if this is a bug or the bitrate on High is not that "High" ) There is a lot of motion in the cinematic, higher bitrate is needed for us, otherwise parts of it are a compressed mess.

Thanks
Raul @ MadGoat

 

Thank you for the detailed answer!

Will definitely check out the legacy recorder then!

On a side note, we used the image sequencer render before, but we decided to switch to mp4 due to the fact that for us it's easier to handle audio directly in unity (with animation events and Timeline) rather than having to import and sync all our audio tracks in Premiere, for example. My guess would be that rendering once as image sequence for the video part and once as mp4 for the whole audio track then only take the audio from the mp4 would also work.

And no worries. We get that the package is still just a preview, and we are looking forward to see improvements! It really is a must have for any cinematic project

 

Thanks Will check out!

 

I tried this to no avail.
- Using Legacy MP4 renders an invalid MP4 file
- Using Legacy WebM will never finish (I rendered a 20 minute video last night, got 20% done overnight.
- Using current MP4 or WebM formats result in a useless video because the bitrate is far too low.

We're still using third party tools to export via image sequence and assemble an MP4 using FFMPEG. After 1.5 years is there ANY hope that Unity will release a production ready Recorder?

 

6 months later, similar problems: On Windows10, with Unity 2019.2, the MP4 mode for latest Unity Recorder is basically useless, it uses a bitrate so low it's embarassing (it looks like a flash video from 1999 - it's a waste of time). I can get better results by switching to the .webm exporter, but it's still a moderately low bitrate that makes even HD export (let alone 4k!) pointless, because Unity is downsampling so badly you can't actually see the render quality that Unity is doing within the pipeline.

It is just about bearable if you have a scene with little or no moving objects (or small objects moving slowly, and a static camera). It feels like putting the engine of a 20 year old banger inside a Ferrari: Unity3D has done all this great rendering work, and the Recorder throws it all away.

(This is Recorder version 2.0.3, running on an AMD Ryzen, and maxing out at approx 60% of CPU usage, and the GPU fans running at half speed - so it's not even resource-constrained, it's just the Recorder doing a bad job .)

@marief_unity Do we have a workaround yet for this?

 

Any news on this? @marief_unity

 

Presumably the ProRes encoder fixes this. Seems like it has quite a few high quality options.

 

Is there any chance that ProRes will ever support variable frame rates? We use that feature heavily to record playback during edit mode (when constant framerate recording would interfere with gameplay).

 

Had the same problem, MP4 is worthless for recording unfortunately. Luckily ProRes works well enough. Huge files and not the best format out there, but I can always downgrade it with a video edit software later.

Really hoping that options to control the codec (color format, bitrate, etc) will be added, because this tool is amazing! Being able to simulate the game at constant framerate for recordings without any stutter or lag is amazing.

 

@marief_unity Anything new on this issue?
I'd like to record a high quality video via a recorder track in a timeline but what I get is horrible.
Using the legacy MP4 recorder doesn't help because it obviously does not record virtual cameras with storyboards - it just shows the main camera view.

May I quote: We are working on this as I speak, but good solution takes time.
It is two years after the first post of this thread and almost a year after that statement...

 

Would like to +1 this as well.

Would love to have good quality MP4 footage without having to do 4k and downscale.

 

Nope.
This video is going to be a public download/stream, so I have to stick to a popular format that is available everywhere.
To be honest: don't you think that one year is enough for a "good solution"?

 

As I wrote:

Using the legacy MP4 recorder doesn't help because it obviously does not record virtual cameras with storyboards - it just shows the main camera view.

At the moment I'm rendering images and put them together via ffmpeg.

 

I'm desperately trying to find a fix for this as well. What's strange is that it was working fine and suddenly started outputting choppy video you can see on my twitter @david_ruttan the video quality was fine up up until I took a month break and now the videos seem to have very low bit rate despite being on high quality. Does the newest alpha build address recorder issues?

 

"Recorder 4.0.0-pre.3 is only compatible with Unity versions 2022.1 and onwards"

i.e. it is unavailable for any current version of Unity - it's alpha only .

We can't even test that. If you launched it in a Unity beta (e.g. 2021) - we still couldn't test it on real projects, but we could at least look at it. (2020.3.26 is the latest production build of Unity).

Is this the plan? No useable version of Recorder for another 2 years?

Or are you going to release a Unity-compatible version later? One that we can all start testing and logging bugs etc on?

 

Thank you so much for making custom encoding options available, it should save me a lot of time. However, I have noticed something that is probably (hopefully?) a bug. If you record on H264 High option, you get an audio bitrate of 194kb/s, but if you choose any custom settings, the audio appears to default all the way down to 96kb/s (the audio you get with the "Low" preset) - which unfortunately makes it virtually useless. Youtube recommends 384kb/s for stereo, for example - four times what the Recorder gives you.

Really it would be great if we could choose custom audio spec, or at least a quality slider or something. 194 is already much lower than it should be, 96 is just not viable. Thanks!

 

My use is very niche so I am sure most users wouldn't mind. I am recording multiple hours of 4k@60fps - even Proxy ProRes results in truly gigantic files and needs to be rerendered for streaming. Ideally I'd love a ready-to-upload file straight out of the recorder. For now I am exporting H264 and a separate wav and then stitching them together without rerendering with FFmpeg.

I tried VP8 but the quality did not look as good as H264 to my eye, colours shifted quite a bit frame-to-frame.

Thanks for all the hard work!

 

I tried out the 4.0.0 recorder in 2022.1 and from my few tests it looks like using custom values for mp4 settings is working well. Having looked into the best settings for quality mp4 I'm kind of shocked it was ever released with high set to a messily 8 Mbps in the first place as its totally unsuitable for anything with motion.

However I'm unable to use it as there is no way i'm updating or even trying to branch off the project into such a beta version of Unity, so i'm stuck rendering to Prores LT ( as Proxy still generated huge files but with artefacts ).

I really don't understand what change was needed to require the latest beta of Unity to support entering custom bitrates for mp4 and very disappointed to hear it wont/can't be backported. Its making me seriously consider just ditching Unity Recorder for video and rolling my own using say Natcorder as a basis. Is there really no way this type of functionality can't be added to at least 2021?