How to film your lectures using OBS Studio
What is OBS studio:
Open Broadcaster Software or OBS is a free, open-source software for video recording and
video streaming. It can be used to capture your screen and /or PowerPoint presentations
and record it as a video or stream it live to the audience. It is thus a useful tool for preparing
short videos for a “flipped classroom” setup. This guideline will cover the steps required to
quickly setup OBS Studio to record videos from PowerPoint presentations with a webcam
overlay.
What do you need of equipment:
The equipment needed for recording your screen with a webcam overlay is a camera and a
microphone. You can either use the integrated camera in your computer or use an USB
webcam that you plug in. You also need a good microphone to capture the audio. The audio
can be captured from your laptops built in microphone or from a web camera but the quality
will be better if you use an external microphone e.g. Røde Filmmaker kit, Audio-Technica –
USB or through a headset. It is also more practical and more comfortable to work with two
screens, one which displays the OBS software and the controls, and the other one that
shows your presentation in full screen.
OBS Setup Guide
1. Install OBS on your computer:
Download the program for free on https://obsproject.com/; choose between Windows,
MacOS and Linux.
Follow the prompts to install.
Open OBS.
Default screen: When you first open up OBS you will see a screen that looks like the one
below. Under the black screen there are five boxes; Scenes, Sources, Mixer Scene Transitions
and Controls. For this guideline we will look into three of them (marked out with a red
circle).