Screen Recorder with No Lag? 6 Tips to Create Lag-free Screencast

Your screen recording looks laggy and choppy? You must ignore something that matters.

Recording the screen content or activity is a great way to maintain crucial moments locally for sharing or other purpose. However, due to various reasons, your screen recording video may have annoying lag problem. Then how to capture a lag-free screen video on computer? Is there any screen recorder without lag issue? Before stepping into the answers, let’s firstly take a look the main reasons of laggy screencast.

Content Overview:
Why Screen Recording Has Lags?
How to Record or Remove Lags when Recording?
Screen Recorder with Less or No Lags

Why does Your Screen Recording Run Slow and Have Lags?

Many factors could cause this issue. But to sum up, there are roughly three reasons.

• ➢ Reason 1: Your computer has poor configuration, e.g low RAM space, CPU or graphics card.

It ranks the top root for lagging screen recording. For one thing, video screen capture is a RAM- and CPU-intensive operation, which means if they two are not competent for handling the large recording data (See how to fix recording is too large), it will stutter and lag. Graphics card, or say GPU/video card, also plays an important role here, because after screen images (knows as frames) are captured, they will be rendered by the GPU and software together to the final video piece. GPU is overpowered, video lags, too.

• ➢ Reason 2: You have made some improper recording settings.

In some cases, it’s your mess settings that maxed out the computer or recording program. For general desktop grabbing, the video parameters are suggested to define in this way: the idea recording resolution is equal with or less than the original size, the frame rate value goes between 20 to 30 is just enough (certain video game capture excluded), bit rate doesn’t need to be high. Encoding method also makes a difference on the recording efficiency for using hardware encoder like Inter QSV/Quick Sync Video X264 or HEVC can boost the video compression speed a lot.

• ➢ Reason 3: The screen recorder has so-so performance.

It should not be ruled out that the capability of screen recording software itself may also lead to stuttering capture to some degree. Generally speaking, all screen video capture software share the same or similar workflow, even they are developed with different programming languages or so. The difference lies in the user experience brought by its interface, compatibility, and functionality. Imagine that if your computer doesn’t have hardware superiority, plus an application with poor encoding performance, how could you produce a smooth while crisp file easily?

How to Reduce or Remove Lags During Screen Recording?

After listing the possible reasons on screen recording with lag, you must have figured out related resolutions of them more or less. Now check more troubleshooting details below.

• ➤ Tip 1: Close all of the unnecessary apps

Check the applications running in the background, and end the needless ones to free up space for the screen recording.

• ➤ Tip 2: Lower the quality or size level of recording.

Since video quality, with a fixed length and size, is usually determined by video parameters like bit rate and frame rate. So decreasing their values slightly could improve the lag problem. As the precondition hints, you can also choose a smaller resolution to make the recording less CPU-intensive.

Another note is that if the recorder supports both CFR (constant frame rate) and VFR (variable frame rate) recording, try VFR to see if the lag disappear. But it’s a pattern that’s not friendly with editor. In other words, for post-production materials, VFR is not the top choice.

• ➤ Tip 3: Use another recording mode, format or codec.

Nearly all desktop screen recorders provide multiple recording modes, video formats and codecs. Therefore, you can try other options to see if the recording works with no lag, for instance, switching full screen to custom area capture, outputting AVI rather than MP4, altering software encoding to hardware encoding or vice sersa, and many more.

• ➤ Tip 4: Run software on another GPU mode if there’re two.

This operation is the same as one fixing way of OBS/scren recorder black screen. Set Windows PC for example, if it’s a Windows 10 1909 or later based one, go to system Settings -> System -> Display -> Graphics settings, add the screen recorder name to “Classic app”, and then click recorder “Options” to change graphics preference to between High performance” and “Power saving” manually. If the system is an elder one, navigate to the Nvidia’s Control Panel -> Manage 3D settings -> Program Settings, and then turn to “High-performance NVIDIA processor” or “Integrated Graphics”.

• ➤ Tip 5: Try some other screen recorders.

There are so many sleek screen recorders for Windows and Mac, be it freeware or shareware. Here some top picks are revealed for your reference: OBS, RecMaster, Dxtory, Bandicam, Fraps, CamStudio, Movavi Screen Recorder etc.

• ➤ Tip 6: Upgrade your computer or do the screen capture in another better machine.

Recommendation on Screen Recorder with No Lag for Computer

We’ve listed several big names in Method 5 above, and they are all good bets to help you capture screen video easily and smoothly. You may ask which one is the best to film lag-free recording. Let’s face it: because of the changeable recording external circumstances, no one is a 100% screen recorder without lag. Hence, we can just put the “best” thing in a virtual standard: leaving out the PC or Mac’s hardware components, for beginner users, the best tool must be the lightweight one with ease-of-use and high-quality, and for advanced users, flexibility on recording settings and editing feature to achieve some effects straightforward outweigh.

Unbiasedly speaking, RecMaster is a handy screencasting utility for both beginners or skilled users. Basic full screen or custom area recording capability with audio/webcam, plus the optimized Game Mode for Windows DirectX games, webcam recording and audio recording, can meet any screen capture requirements in a user-favored way.

How RecMaster Records Screen Without Lag on Computer:

Step 1 – Choose the right recording mode.

Step 2 – Select a proper quality and frame rate, like 1080p HD 24fps, and moderate other webcam, audio, mouse, watermark settings.

Step 3 – Record and stop.

RecMaster for Mac has added GPU acceleration for capture gameplay or other things with less/no lag. Simply tick this option under Settings for smooth screen recording.

Final Thoughts

Screen recording has lag issue is somewhat a common problem for a frequent screencast creator. In short, keep the background applications as less as possible, switch between full screen or certain area, reducing the quality level, and properly using hardware acceleration can improve most lag matters. If they all fail to make it better, maybe it’s time to level up your computer.

Related Troubleshooting Articles:
How to Record Screen Without FPS Drop
How to Fix Screen Recording Has No Sound
Why and How to Fix Screen Recording in Low Quality
How to Improve Screen Recording Blurry Problem