Recording Zelda tears of the kingdom funny moments on ps5 without losing your mind
The built-in capture board on the PS5 is fine for quick clips, but if you are actually trying to collect funny moments from Tears of the Kingdom, you run into problems fast. The game is too chaotic. You build a Ruto device that accidentally launches Link into the stratosphere, you fuse a mushroom cap to your foot, you try to cross a river with a boat made of eight leaves and a stick. The funny stuff happens in three-second windows and you will miss half of it if you are fumbling with button combinations. Here is the setup that actually works for me. You need a capture card. Not the $30 USB ones from Amazon. A proper one like an Elgato Cam Link or even a used AV capture dongle that handles 1080p at 60fps without dropping frames. Connect the PS5 HDMI output into the capture card, then connect the card to your PC via USB. Use OBS Studio on the computer. Set your scene to 1080p, 60fps. Make sure your audio source is picking up both the game audio and your microphone if you want commentary. I usually route the capture card audio as a separate track so I can fix volume issues in post. I spent two weeks trying to record funny moments directly through the PS5's Share button. The problem is the game occasionally dips below 60fps during complex Ultrahand builds or when you are in the Depths. The PS5's built-in recording just cuts the clip short when that happens. You end up with a 30-second clip that cuts off right before the joke lands. Recording through a capture card on a separate machine sidesteps this entirely because the PS5 outputs a clean 60fps signal and OBS records it independently of the console's performance.
For the actual recording workflow, I keep OBS open on my second monitor the entire time I play. When something funny happens, I hit the hotkey I set up instead of navigating menus. My default hotkey is Ctrl+F9 for instant replay and Ctrl+F10 for manual record. Instant replay is the more useful one here because it lets you backfill. You can set it to buffer the last two minutes by default. If you do something silly and only realize it five seconds later, the replay function grabs those five seconds plus everything leading up to it. This alone has saved more clips than manual recording ever did. One thing nobody tells you about recording Tears of the Kingdom specifically: the game has a weird behavior where certain physics calculations don't get properly recorded by hardware encoders. I noticed this when my RTX 4070 was doing NVENC encoding. Every time Link used Fuse on a weapon and the damage number popped up with a specific particle effect, the clip would stutter for a frame or two. Switching to x264 medium preset fixed it completely. The file sizes got bigger, roughly triple the bitrate, but the footage was clean. If you are on an AMD card, use AMF instead and you should not see this issue. Audio is another place where people mess up. The game's sound design mixes ambient music, combat SFX, and character voices at levels that can overwhelm a capture. I learned this the hard way when I recorded a whole segment of me trying to build a flying machine that crashed repeatedly, only to find the audio was just noise. No voices, no music, just a wall of wind and crash sounds. What I do now is set the capture card to output stereo and then in OBS I add a noise gate filter to the mic channel so background game audio doesn't bleed into the voice track. I also set the game audio to a separate track in OBS and duck it slightly whenever I speak. This takes about ten minutes to configure once.
If you want your funny moments to feel natural and not like you directed them, let the game be the director. Do not pause the game to set up a shot or position Link in a specific spot. The funniest clips come from genuine player error. I have one clip where I tried to use the Recall ability on a boulder, missed the timing by a fraction of a second, and the boulder hit the trigger that opened a shrine door, which spawned a group of Moblins, and one of them immediately fell into a chasm while Link was still trying to figure out what happened. I would never have planned that. That took forty-five minutes of actual gameplay to happen. Recording that way means you capture more genuine content with less effort. The main downside to this whole setup is the editing step. Recording raw footage from Tears of the Kingdom generates a lot of empty space. You might have two hours of recording to find six minutes of usable content. I use a tool called MassClipRemover which scans your video files and automatically removes silent sections. It cuts the editing time down from maybe three hours to about forty-five minutes. From there, I just trim the edges, add a title card, and export. For YouTube uploads, I encode at 1080p, 60fps, using the same x264 settings I recorded with. The upload quality stays consistent. There are limits to what works. If your PC is not dedicated to recording and you are running other software in the background, you will get dropped frames. I ran into this when my wife started streaming on the same machine while I was trying to record. OBS couldn't handle encoding the capture and running games simultaneously on the CPU preset. Switching to a GPU-based encoder resolved it, but you lose some quality in the process. If you can only manage one task on your PC at a time, record first and edit later. Don't try to live stream and record at the same time unless you have a dual-PC setup.
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Another limitation: the PS5's HDMI output caps at 4K60 HDR, and some capture cards do not handle HDR passthrough well. Tears of the Kingdom looks noticeably worse in SDR mode. If image quality matters to you, get a capture card that explicitly supports HDR10 passthrough. Otherwise your clips will look flat and washed out compared to what you see on the TV. I picked up a used Magellan 4K capture card for this reason. It costs more but the difference in the final video is noticeable, especially in the bright areas of the Sky Islands where HDR makes a big difference. For people who just want something simple and do not care about production value, the PS5 Share button will work. Record in 720p to maximize buffer length, use the instant replay feature, and accept that you will miss some clips when the framerate drops. It is free and requires no extra hardware. But if you are serious about building a library of funny moments, the capture card approach pays off quickly. I went from uploading once a month to twice a week within the first two months of switching over. The game itself helps you more than you might think. Certain abilities like Ultrahand and Fuse naturally produce comedic situations. Building things that fall apart, fusing the wrong materials, using Recall at the wrong time. Lean into those systems. The deeper you get into the game's mechanics, the more absurd the outcomes become. I stopped trying to make everything work and started just letting the physics engine do its thing. The results are usually funnier than anything I could plan.
