Sudden loss of quality of one of the clips after export

[Kacper33820009tehy]

I have a really simple webinar-style video edited - there's a clip with OBS screencast (2560x1044 ) and a clip of me talking from my Osmo (4K). Everything is CFR now (Osmo was from the beginning, OBS I had to convert using handbrake). It all looks good in the editor and when I playback the clip on its own but after the export, the OBS part of the video suddenly loses a lot of sharpness. To give you an example on a part of the frame containing text: here is the source screencast (MP4 after conversion through Handbrake) and here

is the same part on the final edit exported.

The source clip is QHD, my timeline is even higher res as it's 4K (the osmo material was 4K), I export it all to QHD. My export settings are as per YouTube's guidelines, ie. QHD, 60fps, 24Mbps bitrate. Tried upping the bitrate to 60Mbps to see if that's the problem but nothing changed then. The "use maximum render quality" option doesn't help, exporting to other formats doesn't help. Also, here is an example from the export while here is the preview from Premiere. Notice how sharp the texts, my whiteboard squiggles and icons are in the preview vs. the export 😞 My face video looks the same quality-wise to me (as does the watermark which is an image overlay) but the screencast gets destroyed.

What can be causing the issues then?

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

Sequence should be your QHD or even 1920x1080. Most pros I know don't do larger than 1920x1080 to YouTube anyway.

I think your current process is scaling up then down. Not so good.

Also, you can set OBS to record CFR in the settings. I do.

[Kacper33820009tehy]

OMG, yes, that was precisely it! After changing the sequence resolution to QHD and then rearranging the elements back into place, it's all crystal clear and sharp now! Thank you very very much, been cracking my head over it for over a week 😅

And thanks for letting me know OBS can record in CFR, will look into how to do it and do it the next time I'm recording, thank you!