Speaker 1: What's up, everyone? James Lynch here doing another video, this time on how I record my remote video interviews. If you remember, I've done past videos on this talking about how I like using Skype and Avere, and I still think that's a great option, but now I've moved on to using OBS, and we're gonna go through everything. There's gonna be a lot to digest here, so I will have timestamps in the description so you can jump back and forth. And also, make sure you give this video a like and subscribe to the channel as I do post content on here every single week. Before we get into OBS, I wanna talk about two of the most common ways you can record interviews and why I don't like using them. The first is Zoom. Zoom is really easy to use, but there's two things I really don't like about it. Here's a show I did a little while back using Zoom. The quality is awful, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't upgrade it to 1080p or 720p. The quality is just not very good, so that's another reason I don't like it. And with everyone doing video content now, you want your stuff to stand out. This just isn't acceptable in my books. The second thing I don't like about it is the fact that the audio is recorded in one track, so if you cough on a stream, there's nothing you can do about it. You're stuck with it. I recommend not using Zoom if you can avoid it and just watch this tutorial instead. The second alternative is StreamYard. I actually like StreamYard. I just hate the fact you have to pay for it. You can get a free version, which will have this silly little bird in the corner, the whole stream, which doesn't look very good. Or you can do what I did, which is pay for the medium version or the secondary version, which allows you to do 720p, which is what this looks like. But as you can see here, it's still not up to par. It's not 1080p. If you want 1080p, you gotta pay something ridiculous, like I think $500, $600 US a year, which is way too much money. So OBS is free. That's why I recommend using that instead, but I just wanted to mention these two as to why I don't use them. Even though I think they're decent, I wouldn't use them myself. Okay, let's get into Skype. I think Skype's the best when it comes to doing calls and video interviews. You can use the app on your phone. It doesn't matter. Download the desktop version. That's the first thing. Make sure you do that. Get the desktop version. Don't get the app version. Otherwise, this isn't gonna work. Then you wanna download OBS. Make sure you're using the most up-to-date version of OBS as well. Once we get Skype installed, you want to make yourself a second Skype account. So make one account, like I have here, and then make another account, which is this Parting Shot account. The second thing you wanna make sure you have is a secondary webcam. Most people have a built-in webcam on their laptop. Some people have an old webcam laying around. I use a Logitech 4K webcam just as my alternate camera because if you don't have the camera, it's not gonna work, or if you're calling your guests, they just won't be able to see you. So I recommend getting another camera. You'll see what I mean here because the camera I'm using right now won't show up. I can't use it because of the fact that it's in demand right now. So you'll see there, I'm using my webcam instead as my alternative. So I recommend getting a second camera for this. That's another important thing. Okay, so once you make a backup account, download that Skype app on your phone, and then that way you can use this for testing. That's what we're gonna be doing here today. The second thing, or third thing, I think you should do as well is make sure you go into Settings, and make sure you go down to Calling, and then go to Advanced. What you wanna do is make sure Allow NDI Usage. It's the only way you can get your Skype stream from your guests coming into OBS. I've tried a bunch of different ways. This by far is the best way to do it. So make sure you have this on, and when you do your Skype calls, you'll know it's working if it says NDI in the top of when you're doing your Skype calls. So make sure you get that done. Okay, we've got OBS open. We've got a brand new scene. Before we do our Skype call, I just wanna get a few things set up here in OBS. The first thing you wanna do is create a new scene, which is what I've done here. So you go New Scene. Then you're gonna hit the plus button. You wanna first get your webcam, your capture device first. You wanna go down to Video Capture Device. We're gonna call this My Camera, and we're gonna go OK. And you're gonna see here, there we go. It's already selected my Cam Link 4K webcam. That's what's been accessed here. So you can see I'm on camera. It's all good. But I wanna do a split-screen interview. So what I'm gonna do here, you'll see the lock is unlocked. I'm gonna go here and move this over. So we've got sort of a split-screen thing going. And look, we've got this extra video here. You hold the Alt button, you hold it down, and it'll actually cut the video off. So we've got a great split-screen interview part, sort of my half of it, and so we're all good there. Okay, so we click lock on that. The second thing you're gonna do is you're gonna wanna add the NDI source. Make sure you pause this video and go down to the description of this video, and you're gonna find a tutorial on how to install the NDI plugin for OBS. I do it here, but it's just gonna take up too much time. So once you've done that, you're gonna go down here and you're gonna click Plugin, NDI Plugin. And you're gonna wanna name this your guest. So that's gonna be the feed that your guest is coming in from on Skype. Now, you'll see nothing's here. You actually have to call your guest first for the stream to actually come up. So we're gonna go OK. Now, before we bring our guest in here, we wanna make sure our audio is A+, everything's good to go here. So you'll notice right now, you'll see it says My Camera, my audio's coming through. I recommend disabling that, and I recommend using a separate source for your audio just to make sure you know everything is good to go here. So we're actually gonna go here and disable the audio here on the camera, and I'm actually gonna go into Settings, and I'm gonna go under Audio, and I'm gonna make sure that my mic and auxiliary audio is set to my microphone, which is my ChatMic T-Helicon GoXLR Mini. So we're good there, and you'll see there the audio track is showing up here. That way I know I can see that my audio's good and I can tinker with it, and I also recommend that you separate your audio. Right now, everything's set up that everything's gonna come through one audio feed. I don't like that. I think it's