OBS scenes

These are some scene collections for OBS.

Principles

• Many scenes use a resolution of 840 (wide) × 1080 (high). This weird resolution is actually carefully selected.

  • For interactive work, where a student will be following along, the follower will need plenty of screen space to do so. A vertical share allows them to have half of their screen for following along.
  • 1080 is the height of a FullHD screen.
  • YouTube will re-encode HD versions at exactly this resolution - changing any number makes it not pixel-perfect. YouTube doesn't re-encode perfectly at arbitrary aspect rations.
  • The rule of thumb is "present from your smallest screen". This has the same effect.

• These scenes tend to insert external elements, for example logos. These logos are referred to by absolute pathname and not included, so the scenes need modification before they will actually work. You may need

Common names

To systematically control all scenes via the API, we need to standardize some scene names. (Note the terminology, scene is a selectable layout, sources are items within the scene.) We have done that here:

• Title: A general title card used for intros and so on.
  • Clock: (text that matches xx:NN, regex ([xX?]{2}:)(\d{2})(\s+|$) )
• Gallery: The gallery of presenters, mostly full screen.
• Local: Local screenshare (of the local computer running OBS).
  • _Camera: includes people inserted
• Remote: Capture of remote screenshare (e.g. zoom screenshare window)
  • _Camera: includes people inserted
• Notes: A screen capture of HackMD or other shared notes.
  • _Camera: includes people inserted
• --: this is a placeholder scene to separate primary scenes from the internal ones below.
• _-prefixed scenes: these are internal scenes which get inserted into other scenes.
  • _Camera: Scene with camera. Re-inserted into the abve

Included scenes

The following screens are included in this collection:

TeachingStreamingSimple

This is a simple teaching streaming setup capturing Zoom on a dedicated computer. The scenes:

• Title: title card
• Gallery: people
• Desktop: Zoom desktop capture
• Notes: HackMD or other capture

How to set it up:

• Title: configure scene as you would like. This is a static image.
• Start Zoom. Under general settings, put it in "Dual monitor mode"
• _Camera scene: edit the _ZoomGalleryCapture source (Right click → Properties) and select the Zoom gallery view. Move this window onto your external monitor.
• _Desktop capture scene: edit the Desktop (remote) window capture source and select the other Zoom window. Adjust the size of that Zoom window until it fills the preview as exactly as possible. Move this window onto your external monitor.
• _HackMD scene: edit the _HackMDCapture source to select your browser window. Like before, adjust the window so that it fills the preview. Move this window off to the side.

Adjust any other settings you may need.

Demo recording

This is designed for recording 840x1080 demos on your local computer. It can also be used for recording a demo at the same time as re-broadcasting it to Zoom without having to use the Zoom recording (so participants can't appear or be heard in the recording).

Status of this repository

Under development, reference but may not necessarily be useful to anyone.

Right now updating is done by rkdarst updating in his own OBS and re-exporting.