Record Your Camera and Your Game as Separate Files

Clean sources for clips at full resolution. No more VODs!

What you end up with

You stream once. When you stop, you have:

• Your full stream, as normal
• A separate video file of just your camera
• A separate video file of just your game
• As many more as you want, clean, isolated, no overlays, no alerts, no chat box

All of it recorded live while you streamed, at full quality, on the same machine. No second capture session. No cutting your face out of a busy layout in an editor afterwards.

If you make clips, shorts, thumbnails, or anything vertical, this is the difference between an afternoon of editing and dragging two files onto a timeline.

Why cropping it later doesn't work

The obvious approach is to record your stream and crop the bits you want in an editor.

It fails for a reason you cannot fix in post: you are cropping a composite. Your camera in the recording already has your overlay drawn over it, your alerts firing across it, and your game visible behind it. Cropping gets you a rectangle of the finished picture, not your camera.

You cannot remove an alert that has already been baked in. You cannot uncover the part of your face the chat box was sitting on. You cannot get a clean game capture out of a frame with a webcam in the corner.

The fix is to record the pieces separately at the moment they are generated, before anything is composited. OBS can do this while you stream, on the same machine, with a free plugin. Almost nobody sets it up, because it takes ten steps and about eight specific settings, and getting any one of them wrong gives you a worse file without telling you why.

What's in the guide

Ten ordered steps. Seven screenshots. Every setting specified as a value, not as an option.

• Audio tracks by hand. OBS gives you six and hides them until you change one setting most people never touch. Includes the step that keeps your music off your VOD so the archive stays clean.
• Building the scenes that become your recordings. The step people skip, and the one that decides whether any of this is worth doing.
• The Source Record filter, configured. Record mode, video matching, and the audio track binding.
• The field you must leave empty. It sits there looking like it wants filling in. Fill it and your audio is silently doubled, and you find out weeks later watching something back.
• The full encoder panel. Rate control, CQP value, preset, tuning, multipass, profile, look ahead, adaptive quantization, B frames. Every one of them, with the reasoning where it matters.
• The rule tying keyframe interval to B frames, and what to set them to.

Who this is for

Anyone who has tried to clip their own stream and found the good moment buried under an alert.

Who this is not for

If you never repurpose your footage, you do not need this. Streaming and forgetting is a legitimate way to live.

What you need

Windows, OBS Studio, and the free Source Record plugin. The encoder values are written for an NVIDIA GPU, though the ordered steps hold either way.

Format is PDF, instant download, yours to keep. No subscription, no per clip fee, no upload limits.

Start here for free

The thinking behind this guide is the same thinking in Hear Your Game Without Voicemeeter, which is free and takes about four minutes. If that one solves something for you, this one is the same voice applied to a harder problem.