1800 is way too low for 720p. A true quality 720p/30 fps is about 3500. And if you do 60 fps you need to raise it up even more to about 3750-4000 to get it looking near perfect. That being said not everyone can watch streams at that high of bitrate. The best quality i ever got out of my stream for DP was using the avermedia livegamer HD capture card. This got the best looking picture with the least amount of pixelation when moving around. Also the preset fast or faster is okay depending on what your cpu can handle for encoding. Medium or slower will give you the best quality but it will eat up a good chunk of cpu. I have a 2600k oc'd at 4700mhz and cpu usage still spikes up to 90%+ with the medium or slower preset. If the cpu usage spikes too high you will start dropping frames, so that needs to be played around with.
I agree, tho fast is usually what you want given you are aiming for best quality possible as long as your CPU can handle it. Ofc going for medium or sth better is good, but thats not what most of the processors are capable of.
On the bitrate note, yea i am streaming with 2800 atm, going for the 60 fps stream. Unfortunately i was running into fream skipping issue, but i was able to somewhat fix that by lowering a buffer size. I might try something little higher, to see what happens, i have never increased the bitrate over 3k i think. Suggested quality for 720p/30 fps is around 2500 bitrate i think, but paintball is really high motion so might not be that easy.
Thanks for the input btw, that avermedia card sounds pretty cool, but i wont most likely get it ^^
