Recording Clean Sims 4 Footage Without Talking Over It
You want gameplay recordings where the only audio is the game itself. Maybe you are editing it for a YouTube video, a Twitch VOD, or just for yourself. The process is not complicated, but there are enough small things that can go wrong that people waste hours before they figure it out. I use OBS Studio for this. It is free, it works on Windows and Mac, and the community is large enough that any problem you run into has probably been solved on Reddit. Before you even open the program, make sure your game is running at full screen or borderless windowed mode. Exclusive full screen causes black screens in the capture sometimes, and that is annoying to debug when you have already been playing for forty minutes. Add a Game Capture source in OBS. Do not use Display Capture unless you have a second monitor, because Display Capture records everything on your screen, which means your taskbar, Discord notifications, and browser tabs all end up in the video. Game Capture is targeted. It only grabs what the game window is showing. In my experience, switching to Borderless Windowed in the Sims 4 graphics settings makes this significantly more reliable than exclusive full screen.
For audio, add an Audio Output Capture source and select your default playback device. That picks up game audio. Then add an Audio Input Capture source if you want ambient room sound like keyboard clicks or the hum of your PC, which actually adds a bit of texture to watching someone play Sims 4. Some people skip this entirely and just run with game audio, which is fine. I usually keep it muted unless I am specifically going for an ASMR-style vibe.
Encoding Settings That Actually Work
The biggest mistake I see is people cranking bitrate too high without thinking about their storage or their GPU. For Sims 4, which is a mostly 2D-styled game with flat textures and bright colors, you do not need absurd bitrates. I record at 1080p60 using the x264 encoder at a Very Fast preset with a bitrate of 6000 Kbps. The files are manageable, the quality is good, and my CPU does not thermal throttle during long sessions. If you have an NVIDIA card, switch to NVENC instead. The quality at equivalent bitrates is slightly softer than x264, but the tradeoff is negligible for Sims content where visual fidelity is not the priority. I use NVENC for anything over thirty minutes because the CPU load drops dramatically and I can alt-tab without the recording stuttering. For short clips under twenty minutes, x264 is worth the extra heat. Set your keyframe interval to 2 seconds. This is something most people ignore and then wonder why their timeline scrubbing in editing software is sluggish. A 2-second keyframe interval also matters if you ever plan to stream from the same setup, because stream platforms expect it. Keep your resolution matching your monitor output. If you are playing at 1920x1080, record at 1920x1080. Downsampling in post is cleaner than trying to upscale a lower-resolution capture later.
Specific Problem I Ran Into
There was a period where my gameplay recordings came out with perfectly fine video but the audio was delayed by roughly half a second. I spent an afternoon checking cable connections, driver updates, and OBS audio sync settings before realizing the issue was the Sims 4 game client itself. The Origin launcher had background downloads enabled, and those were briefly stealing audio buffer priority whenever they checked for patches. Turning off automatic downloads in Origin's settings fixed it immediately. The delay never came back. This is the kind of issue that does not show up in any tutorial because it is specific to your particular setup. The workaround is always the same: isolate variables one at a time. Close every background application, record a ten-second test clip, check the sync, then reopen apps one by one until the problem returns.
What This Approach Does Not Handle Well
No commentary recordings look different from the gameplay depending on what you are doing in-game. If you are building a mansion in Build Mode, the footage can be visually dense and engaging. If you are just letting Sims walk around waiting for hunger bars to drop, it is hard to edit that into anything watchable. You need to plan your sessions with intentional activities, not just leave the game running and hope for content. I typically script out what I want to capture beforehand, even if it is just a bullet list on a sticky note. Another limitation is that Sims 4 mods can produce inconsistent frame pacing. Some performance mods help a lot, but others introduce micro-stutters that are nearly invisible while playing and completely obvious when recorded. Before you start a long recording session, run the game for ten minutes without capturing and watch the frame rate graph in your recording software. If the FPS dips are jagged rather than smooth, something in your mod load order is causing it. Reorder and test again. If you are looking for something faster than OBS for quick captures, ShareX has a built-in screen recorder that handles short clips well and is much lighter on system resources. It is not as flexible for long-form recording, but for a five-minute test clip it works fine and takes about two minutes to set up. Just keep in mind ShareX records in lossless by default for short clips, so your file sizes will be large unless you change the output codec in its settings.
Quick Checklist Before You Start Recording
Close unnecessary applications. Set Sims 4 to Borderless Windowed. Confirm OBS is capturing both game audio and your output device. Run a ten-second test recording and verify audio sync and visual quality. Check your storage drive has enough space. Start recording when you are ready. I have been doing this for years and the process has not changed much. The fundamentals stay the same. The only thing that really matters is testing before you commit to a long recording, because fixing a mistake after the fact costs more time than catching it beforehand.
