If you have not but, observe us on X (Twitter), Mastodon, or Bluesky to know once we publish new articles, and be a part of our Reddit or Subscribe to us on YouTube to take a look at our content material and work together with our superior neighborhood. Thanks for supporting us!
So you may have simply up to date your Steam Deck to the most recent consumer and wish to begin recording your video games and sending them to your mates. Nevertheless, it is not essentially the most easy, and whereas it’s simple to document your footage, discovering it, slicing it, and exporting it may be a bit tougher. So, I wished to create this information that can assist you navigate the Steam Recreation Recording characteristic and make you conscious of its limitations. Sure, there are some limitations (particularly for clips you may ship to your telephone or pals).
What Is The Recreation Recording Characteristic Precisely?
Earlier than entering into the right way to use it, let’s begin with what the characteristic is. Steam Recreation Recording is a brand new characteristic of the Steam consumer that lets you document gameplay of your video games instantly inside Steam with as little of a efficiency drain as potential. It tries to make use of minimal CPU energy with GPU encoding to maximise efficiency whereas additionally working with any Steam and non-Steam sport. Whereas in Steam, you may edit clips and ship them to pals, and a few builders may even improve their video games with particular options to see highlights or occasions in your recorded timeline.
It is all packaged properly, and it is an awesome new characteristic general, however there are some limitations to go over.
How To Document A Recreation
First, let’s go over the right way to even document the sport you’re enjoying. By default, Steam assigns the “Steam + A” shortcut to start out and cease recording whereas in-game. So, whenever you go into any sport, you simply press the “Steam + A” shortcut to document. Slightly notification ought to seem within the backside proper of the display whenever you begin and cease, and the recording will not decide this up. If you find yourself carried out recording, the clip will now be in your “Media” tab in your consumer.
Whereas recording, you can too press the “Steam + Y” button so as to add a timeline marker so you may simply work out the place to clip the recording in a while, or press “Steam + Up-Dpad” to create a clip. The latter of those two didn’t work for me particularly whereas recording a sport of Balatro, however the timeline marker did.
You can too assign these actions through Steam Enter and assign a unique button completely to do it. For me, I went and assigned one of many again buttons (R4) to Toggle Handbook Recording, however you can too do that with “Add Timeline Marker” and “Create Clip” if most popular. You’ll find these within the System tab when altering your controller settings, and I like to recommend it to make it simpler to make use of.
The Completely different Varieties of Recording and Settings
Now that we all know the right way to document in-game, I wish to go over all of the settings you may change on your recording. These settings could be discovered within the Recreation Recording tab in your consumer’s settings.
There are two sorts of Recording Modes: Document in Background and Document Manually. The latter of the 2 is extra apparent and forces you to manually activate recording (which I went over the right way to do above). As for Document in Background, selecting this may routinely document your sport and hold the final two hours (or 120 minutes) in a brief format so that you can replay and clip earlier than it deletes.
Slightly additional down, you may change the recording high quality, in addition to the utmost framerate and video top. I’d hold the Most Video Peak at “No Restrict,” so it routinely units the facet ratio appropriately, and the utmost body fee solely has a 30 and 60 choice. However, recording high quality could be modified between Low, Medium, Excessive, and Extremely. Extremely will look one of the best general however take up essentially the most house, whereas Low will take up the least quantity of house, however it is not one of the best wanting.
You’re additionally in a position to plug in a microphone and document your self in addition to the sport audio. By turning this on, you’ll be able to select the system that the audio will document from, in addition to power it to just one audio channel (Mono) as a substitute of two (Stereo) and have the system auto-adjust the recording stage for consistency. I do not see any motive to alter the audio channel away from Stereo, so I would depart it off, however preserving the opposite two on is nice basically.
Enhancing Your Recording
So now you may have your fantastic recording, however it’s 20 minutes lengthy, and also you solely need a quick one-minute clip from it. That is the place enhancing is available in, and it is comparatively simple to do! First, it’s important to get to your clip, which yow will discover in your consumer’s Media part. When you click on on it, you may scroll by means of your video and watch it, in addition to make clips and reduce it.
That is additionally the place you will notice some variations in how the timeline appears to be like for supported video games. You may even see random icons on the timeline or the colour change a bit based mostly on whether or not the developer added in particular options to focus on what occurs in-game whereas recording.
