I’m new with “content creation” and I’m having troubles with finding a way to record, edit and export HDR footage to Youtube. My main issue at the moment is that when I edit the footage looks good but when I export the colors and shadows are all over the place.. Specially in “night” footage it looks horrible! (Example further down)
So, what game capture tool and editing software is better for MSFS videos and in what format do you export?
Have you tried the Xbox overlay to record your videos?
I stopped using HDR because it took almost as long to prepare the images and videos after the flight, as it did to actually fly, and as such, it was sucking the enjoyment out of it for me, but the Xbox overlay was the least difficult.
I’ve ended up doing recording with NVidia’s capture tool (ShadowPlay), copying them to a Mac, trimming out clips in QuickTime Player with the trim tool, and then using ffmpeg on the command-line to resize/crop/compress and tonemap, to make small short clips for social media posting (which are not, themselves in HDR because most people wouldn’t be able to play them back)
To maximize the Rube Goldberg device potential, the wrapper script for ffmpeg I use is written in PHP.
[I really should rewrite it to run more easily directly on Windows! Ah, always things to do…]
What you need to remember is that what you see when flying with HDR is not what someone else will see when you record it. @Vibstronium seems to have got all of the tools and scripts above, but crucially he’s much more patient than me.
I find MSFS overly bright at altitude (flying the 146 for example) and overly dark on the ramp. But I find that in both HDR and SDR.
If you want to spend the time in post production to convert your HDR images and Videos so that others can view them, then the suggestions above are a good place to start.
If you’re more like me then I’d switch back to SDR and you can simply upload your content after your flight with minimal fuss.
I don’t do editing myself since I just want raw footage of my entire flight in 4K HDR (can go up to 10-12 hours long). So all I ever use that app is to do Livestreaming straight to my YouTube channel so I can fly and straight away recorded and uploaded simultaneously, otherwise I would have to wait for a full day just to upload the video to it and taking a lot of storage space in the meanwhile.
You can check my Neo King Arthur - YouTube channel for sample of what the actual recording looks like. They’re all in 4K HDR, so as long as you’re viewing them in compatible HDR display and mode, you should be able to see how it looks like with the app.
I’ve tried turning off HDR but still have extremly ugly dark colors, do you guys know any solution to it? Maybe I’ll just try to record during daylight
From what I understand is that if you turn on/off HDR in MSFS, make sure you exit the sim and restart it again. Otherwise, if you start from HDR and turn it off, you’ll get extremely dark effects until you exit and restart the sim which will load it in proper SDR mode. Same goes for the other way. If you start from SDR and turn on HDR without restarting, you’ll get bleached and overexposed effects until you exit the sim and restart again, at which case you’ll get proper HDR. Make sure you also match your Windows display setting. If you want to fly in SDR, make sure your Windows Display option is set to SDR mode, and vice versa. If you turn on Windows HDR, then MSFS should have HDR turned on as well.
I guess darkness in general is dependent on various factors. If you have a moonless night flight, then even in HDR, it’s basically pitch black. On full moon nights, you’ll get beautifully lit skyline. You’ll also need to use the lighting inside the cockpit. Like Dome light/floodlight, or panel lights. If you dont’ turn any interior lights, then of course it’s gonna be pitch black at night. You can also use the flashlight to make yourself able to see the inside when the aircraft is still Cold and Dark.
But then again, screenshots are generally unreliable and non-representative of what you actually see because sometimes what you see in your display is different when a screenshot was taken, even then, you’re at the mercy of the HDR to SDR tonemapping algorithm of the app. After that, there’s compression when you load the screenshot in the forum. And then when I’m seeing it on my screen, it would dependent on what I’m seeing. At the moment, I’m not reading this from my PC that I used for MSFS, so I’m looking at this on a standard office monitor in SDR mode. So, there’s so many different compression and display settings coming from your source to what I’m seeing on my display.
What i mean with the dark pictures is the “pixelated” dark areas and distortion of colour in darker areas like the cockpit, clouds in the night sky, etc..It doesn’t look like that when playing, only in the recordings.
The pictures are after turning off HDR in both MSFS and windows followed by complete system restart.
There are so many settings to tweak it feels like learning to use a DSLR camera all over again
Thank you very much for taking your time to explain!
In that case, maybe it’s the encoder that’s the issue, or the recording app itself that you use. I’m not entirely sure. But have you checked and see how my livestreams look like on your display? Do you see the same pixelated dark areas for those flights I’ve done at night?
Or it could be your video editor that “changes” the frames when working with HDR files that causes the distortions. Like I said, I don’t really edit my videos, so it’s a complete raw footage from the game straight to YouTube and YouTube handles the post-processing live. fewer opportunities for changing algorithms which may cause further compression or artifacts that way.
I’ve looked at your videos and it looks very good (you’ve got a new sub), exactly as it looks in-game with a normal color transition in darker areas, however, so far it’s only yours and a very few others that achieve that result, most of the videos in YouTube of MSFS in nighttime have that pixelation in the color transitions.
Then I suppose it’s because of my Mirilis Action software that allows me to achieve that good result. Maybe OBS Studio or NVidia Shadowplay that’s making the poor transition? Or maybe their setting.
For me I use Nvidia NVENC HEVC encoder with HDR10 enabled when I set my Action software to do it. Maybe this can help. Otherwise, I think you should give Action software a try. They have like 30 day free trial if I’m not mistaken. So use the trial, set it up like my setting above, make some HDR recording and upload or livestream to YouTube. And see if you can get it working on your end.
I know I did a lot of research about HDR recording and livestreaming, and a lot of streamers recommended OBS Studio, but none of them make active comparison with Action. So I had to compare it myself, then I decided that Action was better suited for my needs, and I never looked back since.
Just bought Action!, speechless how well it performs compared to everything else I’ve tried so far, both FPS impact, file-size and overall quality.. in HDR! Still some small issues with dark areas but nothing compared to before
