Capture Tools for Your Steam Trailer: OBS, ShareX, Unity Recorder and the Free Editors Worth Using

I’m just now starting to record and post gameplay from my game that I’ve been working on for 7 years on and (mostly) off. It should be the easy part - I’ve spent the hours programming and making things work, created some decent animations, and now I just need to show it to the world, right? Well, when I actually tried recording for the first time in a while, and I ended up with blurry footage (my pixel art got smoothed by bilinear scaling) where you can’t hear anything. So I did some research, and that brings me to today’s roundup topic.

This is a tools list, not a full trailer-making guide. It covers what to record with, what to edit with, and which combination actually gets you from “raw gameplay” to “footage you’d put on a Steam page” without burning a weekend fighting settings/menus.

The job: clean footage a Steam page can actually use

A Steam trailer isn’t a stream VOD. It needs to be short, cropped to the good parts, and rendered in a format Steam will actually accept without re-encoding it into mush. That means your capture tool needs to give you control over resolution and frame rate, and your editor needs to export in a format that doesn’t fight Steam’s upload requirements.

The other thing worth saying up front: nobody nails their trailer setup on the first try. My own Steam page for Crown Code Chronicles still has a trailer that’s out of date, choppy, and looks like it got stitched together with scotch tape. That page is a complete work in progress, not something to copy. I only bring it up because it’s a decent reminder that the tooling matters less than actually finishing the pass through it.

What Steam expects from trailer video (and where to check the current specs)

Steam has specific requirements for trailer resolution, format, and length, and those requirements do get updated from time to time. Rather than repeat numbers here that might be stale by the time you read this, check the current spec in your Steamworks partner dashboard before you export anything final. It’s a five minute check and it saves you re-exporting a trailer because the container format wasn’t accepted.

What doesn’t change much: aim to capture at a higher resolution and frame rate than you think you need, because you can always scale down in the edit, and you can never scale up cleanly.

OBS Studio: the default for real-time capture

OBS Studio is free, open source, and it’s the tool most people reach for first, for good reason. It captures your game window or a full display in real time, lets you mix in a microphone or game audio separately, and gives you direct control over output resolution, frame rate, and bitrate.

Who it suits: pretty much everyone. Whether you’re capturing sixty seconds of a boss fight or a full ten-minute devlog session, OBS handles both.

The honest limitation is that it has a learning curve around scenes and sources that trips people up the first time. If you set your canvas resolution to your monitor’s resolution but leave your output resolution at something else, you get correctly-composed footage. Get the canvas and output resolution mismatch is the source of a good chunk of “my capture looks squashed” questions online. It’s also possible to drop frames if your bitrate or encoder settings are too ambitious for your GPU, which shows up as stutter in the recording even though the game itself ran fine. Free, no paid tier.

ShareX: quick clips and GIFs for devlogs and social posts

ShareX is a Windows-only capture and screenshot tool that’s lighter weight than OBS and better suited to quick grabs than full recording sessions. It’s the tool for a ten second clip you want to turn into a GIF for a devlog post or a tweet, not for capturing a full trailer’s worth of footage.

Who it suits: anyone who wants a fast, low-friction way to grab a clip without opening a full streaming app. It’s also handy for screenshots with built in annotation, which is useful for bug reports or store page images, not just video.

Limitation: it’s Windows only, and it’s not built for long, high-bitrate recording sessions the way OBS is. Free.

Unity Recorder: frame-perfect capture straight out of the editor

If you’re working in Unity, the Unity Recorder package (available through the Package Manager, tested here against Unity 6) captures footage directly from the Game view or a specific camera, rather than screen-grabbing your monitor. That matters more than it sounds like for two reasons: there’s no window chrome, taskbar, or desktop notification accidentally in frame, and you can capture at your game’s exact render resolution instead of whatever your desktop happens to be scaled to.

That second point is the big one for anyone doing pixel art. If your game renders at a low native resolution like 320x180 and gets scaled up with point filtering for display, a screen capture tool grabs the already-scaled, already-upscaled image, which can introduce shimmering or blur depending on your display scaling. Recording through Unity Recorder from the camera output lets you capture at the native resolution and then do the upscale yourself in the edit with nearest-neighbor filtering, keeping the pixels crisp.

To set it up: open Window > General > Recorder > Recorder Window, add a Movie Recorder, set the input source to Game View or a Target Camera, and set your output resolution. On Windows it typically outputs H.264 MP4; on other platforms it can offer ProRes depending on what’s installed. The tradeoff is that it only captures what’s rendering through Unity, so any overlay you want (health bars from a debug canvas, for example) needs to actually be part of the scene you’re recording. Free, included with the Unity Editor.

