Anyone know why the audio is choppy/crackling in the Unity recorder? Been pretty disappointed with it as the quality has been abysmal so far - large files, unusable/missing audio, terrible lag.
Link to an example recording:
Have to think it’s an error on my end as I doubt the Unity team would ship a feature this broken! You can see the quality settings here - the video it records is like ~18-20 fps (game runs at 60 in build and in editor).
The mp4 and webm file formats audio is comically sped up and then totally drops sometimes so I’m forced to use ProRes Quicktime which doesn’t have that but still has some bad crackling.
I’m running pretty strong hardware (macOS Big Sur 11.4, 2.3 GHz Quade Core Intel i5 w/8 GB mem, ssd, etc.) so seems like this is just a software issue.
I did not hear any audio while recording except for maybe the first 1-2 seconds. I assume this meant the audio was outputting to a different source (the recorder?). However as you can see in the video the audio is captured, just badly mangled by the recorder.
me too. could not hear audio, which I really needed. And the audio was messed up in one of my recordings, I am assuming because of the CPU load. But I actually asked the fellow who claimed it worked just fine… because afaik, the audio does not play for anyone while recording.
when recording the game had no audio. you are right, I’ve forgot about this. I was mentioning that the video quality was fine (not great) and there was no lag.
I know it is sort of a meme that the Unity folks always turn out half-finished and broken features that never get fixed before they go on to the next thing. Unfortunately, this looks like another bit of evidence in that column. I was really hoping it was not the case!
I would note an i5 with 8gb memory is a pretty low powered machine. Video encoding is a very computationally expensive operation. You would need a lot of spare CPU left over from the game to keep up. (Encoding is generally much more expensive than decoding at playback time.)
Having said that, I also have problems with video quality on a 12 core i9 with 32gb of memory (and high end graphics card). I gave up on MP4 files because it tries to keep up real time, degrading video quality to keep up. (No audio, just the image quality was low.) Complex scenes (with wind etc) and it failed to keep up.
I wonder if Unity needs to have another output file format that is more of a raw stream (no compression - AVI files I have seen used for this purpose) just so they can write it to disk fast. Then later use a separate tool to convert to a compressed video file format. Have you tried writing as an image sequence? It stresses the OS however (creating so many separate files - file creation can be slow - which is why AVI file raw streaming I think would work better - one file).
I have no experience with audio (I don’t record it).
Have not tried the video sequence yet but will look into it later today. I guess my frustration is applications like Quicktime capture the screen with very high fidelity quite easily, just that it doesn’t grab the audio. I was hoping the recorder would allow that.
Yes, I know what you mean. Most screen capture programs I think benefit from being a separate process (at the cost of not synchronizing exactly with the framerate of the program generating content), and frequently not writing out files that are compressed that efficiently. I assume the Unity implementation hooks into the frame generation code, making life harder for Unity - but guaranteeing synchronization with its internal framerate. That is why I was hoping writing an uncompressed video file might help it keep up… maybe!
Hi. On what platform are you recording and your Editor version. Also, could you share the video file created? It will help me understand where the issue is.
Hi, the platform information is further up. Can you see that? If there’s something missing let me know. And sure, I can send a file. How would you like me to send it?
My bad, I didn’t see the specs. Still, I would need your Editor version. I was not able to reproduce the issue on my side. My specs are macOS Big Sur 11.6, Editor 2021.1.9f1, and Unity Recorder 2.5.5. I used the same recording settings (1080p, 16:9, ProRes QuickTime, Apple ProRes 4444 XQ ap4x, HD Rec. 709). I don’t think the issue is performance, but anyway, do you know what your average fps was during recording? I sent you a DM to share your video file in private.
Maybe you play too much multiple sounds if you play too much at the same time it gives problems.Maybe you play music multiple times because of the some code
Thank you for sharing your files. Like we told you in DM for some reason, your files have 5 audio channels. Can you check in Project Settings > Audio > Default Speak Mode is set to Stereo and not Surround?
