How to optimise screen recording on Windows
I’ve found screen recording on Windows to be poor, and now use a Mac. It’s much better — it just works, whereas no amount of fiddling and buying third-party apps makes Windows works well. But if you have only a Windows machine, this post is for you:
If you’re trying to do a screen capture on Windows, and you find the video stuttering, how do you improve it?
I recommend Bandicam — it’s the least worst screen recording software available on Windows [1].
Before Recording
First, if your system has been even slightly unresponsive, reboot it just to be safe. After rebooting, wait till the CPU utilisation in Task Manager falls below 10%.
Second, shut down background apps: if you have multiple browsers open, keep only the one you’re going to use for the recording. Shut down background sync apps like OneDrive or Google Drive. If another user is logged in, log them out. Stop heavy background tasks like video encoding. If your fan was running, wait a few minutes for it to slow down, because you don’t want fan noise in your recording, and also because a hot system performs worse, affecting the recording.
Third, turn off battery saver and switch to Performance Mode:
Fourth, if you have multiple monitors enabled, like an external one and your laptop’s internal screen, turn off the one you’re not going to use:
Keeping multiple monitors on, even if they’re just displaying your desktop, increases the load on your system.
If you’re not particular about a monitor, choose the lower resolution one. For example, my laptop has a 2560-pixel screen connected to a 3840-pixel external monitor, so in this scenario, I’d unplug the external monitor.
Recording Settings
First, use Bandicam’s medium noise suppression: it hardly distorts voice, and eliminates distracting noise. (On the other hand, low and off have distracting noise. High distorts voice a little more than medium without any further noise reduction).
Second, if you have a choice of codec to use, use an older codec like MPEG-1. If not, Xvid. If these are not available, use MPEG-4. If this is not available, use H264. Don’t use HEVC or VP9. Older codecs impose less load on the system to encode. Increase the bit rate to 100 mbps. At such a high bitrate, any codec will produce great quality video.
Third, choose CBR (constant bitrate) over VBR. VBR reduces file size at the expense of more processing, which isn’t the tradeoff you want when recording.
Fourth, choose a lower frame rate like 15 or 24 FPS to prevent dropped frames. A 24 FPS frame rate without dropped frames looks better than a higher rate with dropped frames.
Fifth, if your camera is on, and you don’t think it’s important, turn it off.
Sixth, if you don’t need to record what’s on the screen, use Bandicam’s HDMI recording mode, which directly records the webcam, rather than displaying it on screen and then recording that [2].
[1] Other than costly subscription software, which I didn’t test.
[2] Which reduces quality, can drop frames, and overload your system.
