Getting the hang of OBS for delivery
For a while I had considered myself limited in my delivery style due to OBS Studio turning my laptop into a potato every time I tried tinkering with it. I thought I was going to have to use my personal desktop machine meant for gaming for the task or buy a new laptop. What is embarrassing to admit is that I’ve had the means of doing this for almost a year without knowing it. It turns out that the Surface Studio that was lent to me by my employer is more than just a tool for whiteboarding but also packs a hefty punch with a GeForce GTX 1070 processor along with 32 GB of ram and a i7 processor. More than enough to start using OBS alongside my demonstrations and power point decks. Who knew?! 🤣
Armed with this newfound knowledge, I’ve been dabbling into the space with the help of my colleague and streamer extraordinaire Frank La Vigne. He pointed me to a video recently that provided me most of the vision for this experiment from Scott Hanselman, shared below:
Following Scott’s video, I was able use my extra screen real estate on the Studio to punch my face into different places on my PPT deck to add more interactivity to my delivery. The application that Scott built is a simple C# console app that utilizes OBS Websocket and PowerPoint assemblies in order to look at the notes of a slide to determine which scene it should transition to in OBS auto-magically. Pretty slick, right? I am slightly nervous about giving this a try but my sheer grit has me going for it with a customer tomorrow, after having a dry run with teammates first of course. The main issue that I have noticed is that if I move too quickly between slides that the console app crashes. If that happens during the session it shouldn’t be too bad/noticeable because I can always go back to manual switching in a pinch or can briefly re-open the app.
Well there you have it, just a short entry for President’s Day. Hope you liked it! I have a feeling there will be more content and experience like this to share in the near future.