Dropped frames when recording video - how to troubleshoot this?

Hi there,

When I record video via an external webcam, the recording has many dropped frames. In fact, most frames are missing from the recording, so the resulting video is very far from smooth. It's not a playback issue. When I open the video in Final Cut Pro, I can see that the video (images) change only once or twice per second. Very clunky. The audio recording is smooth and good quality.

I am using riverside.fm Chrome plugin to record video through the browser. I have tried with a 4K external webcam and a standard HD webcam (1080p). If I am very lucky, the recording succeeds and every frame is captured. But it is a rare day when that happens.

This seems to be a performance problem of my Mac. Or maybe Riverside's Chrome plugin is not good (although riverside.fm is a top webcast recording platform nowadays, and I have not heard of other Riverside users having this problem).

My 2019 Macbook Pro has a pretty good spec. It should be able to handle HD recording via an external camera, shouldn't it?

Mac 2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7

16 GB 2667 MHz DDR4

Graphics Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB

I have tried recording while all other applications are closed, and the Activity Monitor shows that the machine has available resources.

I'm pretty new to the Mac world so I want to know how to start troubleshooting this problem.

I'm grateful for any advice...