Recording Yourself Playing Genshin Impact
You want to make videos of your Genshin gameplay with your face in the corner. It sounds straightforward until you try it and realize the game is constantly resizing windows, overlaying menus, and pushing your PC near its limits. I've done this enough times to know where the problems actually show up. The concept is simple: you record your gameplay screen while simultaneously streaming or recording your webcam feed, then edit the two together. The funny moments come from whatever happens during actual play—botching a spiral abyss run, getting distracted by lore you didn't expect, or reacting to something your party does that isn't even your fault. The facecam adds context that pure gameplay doesn't carry. Here's how you actually set this up without spending three hours troubleshooting.
Start with OBS Studio. It's free and it does everything you need. If you're on a machine with a dedicated GPU, you'll want to use NVENC or AMD encoder instead of x264. x264 will fry your CPU and cause stuttering in a game as heavy as Genshin, especially in areas like Sumeru City or Fontaine's underwater sections. Set your output resolution to 1080p if your gameplay is running at that, and target a bitrate around 6000 to 8000 kbps. Recording locally at higher bitrates matters more than streaming quality here because you're editing this later. For the facecam, add a Video Capture Device source. Position it in the bottom corner. Don't make it too big. A 30 percent screen width is usually enough—you don't need viewers to see every microexpression, just enough to tell you were actually there. Light matters more than camera quality. I had a cheap $30 webcam that looked fine once I put a desk lamp behind a sheet of paper on the left side of my face. That single change made it look better than my old USB camera that cost twice as much. Capture method for Genshin is where people mess up. Use GPU capture or Windows 10/11 game capture, not screen capture. Screen capture grabs the desktop at 60fps or whatever your monitor runs, but GPU capture hooks directly into the rendering pipeline. The difference is noticeable—no tearing, no dropped frames during menu transitions, and your recordings won't have that weird shimmer when the game window borders appear. Genshin runs in a borderless window mode by default, which confuses some capture methods. Go into the game settings and actually switch to exclusive fullscreen or back to borderless depending on which method your capture plugin supports best. I spent an afternoon figuring out that my recordings had a persistent green tint because I was using screen capture with borderless windowed mode. Switching to GPU capture fixed it immediately.
Audio is another thing people skip. You need two audio sources: game audio and mic audio, on separate tracks. This lets you adjust levels independently in editing. If you mix them together inside OBS and your mic peaks during a loud reaction, you can't fix the game audio without also lowering your voice. Keep your mic on a dedicated track and set it so your normal talking volume sits around minus 12 dB on the meter. Game audio should read around minus 20 dB. These aren't hard rules but they give you headroom. Now for the actual editing. Most people use whatever is convenient. I recommend DaVinci Resolve if you're on a machine that can handle it—it's free and the color correction alone is worth learning. If your PC struggles, Shotcut or even CapCut desktop works fine for basic cuts. The workflow is: import your video file and your separate audio track, sync them if they drift, trim the boring parts, and export. Syncing is usually automatic because OBS timestamps both tracks identically, but if you notice the audio lagging, drag the audio track half a second and check again. There's a specific problem that caught me off guard when recording Genshin with a facecam. The game's UI elements—the elemental skill cooldowns, the stamina wheel, the map—flicker at different frame rates from the game's render framerate. When I first recorded a 4K 60fps video, the UI would sometimes drop to half brightness on certain frames, making it look like the game was glitching. It wasn't a game issue. It was the refresh rate mismatch between my GPU output and my capture card. I solved it by setting my GPU to match my monitor's refresh rate exactly and enabling VSync in Genshin's settings. The flickering stopped. I wasted about two hours before I realized what was happening.
Get the Full Details
Another thing nobody tells you about recording Genshin specifically: the game generates a lot of small asset downloads in the background after major updates. If you start recording right after launching and something triggers a background asset prefetch, your FPS will tank and your recording will look terrible. Always let the game sit for a minute after launch before you start recording. This is especially true on SSDs that are nearly full. Export settings matter more than most people think. Export at the same resolution and frame rate you recorded at. H.264 or H.265 codec. If you're uploading to YouTube, H.264 is fine and will process faster. H.265 gives you smaller files at similar quality but takes longer to render and some older editing software handles it poorly. For a first pass, just stick with H.264 at 60fps if your footage is 60fps. The funny moments themselves come from whatever is actually happening. Don't force them. The recordings that work best are the ones where you're playing normally and something genuinely unexpected occurs. A character doing an animation you've never seen, a quest text that's oddly written, a co-op player doing something completely unhinged. Trying to choreograph humor usually comes across as forced. Let the game do the work.
If you're just starting out and don't want to deal with OBS configuration, there are simpler alternatives. XP-Bro's built-in recorder handles facecam and gameplay in one window without separate audio tracks, which is fine if you don't plan to edit the audio later. The tradeoff is less control over quality and no multitrack export. It works fine for casual uploads but if you want to do this seriously, OBS is worth the initial frustration. The main bottleneck for most people is storage. A single hour of 1080p 60fps recorded gameplay can be anywhere from 4 to 8 gigabytes depending on your bitrate and how much visual complexity is on screen. Combat scenes with lots of particle effects use more data than walking around in Mondstadt. Keep a separate drive for recordings if possible, and don't fill it past 90 percent. Recording drives slow down noticeably when they're nearly full.
