Speaker 1: Good morning, afternoon or evening colleagues. Hi, my name is Brandt van de Gaast and I'm a temporary instructor at the philosophy department of Utrecht University. Now, in this quick video, I'd like to show you a few things on how you can record lectures or presentations for remote teaching. And I will especially go into the technical details, so the hardware and the software that you could use for this purpose. And hopefully some of you will find the information useful for your own teaching. Now, the things I'd like to cover are tools and software. Then I will first show and explain how to record a lecture in Microsoft Teams. Then how to do the same in OBS, which is open broadcaster software. Then I'll show you how to use an electronic whiteboard in OBS. And finally, I will combine a few of these applications together. For instance, I'll show you how you can stream your webcam together with a whiteboard into video conferencing software such as Microsoft Teams. Now, the level of tech savviness that these applications presuppose increase. So not everybody may be interested in all of them, but it's just to show you what can be done. All right, so let's first talk about some of the tools and the software. So for recording, what I like is OBS, open broadcaster software. This is open source and it's very versatile. You can download it at obsproject.com. For video conferencing and also for teaching, Utrecht University normally uses Microsoft Teams. So that's what I'll be using as well. For your presentations, you can use PowerPoint. But of course, you can also use a PDF viewer or Apple's Keynote or another bit of software. Now, the whiteboard application will require a drawing program. Lots of options there. The one I like is called SmoothDraw, which is a very minimalistic, free drawing program. The hardware that you'll need is a webcam, of course, a microphone, and usually that's built into the webcam. For the whiteboard application, a drawing tablet is useful. Now, Wacom has pretty much cornered this market. So any Wacom tablet will do the job. And of course, a desktop or a laptop computer. Okay, so let's look at the first application, recording a lecture in Microsoft Teams. And this is fairly straightforward. You go to the calendar in Teams and you click on Meet Now. You are now in a meeting with yourself and you can share the screen containing your presentation. Now, if you now hit record and give your lecture, your presentation will be recorded. If you then stop recording, stop sharing your screen and stop the meeting, then you have a video of your presentation. Now, you can find this video by going to web.microsoftstream.com. And on stream, you can edit the video. You can determine who can view it and who can delete it. You can also create a channel and you can assign the video to a channel. Now, this is useful because if you also teach inside Teams, you can simply combine the channel to your team and give the students access to that video. In your class in Teams, you can simply create a tab which contains all the videos of your channel. So, it's useful and it's worthwhile to use both Teams and Stream at the same time. It's very well integrated. Let me show you how to do this. So, let's record a lecture using only Microsoft Teams. You go to calendar and you click on Meet Now and you join the meeting. Now, you are in a meeting with yourself and you can start sharing the screen containing your presentation. So, I'm going to share this screen. Well, now I can go back to Teams and I can start recording my meeting by clicking on Start Recording. So, right now, my meeting with myself is being recorded. Now, at this point, I can simply go through my slides and give my lecture and then finish. And I will go to Teams. I will stop recording. I will stop sharing. And I will stop the meeting. Now, I can go to the website, web.microsoftstream.com, and I can look at the most recent video. And as you can see, my meeting has been recorded and here's the file. I can click on it. Well, it's not ready yet, but this is where I can set all the permissions. I can allow students to watch it. I can also add it to a channel and I can even do simple editing. So, this is the very simplest method of recording your lecture. So, the next thing I'll show you is how to record a lecture in open broadcaster software, OBS. So, first, you go to obsproject.com and download and install OBS. When you have installed it, make sure that the audio and video connections are working as they should. You then go to Sources and you add your webcam window and the window of your presentation. Now, there's a slight complication here because OBS and Microsoft PowerPoint, they don't play nice together. So, what I usually use is a PDF viewer. I convert my presentation into PDF and use that. You arrange them as desired, these windows, and you start recording. Now, let me show you how you can do this. Let's now try to record a lecture in OBS. So, first, you install OBS and this is what the main window looks like. Now, you can add sources to the Arrange window by going to Sources down here, clicking on Plus. And first, I will select Video Capture Device, which is my webcam. And I will make some adjustments. Usually, that's not necessary. And then I can resize my webcam because my face was too big just then. And I can make it like that. And now I can add another source. For instance, I can go to Window Capture and I can select my Presentation window. There it is. I can resize