better if you separate your audio. That way, let's say you cough during an interview or something, you're actually able to cut that out and you can actually record a separate feed itself. So you're gonna need to download a program called VoiceMeeter Banana. I've got a link in the description that's gonna describe how to do that. I'd go through it here now, but it's gonna take too long, so I recommend going to use this other video that someone else did just to save you some time. So if you've already watched that video and you have that installed, then we're gonna go into the next steps here. First, we are gonna make sure that our guest audio is on a separate track here. So we're gonna go down to the guest audio or the guest source here, and you're gonna go to Advanced Audio Properties, and you're gonna see here that if you look here, you have your mic, your camera, your NDI plug-in source, and you'll see here that every audio track's selected. So if we're recording this, it's gonna record six different tracks, and it's gonna have all the audio blended together. We don't want that. So what we wanna do here is, you'll see here the camera is considered active, which is fine, but we don't want the audio from that. So we're actually gonna get rid of all the audio for the camera. We want my microphone to be the first source on the audio track, so we're gonna click that, make sure that's good, but we're gonna disable it here. And then you're gonna wanna make sure your NDI plug-in source is gonna have the proper audio coming in here, so they'll be track two. So that'll be track two, and we're gonna disable the rest of these boxes. This is really key. I've had this happen to me before where I've recorded, and I can't figure out why my guest audio is blended in on one track, and it's because I didn't separate the tracks here. So we'll do that. We'll click close, and now you're good to go from an audio perspective. All the audio's gonna be separate, and you'll see here when I actually do the test, which we'll all do right now. So let me open up Skype. I'm gonna call myself on Skype. Again, I have the backup account I'm gonna get to here. So you see here, my guest is coming in, which is me. You'll see it's coming in on the screen. We're getting some bad feedback, so let me just turn that off a little bit here. You're gonna go to NDI source, and you're gonna go here, and you're gonna go to Parting Shop Podcast, which is my backup account. We're gonna go okay. Sometimes it takes a second or two just for it to show up, and you'll see there it's showing up right here behind my stream. We don't want that. So we obviously wanna resize it so it's gonna work there. There's two quick tips I recommend doing right now and to get your stream all good. The first is you wanna right-click your source, and you wanna go to transform, and you're gonna go edit transform, and you're gonna go into bounding box type, and you wanna go scale to inner bounds. What this is gonna do is that for whatever reason, OBS does this dumb thing where it makes it that your video resizes. This prevents that from happening. The second thing you wanna do, I'm sorry if there's any feedback here, is you wanna go under properties, and you wanna go to latency too low. I've had issues for whatever reason when it's set to high, the audio is out of sync. So this will prevent that as well. So remember those two special tips right there when you're bringing your guest in. But anyways, let's get it resized here so we can get a full screen. Let me just get, so there we go. That's what it'll look like. And then once you've found how you like everything, click the lock button, so that way you can't touch it anymore. Okay, so we've got a split screen video interview here. We're all good to go. I like going from split screen to full screen. So what we're gonna do here is we're gonna call this full screen. We're gonna create a new source, new scene, I should say. And we're gonna go in here, and we're going to, again, NDI plugin source. And we're gonna go, okay. And again, it just takes a second. There we go. We're gonna make this full screen. The lock button. So you can go there from split screen to full screen. And I don't like that fade, so I'm gonna change that and go to cut. So that looks even better. There we go. That looks way better in my opinion. Okay, so we're pretty much all good to go here, right? So you got split screen, full screen. Everything is good to go. Everything's that good. The only thing I've run into issues as well is I've had it where my guest audio is coming through the actual feed. You go to my camera, filters. And you click one here, and you go to NDI plugin audio filter. And what that's gonna do is that's gonna make sure that your guest audio isn't coming through your feed. I've had that happen before for some reason that happens. So I know there's a lot of steps here, but if you follow these, you'll make sure that you're gonna have separate tracks. Okay, now we're ready to record. So let's click the record button. So we're recording directly to my desktop. How's it going? Blah, blah, blah. Okay, and then we wanna switch to full screen. We can do that. Boom, we're good to go. So we click to full screen, back to split screen, back to full screen. I have another video talking about using a thing called a stream deck. It's really good for doing this so you don't have to constantly click it, but that's an easy way to sort of do it. So that's how I go from split screen to full screen. Okay, we're gonna stop recording. So now if you bring the file into Premiere, you'll see here the audio tracks are separated. By the way, people always ask me about graphics when you're trying to get some. Use a site called Fiverr. If you're looking to purchase graphics and templates and stuff like that, even if you have very basic Photoshop knowledge, there's a lot of really good designers on here with pretty reasonable prices if you wanna get graphics and stuff as well. So there you have it. I know there's a lot to unpack here. If you have any questions at all, hit me up on social media. Give a comment on this video. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. I'm more than happy to help and share my knowledge when it comes to doing remote video interviews. And like I said, I think this is the best way, the highest quality you can get when it comes to recording remote video interviews. Hit the like button, hit the subscribe button. I'm James Lynch. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time. ♪ Original flow, head kicks with the pros ♪ ♪ Picks up the fights or anything in the mix ♪ ♪ Getting closer to the heart of the flame ♪ ♪ Bringing conversations with heavy hitting names ♪ ♪ You feel the love of the game ♪