Rasmus Pank Roulund Coffee & Coding Chronicles

1. Configure what should be recorded and how it should look with “Scenes”, “Sources” and the “layout composer”; configure shortcuts to switch scenes if using more than one scene (Settings → Hotkeys). (See obs Overview)
2. Optionally, configure your audio input to minimize background noise (click cog (⚙) → Filters under the “Audio Mixer”). (See this guide)
3. Optionally, configure how the video should be encoded and saved (Settings → Output). (See e.g. this guide)
4. Click “Start Recording”
5. Record your presentation
6. Click “Stop Recording”
7. Profit!

First of all, check the obs Studio Overview.

obs Studio operates with scenes and sources as inputs. Sources, e.g. a video stream from a webcam, are composed and combined via scenes. For instance, the picture above combines video from my webcam and the presentation window of Pympress.

First, to add sources click +. The most useful sources for video lectures are “Video Capture Device” (for webcams) and “Window Capture”³ or “Screen Capture” for capturing the output of a presentation. I like “Window Capture” as Pympress can split my presentation into two windows, allowing me to only capture the “presentation view” of my slides. During the recording of presentation, I can focusing on the presenter view with my notes. If using Screen Capture, the Crop filter might be useful.

Each scene allows you to compose a view of different sources; sources can be used in several scenes, which is necessary for webcams. Different scenes are useful if you want to jump out of your presentation and into your browser or your text editor, say if you want to show a website or some code.

In Settings → Hotkeys you can assign shortcuts to quickly jump from one scene to another. For instance, I assign a the scene “video alone” to Ctrl + 1 and “video plus presentation” to Ctrl + 2 and so forth.

For videos, crisp sound is really important⁴ imho.

obs Studio has a couple of nice features for recording decent sound. Importantly, the “sensitivity” of the microphone can be set directly in the main view of obs in the “Audio Mixer” section (there may also be an os setting for microphone level).

There are also some useful filters for suppressing background noise. Under the audio mixer, click cog (⚙) → Filters.

I use the following filters, in this order,

Noise suppression

The filter can be used for “remove[ing] mild background noise or white noise that may be in any of your audio sources” For my setup −20db seems to work well.

Noise Gate

Noise gate kills microphone whenever one is not speaking. It will obviously require some fine-tuning, but these values seem to work well for me

Setting	Value	Explanation
Close threshold	−50db	Turn off mic. at this volume
Open threshold	−36db	Turn on the mic. at this volume
Attack time	15 ms	Time to turn on mic.
Hold time	200 ms	Time with silence before mic. turned off
Release time	100 ms	Time to turn off mic.

Gain

Add gain (“turn up the volume”) to your sound input.

There is a more detailed guide here.

Note, on my system, the only audio input is Mic/Aux. Screenshots of obs Studio often have several audio sources, like “Desktop Audio”. You will probably want to turn these off, as you would not want to record e.g. notification sounds.

A lot of “actions”, like switching scenes, can be done via shortcuts in obs Studio, but they need to be configured. See Settings → Hotkeys.

The most useful configurable shortcuts are start and stop recording and those to switch between scenes.

You can control pretty much all aspects about how videos are recorded in Settings → Output.

The standard encoding settings should be fine; x264 is a widely supported and at least modern browsers and vlc should come with a decoder.

You might want to Rescale Output under Settings → Output → Streaming to limit the file size.

Under Settings → Output → Streaming you can decide where videos are saved and the video container format (e.g. mp4).

This guide should give more details, if necessary.

I have come across two different pdf presenters that can split the presenter view and the presentation view into two different windows, namely Pympress and pdfpc (use the -w both when starting pdfpc).

Both give you a “virtual” laser pointer (Ctrl + click with Pympress and mode 2 with pdfpc). pdfpc can emphasize parts of the screen (Ctrl and draw square with mouse) and Pympress can zoom in on a section of the screen (shortcut z for zoom and u to undo zoom).

Pympress as it works nicely with latex Beamer notes. In pdfpc, you can add notes in the application with Ctrl + n or use pdf annotations. Beamer notes don’t work that well with pdfpc.

It’s pretty easy to configure the layout of Pympress.

Microsoft provides a obs and powerpoint guide.

I have not tried to record powerpoint with obs. I would imagine that the Screen Capture source would be the best options, but you might need two monitors.

On Windows and gnu/Linux it is possible to make a virtual webcam, streaming from obs. This is useful for streaming presentations via standard video conferencing software (like “Skype”). Windows users can do this with obs-virtual-cam and gnu/Linux user can obs-v4l2sink and v4l2loopback.

In the future, this might be included in obs Studio itself (see this rfc discussion).