Apex Legends Gameplay Speedrun With Facecam

What You're Actually Looking At Here

A apex legends gameplay speedrun with facecam is exactly what it sounds like on paper, but the execution side is where most people fumble. You have a speedrun — any strat, any trick — recorded from the game itself, and then you layer a webcam feed on top so people can see your reactions. The community has been doing this for years. The format isn't going anywhere. I run a channel that posts these regularly. What I'm about to tell you is the result of breaking multiple recording setups and spending way too many hours debugging OBS when something went wrong.

Setting Up Apex Legends Gameplay Speedrun With Facecam

First, you need to separate your sources properly. Don't rely on game capture alone if you want a clean facecam. Use two displays if you have them — one running the game in borderless windowed mode, one running OBS full-screen. If you're on a single monitor, use windowed benchmark mode or a virtual display adapter. The extra latency from alt-tabbing will kill your workflow. For the capture itself, game capture in OBS is fine for Apex. It uses DirectX 11 hooks and doesn't add noticeable input lag to your run. Screen capture adds about 30 to 50 milliseconds of delay. That might not matter for casual viewing, but when you're trying to sync audio later, it becomes a real problem. Set your game to run at the same refresh rate as your monitor. Apex runs uncapped by default, which sounds great until you're trying to time-stamp splits and they don't line up with frame-accurate splits from strats. Set it to match your monitor refresh or cap it at 240 if that's what you're running. Keeps things clean.

The Audio Problem Everyone Misses

This is where I wasted about three weeks of my life. The game audio and your facecam mic audio will drift apart over time. Not dramatically — we're talking maybe half a second after a full run — but enough that viewers will notice before you do, and they'll call it out in the comments anyway. The fix is simple if you know it. Run your game audio as a separate track in OBS. Go into Advanced Audio Properties and set your desktop audio to Track 2, leaving your mic on Track 1. When you export or if you need to sync in post, you align the two tracks by matching the audio waveforms. I use a free tool called TSioSync — it's old, the UI looks like Windows XP, and it works perfectly for this exact purpose. Takes about two minutes to sync a full run. If you skip this step and just mix everything into one track, you're going to have to manually nudge the audio timeline in whatever editor you're using. Doing that for a 45-minute speedrun is miserable.

Facecam Setup That Actually Looks Decent

You don't need expensive gear. A decent webcam from a few years ago is fine. What matters more is lighting and positioning. Put your camera at eye level or slightly above. Facing a window or a cheap ring light. No colored LEDs behind you washing out the frame. Keep it simple. In OBS, add your webcam as a source and scale it down. Most speedrun viewers don't want a massive facecam blocking the entire gameplay. I keep mine around 15 to 20 percent of the screen width, positioned in the lower right corner. Add a crop if needed so you're not showing half your ceiling. Use a black background mask if your room is cluttered. A simple solid color key or the Remove Background filter in newer OBS versions works fine for this. Don't overthink it. The point is that people can see your face, not that you built a studio.

Recording Strategy During the Run

Record continuously. Don't stop and start between attempts. If you die at the drop and restart, keep recording. You cut the dead parts in post. The alternative — recording in segments — introduces file management headaches and sometimes causes OBS to misalign timestamps between clips. I learned this the hard way after losing an entire run because two .ts files wouldn't stitch together cleanly in FFmpeg. Use the recording hotkey. Don't click the button in OBS while playing. This is basic advice, but I've seen it happen. Your character dies, you fumble for the mouse, and you miss a critical moment because you were looking at the UI instead of the game.

Common Pitfalls With Apex Legends Gameplay Speedrun With Facecam

One issue that bites a lot of people: OBS buffer recording. The built-in feature keeps a rolling 30-second cache of your last few moments. It sounds useful, but it causes problems when you're doing speedruns. The buffer doesn't always align cleanly with actual run start times, especially if the game stutters during load screens or lag spikes at the drop. I had a split time that looked wrong for two weeks before I realized the buffer had silently dropped a few frames of gameplay. Disabled it. Never looked back. Another thing — make sure your game is set to fullscreen exclusive or borderless windowed, not windowed mode at a lower resolution. Rendering at 900p and stretching to fill 1080p makes your facecam look worse by comparison because everything gets soft. Run both at native resolution.

Exporting and Publishing

For exporting, use x264 encoding if you want smaller files and faster uploads. CRF around 18 to 20 looks good and keeps file sizes manageable. If you're uploading to YouTube, x264 is the standard. NVIDIA NVENC is fine too if you need to save CPU, but the quality at equivalent bitrates is slightly worse. Bitrate: 8000 to 12000 kbps for 1080p60. Higher than that and you're just padding the file. YouTube compresses aggressively regardless, so there's no point in pushing 20 megabits and waiting twice as long to upload.

Does This Even Matter Anymore?

Some people argue that facecam overlays are unnecessary. The speedrun itself is the content. That's fair. But the demographic that watches these runs often includes people who follow the runners, not just the runs. The facecam adds personality and context — a reaction to a good skip, a visible stress moment during a tight section, that sort of thing. It's genuinely helpful for certain viewers. If you're purely focused on clip-worthy moments and minimal file sizes, you can skip the facecam entirely and just post raw gameplay. There's no rule saying you have to include it. But if you want to build an audience around your runs specifically, it's worth the extra setup time. The whole process from recording to uploaded video usually takes me about 20 to 30 minutes for a standard run. Syncing audio adds another 5 minutes if I'm being careful. Editing out death loops and bad drops takes the most time — roughly 10 to 15 minutes depending on how many retries I did. Total turnaround is manageable if you're not obsessing over perfection.