# The Best OBS Settings for Small, Sharp Recordings (Demos & Presentations) > Stop exporting 2 GB monsters. The OBS settings that give you a small, upload-ready recording of a demo, lecture, or presentation without the quality tanking, explained so you know what each one does. _Published September 2, 2026 · 7 min read · EasyDub blog_ OBS, left on its factory settings, will hand you a video file roughly the size of a small moon. This is not because your nine minute screen recording secretly contains a small moon. It is because nobody told OBS to be careful with your disk space, and OBS, given no instructions to the contrary, is generous to a fault. It records as though you might one day want to project your slideshow onto the side of a mountain, and it sizes the file to match that ambition. Most of us do not need that. We need a recording that looks clean in a browser window and fits inside whatever upload limit some website has decided is reasonable. Getting there takes about five settings, and once they are set you can mostly forget them. Here is the short version, followed by what each one is actually doing, because settings you understand are settings you can adjust when your situation differs a little from mine. ## The settings, if you are in a hurry In OBS, open Settings, go to Output, and switch Output Mode to Advanced. On the Recording tab: - **Encoder:** your hardware encoder if you have one (NVENC on NVIDIA, AMD VCE, Apple VT, QuickSync on Intel), otherwise x264 - **Rate Control:** VBR - **Bitrate:** 5000 Kbps for slides and a talking head, 10000 Kbps if there is a lot of motion - **Max Bitrate:** about double the target, so 10000 or 20000 Kbps - **Keyframe Interval:** 2 seconds - **Preset:** Quality on NVENC, or "veryfast" on x264 - **Profile:** high - **Frame Rate (Video settings):** 30 - **Output Resolution (Video settings):** 1920 x 1080 - **Audio:** AAC, 160 Kbps - **Recording Format:** mkv, with "Automatically remux to mp4" switched on Now the reasons. ## Rate control, which decides almost everything An encoder has one basic job, which is to decide how many bits to spend describing each moment of your video. Rate control is the rule you hand it for making that decision, and it affects your file size more than every other setting put together. CBR, constant bitrate, spends the same amount of data every second no matter what is happening on screen. A frozen title slide gets the identical budget to a fast scroll through a spreadsheet. Streaming platforms like this because a steady, predictable data rate is easy to push over the internet. For a recording sitting on your own disk, it means all of your quiet moments, and a presentation is mostly quiet moments, pay full price for nothing. VBR, variable bitrate, lets the encoder spend more when the screen is busy and less when it is still. Since a demo or a lecture is mostly a still image with a voice over the top, VBR buys you the same picture for a good deal less space. This is the setting to use. CQP and CRF are a third approach, where instead of aiming at a bitrate you aim at a quality level and let the file size land wherever it lands. A value around 20 to 23 looks excellent. The one catch is that you cannot know the final size until the recording finishes, which is a nuisance when you have a hard upload cap to clear. Capped VBR keeps you in charge of the number, so that is what I reach for whenever something is due somewhere. ## Bitrate, and a bit of arithmetic that will save you Bitrate is the dial that sets how much data goes into each second. Turn it up and the picture looks better while the file grows. Turn it down and the reverse happens. For 1080p slides and a talking head, 5000 Kbps (5 Mbps) looks clean. If your content genuinely moves a lot, say software full of animation or an embedded video clip, 10000 Kbps gives you room. Setting Max Bitrate to roughly double the target lets VBR spike during the busy parts without inflating the entire file. Here is the calculation worth memorizing. Take your bitrate in megabits per second, multiply it by about 7.5, and you get the megabytes each minute of video will cost. So 5 Mbps works out to roughly 37 MB a minute, which puts a ten minute presentation somewhere near 370 MB. This is honestly the most useful line in the whole article, because it tells you whether you are heading for a size problem before you have spent an hour recording, rather than at ten to midnight afterwards. ## Frame rate, where a bigger number quietly costs you double There is a strong temptation to record at 60 frames a second, on the general principle that 60 is more than 30 and more is better. Resist it. Doubling the frame rate roughly doubles the file, and for slides, screen shares, and a person talking, 30 frames a second looks perfectly smooth. Your slides are not going anywhere exciting. They gain nothing from being photographed 60 times a second. Save 60 for when you are actually capturing fast movement, like gameplay or animation you want to stay fluid. ## Resolution, matched to where it will be watched If you record on a 4K monitor, OBS will cheerfully capture in 4K, and the resulting file will be spectacular in every sense including the one where it does not fit anywhere. Set your Output (Scaled) Resolution to 1920 x 1080. For a presentation that is mostly text, even 1280 x 720 is comfortably readable and noticeably lighter. Whoever is watching your demo is doing it in a window on a laptop, not on the big screen at a planetarium. ## Encoder, or letting the right chip do the work If your computer has a dedicated graphics card, use its encoder (NVENC, AMD, Apple VT, or QuickSync). These are small pieces of hardware built for precisely this task, and using them keeps your main processor free to run whatever you are actually demonstrating without stuttering or dropping frames. x264 does its encoding on your CPU instead. It can produce a marginally smaller file at the same quality, which is nice, but it works your processor hard for the entire recording. If you are also screen sharing something demanding, that is a real risk, and it is why I keep x264 in reserve for machines with no hardware encoder to offer. ## Record to mkv, then let OBS convert it This tip has saved recordings I would otherwise have had to do all over again. Record to mkv rather than straight to mp4. If OBS or your computer falls over in the middle of a recording, an mp4 can be left corrupted and completely unplayable, taking the whole session down with it. An mkv survives the same crash intact. Turn on "Automatically remux to mp4" and OBS quietly converts the finished file to a friendly, universally compatible mp4 the instant you press stop. You get the durability of mkv while recording and the compatibility of mp4 once you are done, at no cost to you. ## Audio, briefly For a human voice, AAC at 160 Kbps sounds clean and stays small. Going higher does nothing audible for speech and only adds to the file, so there is no reason to bother. ## If you still land just over the line Even with everything set sensibly, a recording will occasionally run long and drift past the limit anyway. That is not a reason to record it all again with fresh numbers. Drop the file into our [video compressor](/tools/video-compressor), tell it the size you need to hit, and it will bring you in under the cap in about a minute, right in your browser, without uploading your recording anywhere. Set these once and OBS stops being the thing standing between you and a finished upload. Your recordings come out small, sharp, and ready to go, and the version of you facing a deadline gets to spend those last twenty minutes on something other than watching a progress bar. --- - Canonical article: https://easydub.video/blog/best-obs-settings-for-small-files - Related free tool: https://easydub.video/tools/video-compressor - All free EasyDub tools: https://easydub.video/tools