Gameplay Walkthrough Ps5

How to Make PS5 Gameplay Walkthroughs That Actually Get Watched

Recording a gameplay walkthrough on PS5 used to mean wrestling with capture cards, complicated software, and exporting files through multiple steps. Sony changed that with the built-in Share Screen and Create menu, but knowing what button to press isn't the same as producing something people will actually watch. I spent years uploading walkthrough content across platforms, and the gap between "I recorded this session" and "this is usable walkthrough footage" is wider than most beginners expect. The PS5 Create menu is accessible by pressing the Create button — the small button to the left of the touchpad. From there you have several recording options that behave differently depending on what you're trying to capture. For a standard walkthrough, long-form recording is usually the better choice over the default 60-second clip, which keeps cropping your footage when you need continuous play through a level or boss fight. I ran into a specific problem last year when recording a lengthy Souls-likes walkthrough. The console auto-saving was interfering with my recording at unpredictable intervals. Every time the game triggered an autosave, the footage would stutter and occasionally corrupt the last few seconds of the clip. I figured out that switching to "Save Data + Broadcast" mode in the PlayStation Settings under Saved Data and Cloud Saves, then turning off the auto-save notifications during recording sessions, eliminated the issue entirely. You can't disable autosave outright because the game requires it, but silencing the on-screen notification and being aware of when saves trigger lets you plan your cuts around them.

Before you start recording, check your resolution and frame rate settings. Navigate to Settings > Screen and Video > Video Output and set your HDR mode to On if your monitor supports it. For the actual recording quality, go to Settings > Captures and Broadcasts > Video Clips and set Recording Resolution to match your display output. If you're playing at 4K, record at 4K. Most walkthrough viewers will skip content that looks softer than the source game. Frame rate should be set to 60fps if the game supports it — this is non-negotiable for action-oriented walkthroughs. Audio mixing is where most people mess up. The default audio setup prioritizes game audio over your commentary mic, which means your voice gets buried under explosion sound effects and boss music. In the Create menu before you hit record, you can adjust the Audio Mix. Set it so your mic sits at roughly 40% and game audio at 60%. Test it by speaking normally while something loud plays in-game. If you have to pause the game to hear yourself on a recording, the mix is wrong.

The Editing Process Nobody Warns About

Recording the footage is maybe 30% of the work. The rest is editing, and on PS5 itself you have the Video Editing app, which is functional but limited. For a proper walkthrough, you'll want to edit on a PC. Transfer your clips via the Photo API feature or through a USB drive if the file sizes are manageable. Here's the part most walkthrough creators skip: segmenting your footage by topic before you even start editing. I used to dump an entire three-hour playthrough into my editor and hope for the best. That approach produced videos that ran 45 minutes with zero structure. Now I mark timestamps as I play — not during the session, but in a separate notes document. When I reach a milestone, a tricky puzzle solution, or a secret room, I log it with a brief description. This turns editing from "figure out what happened in this footage" into "pull these specific segments and order them logically," which cuts my post-production time from around four hours down to maybe forty-five minutes for a standard walkthrough. There's also a counter-intuitive thing about walkthrough pacing that newcomers miss. Viewers don't want every moment of gameplay shown. They want the decision points highlighted. A good walkthrough shows the player struggling with a puzzle, then speeds through or cuts past the repetitive combat that follows. If you're making a walkthrough for a game like Elden Ring or Final Fantasy, the value isn't in showing that you killed forty slimes to reach the next area. It's in showing which skill builds worked, where the traps are, and what order you tackled the bosses in.

Audio cleanup deserves more attention than it gets. Record your commentary at a consistent volume, and use basic noise reduction in your editing software if your mic picks up fan hum, keyboard clicks, or background conversation. A $20 USB mic like a Fifine or a used Blue Yeti will sound significantly worse than a $150 setup if you don't treat the audio at all. Even a basic pass in DaVinci Resolve's free version makes a noticeable difference.

Uploading and Optimization

YouTube remains the standard platform for walkthrough content, but the upload process has some quirks that affect your video quality. PS5 records in H.265 by default for efficiency, but YouTube processes H.264 faster and sometimes applies less aggressive compression. Convert your recordings to H.264 before uploading unless you're certain your workflow can handle HEVC natively. This adds maybe fifteen minutes of encoding time but can save you from dealing with YouTube's slower transcoding pipeline and the quality artifacts that come with it. Title structure matters more than most creators admit. A title like "God of War Ragnarok - Complete Walkthrough Part 3" performs worse than "God of War Ragnarok Part 3 - Tips, Secrets & Full Story Walkthrough" because the second version captures search traffic from multiple query types. People search for tips, secrets, and walkthroughs separately, and your metadata should account for all of them without looking spammy. Thumbnails are where I see the most wasted effort. PS5's built-in screenshot feature can grab stills, but they're usually locked at the game's native resolution with UI elements cluttering the frame. Take your screenshots in-game with the HUD hidden if possible, then composite them in an editor. A clean thumbnail with just the character or boss centered and minimal text overlay consistently outperforms busy thumbnails that cram three different screenshots together. I've seen the same video double its click-through rate just by swapping the thumbnail.

Limitations and When This Approach Fails

The PS5's built-in recording has real constraints. You can't record gameplay from certain titles that enforce strict anti-piracy measures. Games like Resident Evil Village and some Capcom titles block recording entirely or produce black screens. There's no workaround for this except using an external capture card, which adds cost and complexity. If you're making walkthroughs for games with recording restrictions, you're looking at spending $60 to $200 on a USB capture device and routing your PS5 output through it. Another limitation is storage. A single hour of 4K 60fps gameplay takes up roughly 40 to 60 gigabytes. If you're planning a full game walkthrough, you'll need at least 200 to 400GB of free space on your console, plus external storage if you're recording extensively. I solved this by moving my captured media to a USB external SSD regularly — a 1TB drive handles about two weeks of active recording before I need to archive to a larger drive. For multiplayer or live-service games where the meta shifts weekly, long-form walkthroughs lose relevance fast. In those cases, shorter tips and highlight clips perform better and require less editing investment. A thirty-minute guide on the current best loadout for a specific game mode beats a full walkthrough that might be outdated by launch week.

The Create button gives you everything you need to start. The quality of the result depends on how thoughtfully you approach the recording, editing, and optimization steps. Most people skip those and wonder why their content isn't growing. It's not a complicated process, but it is one that demands more attention to detail than the average casual recording.