it and reposition it. Now, this window contains this unwanted border and I don't want that. So, I can use Alt-Left-Click to crop the window and show me only the part that I want to see. I put it in the top right, I make it bigger again and I send it to the back. So, now my webcam is on top. Now, I can just give my lecture and go to my PDF window and advance through the slides while giving my presentation. And then I can stop recording. Now, as I said, OBS does not play nice with PowerPoint, unfortunately. So, you'll have to use PDF Viewer or some other program. Now, this recording will end up on your hard drive and it will have a certain resolution and a certain file format. If you want to change that, go to File, Settings and go to the Output or the Video menu. And that's where you can adjust the resolution as well as the file format. So, that's fairly straightforward, I hope. So, the third thing I'd like to show you is how you can use a whiteboard in Open Broadcaster software. So, first you'll need a drawing program. So, start up your favorite drawing program. What I like is called Smooth Draw. Then you start OBS. And in the Arrange window, you add your webcam and the window of your drawing program. You arrange them the way you want and you start recording. Now, the whiteboard, for instance, is used by the Khan Academy. This is a well-known organization that creates math videos on the internet. Look up their channel to see how you can use a whiteboard in teaching to great effect. Okay, so let's now combine our webcam and a whiteboard in OBS. First, we add the video capture device as a source. And we have our webcam. Make adjustments if needed and then resize it. Now, then we add a new source, which will be a window capture. And we will select our drawing program. There it is. We will resize it with CTRL-left-click. Now, as you can see, this window also has unwanted edges. We can crop those by using ALT-left-click. So, there we go. And then we make it bigger. And we send it to the back. And now I can hit Record. And then I can start drawing. Which is basically the whiteboard application we were going to use. And, of course, you can assign a button to delete so that you can easily wipe the whiteboard and start from scratch. So, this is how to use OBS and a drawing program to create a lecture in which you use a whiteboard. Now, the fourth application I'd like to show you is how you can use your webcam together with a whiteboard inside a meeting in, for instance, Microsoft Teams or in other video conferencing software, for instance, Zoom. Now, to do this, you'll need a plugin for open broadcaster software, which is called VirtualCam. So, get this plugin and install it. Fire up OBS and arrange the webcam and the whiteboard window the way you want it to look. And then start running VirtualCam. So, what OBS will do is it'll take the output of the arrange window and present it to other software as if it's the webcam. So, for instance, in Teams, you can now select OBS camera as your webcam and the participants in your Teams meeting will see the output of OBS. This is one way where you can stream your webcam together with a whiteboard to other participants in a meeting in Teams. Now, of course, you can also do this in certain other ways. For instance, you could also share the window of your drawing program inside Microsoft Teams. But combining them in OBS is what I prefer. So, let me show you how to do that. All right, so let's try some other applications. Let's combine some of these. Suppose we would like to have our webcam and a whiteboard visible in a live meeting, for instance, in Teams. Well, that's possible. So, you go to OBS and you add your webcam and your drawing window as a source and you arrange them the way you want. Then you install a plugin for OBS called VirtualCam. And when you've installed it, it'll become visible in the Tools menu. So, you hit VirtualCam and then hit Start. What now happens is that OBS presents this output to other software as if it is your webcam. So, you can go to Teams, go to Calendar, start a meeting, join the meeting, and other participants in this meeting will see your webcam combined with a whiteboard and not just your webcam. And you can talk to the other participants. And meanwhile, you can draw on the screen. Draw in a live meeting. Now, this is useful for certain applications. I've been using it for question and answer sessions with my students where I would talk to them and draw on the screen using the whiteboard. Now, there are some downsides. One is that Teams sometimes crops your image unpredictably. Now, you can prevent that by asking other members of the meeting to right-click your image and to select Fit to Frame. If you select Fit to Frame, there's no cropping going on. And, of course, they can also pin your screen, which means that your screen will be more prominent on their screens. Now, of course, you could also achieve this in a slightly simpler setting. You can, of course, also have a meeting with others where you use your webcam and where you share the window of your drawing program in Teams by going to Share. So that's also a possibility. But I like this one a little bit better because you have more control over what others see. So hopefully this was also useful. All right, so that's it for today. Hopefully some of these tips were useful. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to send me an email. Take care.
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