Baldurs Gate 3 Gameplay Ending With Facecam

Setting Up BG3 Endings With a Facecam Overlay

If you're looking to record your Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough endings with a facecam in the corner, this is about as straightforward as it gets with OBS. The trick isn't really the recording itself. It's making sure your gameplay doesn't drop frames when the credits roll and the game starts pushing out cinematic stuff. I've done this enough times that I learned the hard way. You need OBS Studio (free), a working webcam, and BG3 installed. That's basically it. For the stream encoding, I run at 1080p 60fps with the x264 preset set to veryfast. If you have a newer NVIDIA card, switch to NVENC instead and use the P5 preset. It's lighter on your CPU and looks just as good for this kind of content. The facecam sits at 720p on top, positioned in the lower right corner. Nothing fancy. I'd suggest using the Baldurs Gate 3 Gameplay Ending With Facecam approach where you trigger your recording manually right before you hit the final boss or the final dialogue sequence. Automatic triggers tend to miss stuff or start recording 30 seconds too early and waste your storage.

The Actual Setup Process

Open OBS, create a new scene, and add your game capture source. Make sure you're capturing the BG3 window directly rather than screen capture mode. Screen capture introduces a few frames of latency and sometimes picks up Windows notifications or the taskbar. Game capture is cleaner. Add your webcam source next, resize it, and drop it into the corner. Enable privacy mode if your camera supports it so you're not accidentally broadcasting your whole room. Set your audio tracks. Game audio on one, mic on another. You can always mix them later, but keeping them separate gives you flexibility during editing. For the actual recording format, use MKV instead of MP4. MKV won't corrupt your file if OBS crashes mid-recording, which happens more often than you'd think. You can remux to MP4 afterward in a couple of clicks. This saved me once when my system froze during a particularly long credit sequence that runs about eight minutes in BG3.

One Problem That Caught Me Off Guard

During my third or fourth ending playthrough, I noticed the facecam would completely freeze every time the credits started rolling. The gameplay stayed fine, but the webcam source just locked up for about 20 seconds then resumed. I spent an hour Googling before I realized it wasn't OBS or my camera. It was BG3's own rendering pipeline shifting gears when the game transitions from gameplay to the ending cutscene. The engine temporarily starves the webcam driver of resources during that shift. The workaround is simple enough: close any background applications that also use the camera. Discord's webcam feature is the usual culprit. You turn off "Hardware Acceleration" in Discord's voice settings, close Discord's background camera process, and the freezing stops. You can keep Discord open otherwise. Just make sure no other app is hogging the webcam while OBS is running.

Things People Get Wrong

The biggest mistake I see is recording at too high a bitrate for the ending specifically. When the credits roll and the screen goes darker, high bitrate recordings actually look worse because the encoder wastes quality bits on black space. Drop your bitrate down to about 6000 Kbps for the ending sequence rather than the 10000 you'd use for normal combat. The visual difference is negligible and your file size shrinks by nearly half. Another thing: don't run BG3 in windowed borderless mode if you can avoid it. Exclusive fullscreen gives the game slightly better performance during those heavy ending sequences. I tested this directly. In exclusive mode, I got consistent 60fps through the entire credit roll. In borderless, the frame times spiked around the four-minute mark when the cinematic transitions kick in. The spikes don't destroy the recording, but they make it choppy if you're capturing at 60fps.

When This Approach Doesn't Work

This method breaks down if you're trying to record in 4K. The encoding load becomes too much for most consumer hardware during the ending sequences, and you'll either drop frames or the webcam will start glitching again. If you need 4K, record the gameplay separately at a lower resolution and overlay the facecam in post-production using DaVinci Resolve or Premiere. It takes longer, but it's the only reliable way to get clean footage at that resolution. Also, if your webcam has a hardware autofocus that hunts in low light, the ending cutscenes will look terrible. The cinematic lighting in BG3's endings is deliberately dark and moody. Your camera's autofocus will go haywire trying to find contrast. Switch your webcam to manual focus before you start recording and lock it. This applies to pretty much any low-light recording, not just BG3.

A Quick Note on File Management

Save your recordings to an SSD. I know that sounds obvious, but I've seen people save directly to a spinning hard drive and then wonder why OBS stutters during playback preview. The write speeds on older drives can't keep up with sustained 1080p60 encoding plus the facecam overlay. An SSD makes the difference between a smooth export and a corrupted file that you have to start over from scratch.