Hey everyone!

So, I tried looking for information on Google, YouTube, here, for this information, but I keep ending up with answers that have nothing to do with my questions.

I'm a YouTube content creator who primarily does LSPDFR patrols, as well as other games and real-life dash-cam footage from my car. I strive to always better my content, but I've been having a really hard time getting one thing down.

Let's go with GTAV for example (but this applies to all of my videos, so I'm guessing it is a problem in my recording software). I record in 1680x1050, which is my monitor's screen size, but when I finish rendering the edited video, I get a black frame all the way around the video, so when it's finally on YouTube, it does not fully fit the screen. I really want the max resolution for YouTube, because it just looks terrible otherwise.

As an example: https://youtu.be/3mAiyyX0yRI

As you can see, the "OneOceanTen" opener and the image that fades in after my intro are a great size for the video, however, the footage itself in between and throughout the episode have a black frame. I haven't been able to fix this, and no matter what I seem to change in the settings of my recording software (Movie Studio Platinum 13) it still renders this way.

If you need additional information to help me out, please ask! I really want to fix this and I feel I have exhausted all of my knowledge on this. Thank you in advance!

 

Probably depends on your screen recording software and editing software. There should be an option somewhere in your editing software to scale up imported video. Standard heights for YouTube videos are 144, 240, 480, 720, 1080. You can do higher but that's uncommon. As you can see 1680x1050 is not a standard resolution, so your program is probably exporting at 1920x1080. You need to scale up your recorded video to that size. Or, if you can buy a 1080p monitor, do that and you'll have the right resolution. If you can afford a graphics card to play GTA you can probably afford a cheap 1080p monitor... often they're even available on Craigslist for well under $100. There are lots of new ones on Amazon even for $80-100 - http://amzn.to/1WDSYAi. 

I'll add in addition to the above great advise, if you cant get a 1080p monitor, you'd probably be better off downgrading your resolution to whateverx720 (I don't know the matching width, you'd probably have to google that to make sure its still in 16x9 resolution... I guess you could probably also Math it). It won't look as good as 1080 but it'll be in the right resolution so wont have the black borders.

Thank you, guys!

As per usual, being me with my luck, I literally figured it out fifteen minutes after posting this. Literally happens every time. As an oddity with my editing software, the resolution can be fixed on each clip in the stream, and that's where I found the settings. I guess it wouldn't make sense for it to be in the settings for the whole project. Whatever! It works, I'm happy, and my content looks so much better. Just put up the new one with the fixed size. Thank you guys for the help, again!

Not the sharpest tool in the shed on this patrol.
LSPDFR #25 - Stopping Steve Harwell (Smash Mouth)
https://youtu.be/ZVOnscdxN9I