Today’s Plan:
- Quick Review of Open Broadcaster
- Time to Screen Cast
- Homework
Overview of Open Broadcaster
Today is our one-day Open Broadcaster workshop. My aim is to show you the fundamentals of the program. The demonstration I have put together comes from various tutorials listed on the Open Broadcaster tutorial’s wiki.
- When you open the program for the first time, you will want to run the Auto-Configuration Wizard. Simply select all the defaults
- Set Audio Source. Open Broadcaster gives you the option of recording audio as you screencast. I doubt this is a good idea–I think you are better off capturing your screen cast and then generating audio in Premiere or Audacity (record the audio while you watch a playback of your video). To set your audio input, go to Settings > Audio (OBS > Preferences on a Mac). If you have an active audio source selected, then you should see movement on your mixer bar.
- In order to start recording, we have to direct Open Broadcaster to a source. Find the Source box to the left of the Mixer and click the + sign. You should see the following:
- Choose Window Capture (for an internet window), Game Capture (for a compatible game), or Display Capture (if all else fails). When the dialogue box opens select “Create New” and type in a title. Press Ok. You will be at the source selection screen:
- To open the source list, click on the bar next to Window. Select your source. It should now appear in the left viewer.
- You can start and stop recording a “scene” using the controls on the bottom right
What I find particularly disorienting about Open Broadcaster is that it doesn’t really do much to tell you that you are recording. It just happens. And, when you finish “stop recording,” nothing really happens. You have to know to look for your screen captures.
- To find them, go to File > Show Recordings. They should open in a Finder window. Notice that they are .flv files. These are pretty useless in that format.
- To convert the files into .mp4 video files, go to File > Remux Recordings (because of course that’s what you call it). Press “Browse” to select the file, select a location to save the conversion, and hit “remux”
I had difficult capturing a game–and, based on a few Google searches I am not alone. It doesn’t appear that OB’s game capture plays well with all laptops, especially macs. Here is a trouble-shooting page if you are getting a black screen on a laptop. The first time I used OBS, it worked seamlessly. This morning,
I couldn’t get it to record anything. This afternoon, right before class, it worked fine again. It does feel buggy–if you are having issues, try closing the program, relaunching, and running the set-up wizard again. Also, I found cursing at the program effective.
Homework
Finish your documentation projects. We will watch these in class on Monday. There’s a turn-in in Canvas called Documentation Project. As we discussed, shoot an opening greeting, then go to the screen capture. Maybe a conclusion too? My goals for the assignment are to introduce you to the software and (hopefully) show how easy it is to use.
