Setting Up FC 24 Speedrun Recording with a Facecam Overlay
I've been running and recording FC 24 speedrun attempts for about two years now, mostly Ultimate Team card packs and Division Rivals routes. The facecam side of things isn't complicated, but getting it to actually look decent without eating your framerates takes some patience. Most people mess this up by slapping a webcam feed into OBS and calling it a day, then wondering why their upload chokes or their run gets disqualified from the leaderboards. The core setup is straightforward. You need OBS Studio, a webcam, and a way to capture the game at the right resolution. For FC 24 specifically, I run the game at native 1080p with the facecam overlay in the bottom corner. The game itself runs at 60fps on console and usually peaks around 120fps on PC depending on your settings. The key is making sure your recording bitrate doesn't conflict with whatever streaming or uploading workflow you're doing afterward. Here's how I actually have mine configured. OBS output resolution is set to 1920x1080. My game capture source runs at the native resolution of whatever display mode FC 24 is using. The webcam sits in the lower right, cropped to roughly 20 percent of the screen width. I use the NDI plugin for routing the webcam feed rather than a direct USB capture, which cuts latency through the system significantly. That's important because if your facecam is delayed even by a frame or two, the sync looks wrong in post and it's annoying to fix.
I hit a real problem during my first few weeks. The webcam feed was introducing compression artifacts that made the gameplay footage look muddy around the edges of the overlay. It wasn't a bitrate issue with the game capture itself. The problem was the NDI stream being re-encoded on top of the game capture within OBS. I resolved it by switching to the V4L2 loopback method instead. I set up a virtual camera, routed just the webcam into it, then pulled that as a separate source in OBS. No double encoding. The picture stayed clean and the file sizes dropped noticeably. Recording settings matter a lot more than most people realize. If you're uploading to YouTube or storing locally, go with x264 at a slow preset. The default medium preset will leave macroblocking visible during fast-paced match sequences where the ball is moving quickly across the screen. Ultrafast looks terrible. Slow gives you the best quality at a given bitrate, but it demands more from your CPU. If you have an 12th gen Intel or newer, or a Ryzen 5000 series, you should be fine. Otherwise you might want to drop to a medium preset and increase your bitrate to compensate, but quality takes a hit. For the actual speedrun execution inside FC 24, there are specific mechanics you need to understand before you even think about recording. The game has predictable button input patterns for certain actions that can be exploited. Pressing the sprint button combined with a direction hold before kicking the ball will cause a slightly faster shot animation in some cases. It's a small thing but it adds up over dozens of attempts. I spent weeks figuring out these input tricks through trial and error rather than relying on published strategies, because published strategies are usually incomplete or based on older versions of the game.
One thing nobody warns you about is the save state corruption that happens when you pause during certain cutscenes. I lost three full runs once because I paused to check my facecam position and the game wrote corrupted data to the cloud save. After that I turned off cloud saves temporarily and only used local storage. The runs are fast enough that you don't need to be worried about losing progress across multiple sessions. Just save manually after each attempt. Audio is another area where people go wrong. FC 24 has stadium crowd noise that will overpower your mic if you don't route it properly. Use a separate audio track for game sound and one for your commentary. In OBS you can set this up under Audio Mixer by clicking the gear icon next to each source and selecting Advanced Audio Properties. Put the game audio on one track and the mic on another. This makes it trivial to duck or mute one without affecting the other during editing. When it comes to the speedrun portion itself, the most common mistake is trying to beat the clock by rushing through menus without actually understanding the routing. FC 24 has multiple paths through any given mode. The shortest route isn't always the fastest if you're not comfortable with it. I've seen people try to clip through walls in certain modes and end up stuck for thirty seconds while a smoother, longer route would have taken less time. Know your route cold before you start hitting record.
If you want a download link for the software, OBS Studio is free and available at obsproject.com. That's really all you need. There are a lot of prebuilt scenes floating around for sale that are basically just OBS profiles with some webcam borders and music beds. They're not worth buying. Build your own. It'll take twenty minutes and you'll understand exactly what each setting does when something goes wrong. The other software worth mentioning is StreamLab if you want something simpler than OBS but still flexible. It handles facecam overlays automatically and has built-in widgets. For speedrun recording though, OBS gives you more control over the output file and you can verify the recording hasn't dropped frames. That matters when you're submitting times to a leaderboard. Facecam placement is subjective but there's a practical limit. If you put it too large, you're cutting into the HUD elements. FC 24 shows important information like stamina bars, player positions, and the timer in specific areas of the screen. A facecam that overlaps the bottom right corner where the stamina bar sits will make it impossible to monitor your players' fitness during a match. Keep it small enough that it doesn't obscure any HUD elements. I use a border around the webcam feed to make it look intentional even at smaller sizes.
Testing your setup before the actual run is critical. I do a thirty-second test recording at the start of every session. This catches issues like audio desync, incorrect resolution, or the game capturing at the wrong refresh rate. I've had FC 24 default to a weird intermediate resolution once because I had Windows scaling set to 125 percent. The recording looked fine on screen but was actually stretched. The test recording revealed it immediately. File management is something I wish someone had told me earlier. Speedrun recordings add up quickly. A single hour-long run with a facecam overlay at good settings can easily hit 4 to 6 gigabytes. I organize my files by date and run type. Each folder has the raw recording, the edited version, and a notes file with the final time and any glitches attempted. This makes it much easier to review later and identify patterns in your splits. For uploading, compressing with HandBrake after recording helps reduce file size for submission. The default OBS recording is usually fine for viewing but the encoding is heavy. HandBrake with the YouTube optimized preset will shrink the file by about forty percent without noticeable quality loss. I set the audio to AAC and the video to H.264 medium preset. It takes about ten minutes for an hour-long recording on my machine, which is reasonable.
One last thing about the speedrun community side. Leaderboard verification usually requires unedited footage with the facecam visible throughout the entire run. If you cut or edit anything, it won't be accepted. Make sure you record straight through without stopping. The facecam also serves as proof that you're actually playing and not using a pre-recorded run. Some communities require the facecam to show your hands on the controller too, so position it accordingly. This is something you'll find out after the fact if you don't read the specific rules for whatever category you're pursuing.
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