To do that, get to a bit of the recording you wish to clip and press the Scissors button within the backside proper. This can take you to a brand new display the place you may edit your clip’s size and select the place it begins and finishes. The clip’s size goes from 10-12 seconds from wherever you began. You should utilize the 2 new scissors icons on the backside proper to extend the size. The one with a dotted line on the left will modify the beginning of the clip, whereas the dotted line on the suitable will modify the tip of it. You should utilize the left and proper triggers to maneuver alongside the timeline to align the clip the best way you wish to, after which use these buttons to set the size.
The button to the left with the circle and dotted line will allow you to watch your clip from the start of the clip’s outlined size, whereas the magnifying glass will zoom in to the clip so you can also make some finer adjustments.
As soon as carried out adjusting your clip, click on the “Save” button on the underside proper hand nook and it offers you the prospect to “Save Clip” (which deletes the previous recording) or “Save new Clip” (which saves it as a totally new clip whereas preserving your recording in-tact. There are some sharing choices as properly, however we are going to get to these momentarily.
On the left-hand aspect of the display, you may set markers in your timeline to be sure you come again to these spots.
Sharing With Pals
So, you may have your clip and are able to share it with your mates! There are a number of methods to do that, and they’re all fairly simple.
So, there are 4 methods to share your clips. You’ll be able to ship it to a different system in your community, ship it on to your telephone, create a QR code hyperlink to take a look at the clip, or share it on to a Steam chat. Once you ship it on to a tool, it’s important to log into your account on the opposite system, and as soon as it’s despatched, it’ll seem in your Screenshots and Recordings library. Ship to telephone will let you ship by means of your Steam Cell app, whereas the QR code hyperlink permits anybody to scan the QR code and obtain/view the clip. Alternatively, you may simply add the clip to a chat you may have happening with somebody.
Nevertheless, there are some limitations to notice right here.
You’ll be able to’t ship clips which might be too large or too lengthy. The three fast choices it’s important to share all have limits. If you wish to ship it to your telephone, share it in a chat instantly, or create a QR hyperlink, you have to hold your clip at a most size of 59 seconds. To ship to a different system, you have to hold your general clip measurement beneath 100MB. There are methods to nonetheless use larger recordings, which shall be very helpful for content material creators, and I’ll go over that after this.
Exporting Greater Clips as MP4 Movies
If you’re a content material creator, it’s possible you’ll wish to document gameplay for movies, and it is a good way to do it. Nevertheless, the recordings aren’t in MP4 format whenever you document them and are in a format solely Steam can learn. Fortunately, there’s a option to export them, however it’s a little bit of a course of and one that may’t be carried out from Recreation Mode.
First, you’ll have to head to Desktop mode. When you do, go to your Steam library and consider your Recordings and Screenshots (click on the View tab on the high and choose Recordings and Screenshots). As soon as there, right-click the clip you wish to use and choose “Share.” There needs to be a brand new choice on the high to “Export Video File,” so go forward and click on on that.
You’ll then be taken to a brand new display the place you’ll change some exporting settings. There are three tabs for exporting your video: Authentic, File Dimension, and Customized. Authentic is the simplest one and can simply export the clip with none adjustments, whereas File Dimension lets you compress the clip and decrease the standard earlier than exporting it by altering the file measurement on a slider. Customized provides you extra choices, like altering framerate, Bitrate, and Codec, to customise earlier than exporting it.
Every choice helps you to change the clip’s identify and the place it’s saved, however it ought to default to the house/deck/movies folder. On the high, additionally, you will see an estimated file measurement and bitrate in addition to the size, decision, and body fee.
After getting determined, hit “Export Video,” you ought to be all set! It takes a while for it to export, relying on how lengthy the clip is and the way large the tip file shall be, however it works!
And that is every thing you might want to learn about Recreation Recording! It is potential the characteristic will change slightly bit sooner or later, however that is every thing you are able to do with it for proper now.
In case you loved this information, take a look at the remainder of the content material on SteamDeckHQ! Now we have all kinds of sport critiques and information that may assist your gaming expertise. Whether or not you are on the lookout for information, ideas and tutorials, sport settings and critiques, or simply wish to keep up-to-date on the most recent developments, we have got you coated!