GPU capture built into your drivers, and when it is enough

Both NVIDIA and AMD ship a background capture feature in their driver software (NVIDIA’s instant replay feature inside GeForce Experience, AMD’s ReLive inside AMD Software). These use your GPU’s hardware encoder, which means very low performance overhead compared to software encoding, and they’re genuinely useful for grabbing a highlight the moment it happens.

Who it suits: quick personal clips, bug reproduction footage, or grabbing a moment you didn’t plan to record. It’s less suited to trailer capture specifically because you get less control over exact resolution and cropping, and no audio mixing control the way OBS gives you. If you just want “did that boss fight look cool” footage to review later, it’s enough. If you’re capturing the actual clips that go into your final trailer, you’ll usually get more usable footage out of OBS or Unity Recorder instead.

Free editors: Shotcut, Kdenlive and DaVinci Resolve compared

Once you’ve got footage, you need to cut it down and put it together. Three free options come up constantly:

Shotcut is free, open source, and simple. Basic cuts, keyframed effects, text overlays, and a straightforward timeline. It’s a reasonable first editor if you’ve never cut video before, though it can get a little unstable on longer, higher-resolution timelines.

Kdenlive is also free and open source, with more editing power than Shotcut, multi-track timelines, more effects, and color correction tools. The tradeoff is a steeper learning curve, and it’s historically had rougher edges on Windows than on Linux, where it originated.

DaVinci Resolve, made by Blackmagic Design, is the heaviest hitter here. The free tier is a genuinely professional editor with color grading and audio mixing tools built in, and it’s what a lot of people graduate to once Shotcut or Kdenlive start to feel limiting. Some advanced features are reserved for the paid Studio tier, but the free version covers what most trailer edits need. The cost is a steeper learning curve and heavier system requirements than the other two.

Worth a mention outside that trio: Screen Studio is a paid, macOS-focused tool built for polished software demo videos with smooth cursor movement and automatic zoom effects. It’s not really built for game capture, but some devs use it for devlog-style talking-through-the-editor footage.

Common problems: dropped frames, pixel art scaled badly, audio out of sync

Three things go wrong more than anything else.

Dropped frames usually come from an encoder setting that’s too demanding for your hardware, or a disk write speed that can’t keep up with the bitrate you set. Lowering the bitrate or switching to your GPU’s hardware encoder (NVENC on NVIDIA, for example) instead of software encoding in OBS usually fixes it.

Pixel art scaled badly happens when a capture or edit step applies smooth scaling to art that’s meant to stay crisp. Check the scaling filter in every step of your chain: the capture tool, the editor’s timeline resize, and the export settings. Nearest-neighbor (sometimes labeled “point” or “nearest”) keeps hard edges, bilinear or bicubic will blur them. If your art already looks soft in a comparison against your own game, that’s the setting to check first. There’s a broader rundown of tools for handling pixel art assets in the comparison of pixel art software for game dev, if the issue traces back further than just the capture step.

Audio out of sync most often comes from recording at a variable frame rate rather than a constant one. If your capture tool drops frames occasionally to keep up with load, the video timeline gets shorter while the audio timeline stays the same length, and they drift apart the longer the clip runs. Recording at a constant frame rate setting, even if it’s a slightly lower number, keeps this from happening. If you’re layering in music or sound effects afterward rather than using in-game audio, the free sound effects and editing tools roundup covers editing audio with Audacity, which is a reasonable way to clean up and align a separate audio track.

A minimal capture setup that takes an afternoon

If you want the smallest setup that actually works, this is a reasonable starting point:

1. Install OBS Studio and set your canvas and output resolution to match, at a frame rate your game actually runs at consistently.
2. Record several longer takes of the moments you want, rather than trying to nail a short clip in one pass.
3. Install Shotcut (or DaVinci Resolve if you want more control over color and audio) and cut the good moments down.
4. Export at the resolution and format your Steamworks dashboard currently asks for.

That’s genuinely an afternoon’s work once you’ve done it once. The first time through takes longer, mostly because of settings you didn’t know you needed to check.

Which should you pick

For quick devlog clips or a moment you want to share fast: ShareX or your GPU’s built in capture (instant replay / ReLive) get you there with the least setup.

For full control over your actual trailer footage: OBS Studio if you want flexibility over your whole desktop or a windowed game, Unity Recorder if you want pixel-perfect capture straight from your game’s render resolution without any screen-scaling artifacts.

For editing: Shotcut if you just need to cut clips together and add text, Kdenlive if you want a bit more editing power without moving to a heavier tool, DaVinci Resolve if you want real color grading and audio mixing and don’t mind the learning curve.

Once the trailer’s cut, the next thing worth spending time on is making sure the right people actually see it. The guide to picking Steam tags is a good next stop, since tags do a surprising amount of the discovery work that a trailer alone can’t.