Today I’m sharing a story about my YouTube creator journey. I spent a big chunk of time batching a couple of videos and then realised somehow my videos would only give me the video output at 720p (so only “SD” on YouTube).

I even did a video about it, which you can see below.

When I made the video, I thought this was because I had a lower quality video as the start of my reel. When looking into it when the same thing happened again with a new video, I found the real issue.

OBS was the culprit

OK, in reality it wasn’t the fault of OBS, it was a PICNIC…

What was I doing wrong? The issue was hidden in OBS and was only happening when I used OBS to record my videos.

The default setting for the Output was 720p, so even though I thought I was setting this to HD when choosing my camera, the output was always rendering at 720p.

What’s happened since then..

Well, my ONE mistake, made me try new ways of creating content, and I’ve been reliably producing 1080p videos. The way I’m now set up is I can even use 4k if I want that extra bit of quality.

You can see my latest videos here.

What can I learn from the mistakes

Firstly, I thought I’d found the issue when in reality I hadn’t. I was trying to use streaming tools for recording single videos.

If I do live streams in future, then these tools may come in useful but for my current content (one video a week) I’ll be aiming to shoot these using the following:-

• 4K mode on my phone
• Audio through my lav mic
• Lighting and camera angles good

I’m still not happy with my latest video (see below) but I feel like they’re slowly getting better.

Certainly when I compare them to the first one I did back on January 2nd.

What do you think?