I’ve recently gotten into a “maker” mindset, becoming more and more interested in the concept of makerspaces, hackerspaces, and generally improving my ability to make, repair, or upcycle the things I use on a daily basis. Besides using my wife’s broken laptop charge port as a big impetus to learn to solder, or installing various Linux distributions on various old computers or single board computers I have, I’ve been spending time watching YouTube channels of various makers or Linux podcasts. One thing I’ve noticed is that the video production of these channels is often very good, even when they seem like shoestring productions.

For a while, I had thought this must be because they were using expensive video switching gear or fancy capture cards on the computers. It turns out the answer is much simpler (and cheaper) than anything like that.

Many of these productions are using a free, open source program called Open Broadcaster Software Studio, or OBS Studio. This is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, and allows users to set up multiple inputs or camera shots, even superimposing them on one another, or switching between scenes quickly with just a keystroke.

After just a few minutes playing with the software, I was able to set up 5 or 6 different scenes to switch between, ranging from a single camera on me (helpful for introduction videos or brief overview videos), a “document camera” view where I took an extra webcam and pointed it down at the desk and applied a mirror effect to flip the text right side up (good for writing notes), a screen capture of my desktop or a web page, or any combination of these things.

Illustration 1: OBS Studio with a webcam view only

Illustration 2: OBS Studio with document camera, small webcam, and web page view

Illustration 3: OBS Studio with document camera and small webcam view

OBS Studio includes several filters as well, ranging from color correction to color-key (used for green-screen style recording where you replace the background with a custom image). Once the scenes are set up and any filters applied, you can set up key bindings to quickly switch between the scenes, allowing you to have a full screen camera at one instant, and in another instant show the document camera full screen with a picture-in-picture view of the camera in the corner.

OBS Studio can also act as the recorder itself, allowing you to set the scenes, hit record, and jump between them, showing different notes, websites, or cameras as you lecture or demo. Once finished, the file can either be uploaded to a streaming service or into the LMS itself.