To clip with OBS, enable Replay Buffer in Settings > Output, choose how much recent footage to retain, and assign Save Replay in Settings > Hotkeys. Click Start Replay Buffer before the moment happens, then press your save key or the adjacent save icon to write the retained footage to your Recording Path. Saving leaves the buffer running; stopping it discards unsaved history.
I would start with the built-in buffer because it already saves the scene and audio you have configured for recording. You can use it without going live or making a continuous recording. The routes below follow the English interface in OBS Studio 33.0.1.
Enable the buffer and choose its recording settings
Save any replay you want to keep and stop active outputs before changing their settings. In Settings > Output, read Output Mode at the top: Simple and Advanced put the enable control in different places.
Simple output mode
- Find the Replay Buffer group below Recording and tick the checkbox in its title.
- Set Maximum Replay Time to the amount of lead-up you need. A fresh profile starts at 20 seconds; an existing profile keeps its saved value.
- If Maximum Memory is visible, choose a packet budget that leaves room for your game, OBS and other apps. The memory section below explains why this field sometimes disappears.
- Check Recording Path and Recording Quality in the Recording group, then click Apply.
With Recording Quality set to Same as stream, the buffer shares the streaming encoders. Other supported recording quality presets use the recording encoders. Simple mode's Lossless Quality, Tremendously Large File Size disables Replay Buffer, so choose a supported quality before enabling it. These branches are defined by OBS's Simple output handler.
Advanced output mode
Open the Replay Buffer tab and tick Enable Replay Buffer. Set Maximum Replay Time and, when shown, Maximum Memory, then click Apply. The example below shows 20 seconds and a 512 MB packet budget with a quality-based recording encoder.
On the Recording tab, Type must be Standard. Custom Output (FFmpeg) makes the native buffer unavailable. The buffer uses the selected recording video encoder, or the streaming video encoder when you choose (Use stream encoder), and the audio tracks selected for recording. The Advanced output handler connects those encoders and tracks to the replay output, so check that the tracks you need are selected here before troubleshooting a silent clip.
If the recording encoder uses a lossless rate-control mode, the replay time and memory fields are disabled even with Type set to Standard. Switch out of that rate-control mode to edit those parameters.
With the buffer enabled and the settings applied, Start Replay Buffer appears in the Controls dock. That confirms the feature is available; it still needs to be started.
Assign Save Replay, then start the buffer
Open Settings > Hotkeys, find Save Replay among the main-window hotkeys, select its input field and press your chosen key combination. Click Apply. In OBS 33.0.1, Save Replay is registered alongside Start Replay Buffer and Stop Replay Buffer; older replay-save bindings are migrated to that main-window entry. Looking for a separate Replay Buffer hotkey group can send you to the wrong place.
Click Start Replay Buffer in the Controls dock. OBS checks the recording path and disk space before starting; an empty scene can trigger the No Sources confirmation. Make sure your intended picture is in the preview and the expected sources appear in the Audio Mixer.
Once running, the dock button reads Stop Replay Buffer and the separate save icon appears beside it. Use that icon to save without a keyboard shortcut.
For streaming sessions, Settings > General > Output offers Automatically start replay buffer when streaming. Keep replay buffer active when stream stops becomes available after automatic start is selected. Both depend on Replay Buffer being enabled. I would leave the keep-running option off if clips only matter during a stream, because otherwise the buffer continues retaining footage after the stream ends.
Save the moment and wait for the file confirmation
Press Save Replay after the event you want to keep. The buffer holds encoded video and audio packets from the scene output, drops older history as new packets arrive, and writes a retained stretch when you request a save. It can't recover anything from before you started it.
A successful save produces a status-bar message beginning Replay buffer saved to, followed by the path. Wait for that confirmation before stopping the buffer or closing OBS. The save request is queued, and OBS writes the file asynchronously while the running buffer can continue collecting footage.
Wait for one save to finish before requesting another. Rapid repeated presses can replace a pending request, so every press needn't produce a separate file. Two completed saves made close together can contain overlapping footage because saving doesn't reset the rolling history. Stop Replay Buffer ends that history without requesting a final save.
If recording is paused and shares the buffer's video encoder, resume recording and press Save Replay again. A save request made while that encoder is paused is rejected; a warning dialog needn't appear at the moment you press the key.
Choose replay time from the history you need and the RAM available
Use the shortest window that includes the lead-up you want. Maximum Replay Time accepts 5 to 21,600 seconds, but the six-hour field limit is no reason to reserve hours of footage. A longer window retains more encoded data while the buffer runs.
The memory display follows the recording mode and rate control:
- Simple, Same as stream: OBS estimates the encoded payload from time and bitrate. Maximum Memory is hidden and the replay output has no packet-size limit.
- Simple, other supported recording quality presets: Maximum Memory is shown and supplies a packet-size budget.
