If you haven’t checked out Matt’s post on using OBS for recording video, I highly recommend doing so. OBS is a terrific way to present your work online. It can provide (amongst many, many other things) the ability to create live picture-in-picture scenes, so you can move through your powerpoint deck whilst overlaying video of your tiny talking head in the corner.
Continuing on from Matt’s post, I’d like to promote the OBS virtual camera plugin and Touch Portal.
Every company, department or course has its own favourite video conferencing application and whilst they all have their strengths, consistency is not one of them. If you want to consistently display your presentation and your live video regardless of the platform in use, this quickly gets into the “messy” territory. This is where the virtual camera comes in.
The OBS virtual camera allows you to create a composite scene and present that as a webcam to any other piece of software. For instance, you can create a background which is a static image (such as your departmental logo), include a feed from your powerpoint window and add one or more webcam feeds, along with capturing audio from whichever mic you prefer.. but as far as the conferencing application is concerned, you are only displaying the video coming from a webcam, nothing more. The OBS virtual camera plugin takes your carefully curated scene pretends all of that is coming from a webcam.
You can activate the virtual webcam by starting OBS and then selecting Tools -> VirtualCam (additional information available here). Next, create your scene as described by Matt and then in Teams/Zoom/Facebook, choose “OBS-Camera” as your Video input. For instance, for Microsoft teams, select settings -> devices and select OBS-Camera. Don’t be alarmed when your output appears to be mirrored, it won’t appear that way to the viewer.
One trap for new players is that it’s important to start OBS before starting the application that requires your virtual camera. The reason being that if teams takes a hold of your physical webcam, it’s not going to want to let it go it can be used by OBS.
The other bit of software I’d like to evangelise is Touch Portal.
People who live stream on a regular basis often make use of dedicated hardware such as the Elgato stream deck to provide shortcut buttons to switch between cameras, change which mic they’re using, play fade out music or roll credits. For those of us forced into streaming due to COVID this is a somewhat pricey solution to a problem that six months ago we didn’t know we had. As opposed to the relatively expensive hardware approach, Touch Portal is a very clever piece of software which seamlessly integrates into OBS (and others) and allows you to switch OBS scenes from your phone.
OBS scenes provide a way to cleanly and quickly switch between things you wish to present. Regardless of if you’re streaming or recording, instead of quitting sharing one window and fumbling between which window to share next, using Touch Portal you can just press a button to swap between pre-existing windows. For instance, immediately swap between your webcam running full-screen and powerpoint overlaid with your little talking head, that same presentation with your head in a different position (so as not to occlude important information), a terminal window running your code (again overlaid with your head if you so desire) and as many window or monitor captures as make sense. Again, your conferencing software will see all these as just stuff appearing on your virtual webcam feed.
Touch portal comes as two parts: An application on your computer to create and manage the user interface and an application on your phone to trigger events.
On the PC side, each button gets be mapped to events such as camera changes, fade out, play music, etc. However, to avoid having to add one button to start somethign and another to stop it, touch portal also provides simple logic functions which can use a single button to toggle actions or such as “if faded out, fade back in again”.
Touch Portal can operate on your phone both wired (over USB) and wirelessly and during a recent OPIG pub-quiz, I used it to regularly flip between my video feed, the questions (with me as a little talking head) and a spreadsheet of the scores, without ever having to select apps or even start zoom screen sharing.
You can download the version of Touch Portal appropriate to your platform here.
To allow Touch Portal remote to integrate with OBS, an additional step is needed and that is to add the OBS websocket plugin. After that, fire up OBS, create your scenes, fire up touch portal on the PC to create your events and finally download the Touch Portal app to your phone. After being given the IP address of your computer, your phone will automatically sync with the PC and download the button configuration and any custom icons and you’re all set. Additional information on getting started with Touch Portal is available here.
