This blog posts captures some learning I did about OBS recently.

I recently invested a little time in learning the basics of OBS Studio. OBS is one of those programs that seems enormously powerful, has a vast user base, and a correspondingly vast amount of content about it on YouTube. There is so much content about OBS it’s hard to tell what’s good. Thankfully, I stumbled upon this 27 minute tutorial from Kevin Stratvert.

In addition to Mr. Stratvert’s tutorial, there are some other essential tips I want to capture.

Blurring during recording

This video, from a much more gamer-focused perspective, did give a practical tip for how selectively blur arbitrary portions of the screen. I’ll outline the process next.

  1. Add a new Display capture source.

  2. Arrange it above your “main” Display capture source.

  3. Add a Scaling/Aspect Ratio filter to it.

    1. Scale Filtering Point.
    2. Resolution 640x360

  4. Drag the red grabber handles so that the new Display capture source completely covers the “main” display capture source.

  5. HERE IS THE IMPORTANT STEP: Hold down the alt key and re-size the grabbers to cover the area you want to blur. It is very important you don’t move the region by dragging it. Use the alt-resize technique to effectively move the blur zone.

    • This works because of the low resolution you set.

  6. Repeat this process for whatever other parts of the screen you want to blur. Note that you can blur/un-blur easily with the “eye” icon for that Display capture source in the Sources screen.

Bluring after recording

I found I missed some things on my first recording and needed to do additional blurring. No problem, add a Media source and select the file from the first recording. You can then play the first recording into another recording and add more blurring as desired. I found this reminded me of some of the performance aspect of real time analog audio mixing because I had to take cues from the media source for when to blur/un-blur certain parts of the screen.

Note, when you add Media source, by default you cannot hear the audio. Turn it on with these steps.

  1. In the Audio Mixer panel, in the row for Media Source select the cog icon and select Advanced Audio Properties.

  2. In the row for Media Source, in the column for Audio Monitoring, ensure Monitor and Output is selected.

Removing click sounds from your mic while recording

Add these filters to your Mic/Aux source.

  1. Noise Suppression: RNNoise

  2. Noise Gate

    • Close Threshold: -54.00 dB

    • Open Threshold: -39.00 dB

    Remainder at defaults.