- Advanced, CBR, VBR or ABR with a known nonzero bitrate: OBS shows an estimate and hides Maximum Memory. The output disables its packet-size limit for those rate-control modes.
- Advanced, quality-based rate control: OBS shows Maximum Memory because it can't predict the encoded size from a fixed bitrate. In an unusual encoder profile with a zero bitrate, field visibility alone doesn't prove a size limit is enforced.
OBS calculates its estimate from replay seconds and the video plus selected recording-audio bitrates. The calculation is:
seconds × (video kbps + audio kbps) × 1000 ÷ 8 ÷ 1024²The result is an approximate payload size in MiB, displayed by OBS with an MB label. It excludes encoder allocations, other OBS memory and the references retained during a file save. A 512 MB setting therefore doesn't promise a 512 MB ceiling for the OBS process.
The memory field's upper bound and the oversized-estimate warning use 75% of installed RAM, rather than currently free RAM. I would stay well below that threshold because the operating system, capture workload and other apps need memory too. If an estimate is too large, shorten the replay window before changing image quality just to fit it.
Clip duration is approximate. A buffer that has just started holds less history, and a packet-size budget can shorten retention. Trimming works around keyframes, so time and size aren't exact cut points. Save first, wait for the saved-path message, then stop the buffer if you need to change its settings.
Find the replay and keep clips in their own folder
The clip goes to Recording Path: Settings > Output > Recording in Simple mode, or the Recording tab in Advanced mode. New profiles use the Windows Videos folder, macOS Movies folder or Linux home folder; an existing or redirected path can differ. Read the saved-path message for the precise file location.
File > Show Recordings opens the configured base recording folder. If your replay prefix creates a subfolder, open that subfolder too. The menu command doesn't automatically follow the last replay's full path.
In Settings > Advanced > Recording, Replay Buffer Filename Prefix and Suffix control the replay-specific parts of the name. The default prefix is Replay. Filename Formatting supplies the date and time, and Recording Format supplies the extension. For example, with default Windows formatting, a hypothetical save at 14:03:22 on 7 October 2026 would be Replay 2026-10-07 14-03-22.mp4.
I would use Replays/Replay as the prefix to separate clips from full recordings. The replay filename generator creates the parent folder, so that prefix places clips in a Replays subfolder of Recording Path. Generate File Name without Space replaces spaces with underscores.
Fresh profiles use Hybrid MP4 on Windows and Linux and Hybrid MOV on macOS, giving .mp4 and .mov extensions respectively; existing profiles keep their selected container. Automatic remux also applies to saved replays when enabled. Its destination depends on the format and codec, so don't assume every additional file will be MP4.
If the dock save works but the hotkey doesn't
First use the save icon with the buffer running. If it produces a file, capture, encoding and the file path are working; follow the keyboard path next. Confirm the Save Replay field contains the combination you intend to press.
In Settings > Advanced > Hotkeys, check Hotkey Focus Behavior. Disable hotkeys when main window is not in focus blocks a save key pressed from a game or another app. Choose the focus policy you need before changing OS permissions.
- macOS: allow Input Monitoring for OBS so hotkeys can work in the background. Older installations may list OBS under Accessibility. OBS Studio > Review App Permissions... reopens the permissions dialog; the current permission text identifies Input Monitoring as the background-hotkey permission.
- Native Wayland: when OBS itself runs as a Wayland client, its built-in hotkey handler doesn't receive out-of-focus triggers. Use the dock save icon, or a controller that sends a save request to OBS. That limitation doesn't describe every app running within a Wayland desktop session.
For a compatible external controller, the obs-websocket SaveReplayBuffer request provides a separate route to the same native output. GetLastReplayBufferReplay returns the path of the last saved replay.
When the built-in buffer needs an add-on
The native buffer saves its retained history using one configured duration. If you need several duration buttons for the same moment, Joshua Potter's Replay Buffer Pro 1.10.0 adds that choice. The project declares OBS 32.2.0 or later, publishes Windows 10/11 x64 and macOS 13+ packages, and uses GPL-2.0-or-later licensing.
Check the package notes against your OBS build before installing: its binary compatibility also depends on the FFmpeg major version, as the project's build notes explain. Several save buttons still need enough retained footage. A plugin can't recover an event from before capture began.
Rehearse one save in private
Start the buffer without going live, let it run longer than your chosen window, and press Save Replay with the app you plan to capture in focus. Wait for the saved-path message, then open the clip. Check the picture, expected audio tracks, approximate duration and destination folder. If a clip is choppy, make a short recording with the same capture and encoder settings; a matching fault sends you back along that shared path.
Before the next session, check the Controls dock: Stop Replay Buffer means capture is running. Keep the Save Replay key or icon ready, and wait for the file confirmation whenever a moment matters.
