Alright, this might be a bit of a niche topic. And if you don’t know OBS Studio (probably needs less explaining) or GitPitch (which lets you build brilliant presentations in Markdown), feel free to move right along. But if you’re using both — or if you’re only using OBS and you want to get away from PowerPoint — I’ve found a workflow worth sharing.
The idea: imagine you’re giving an online presentation and recording with OBS. You can already set up scenes that show or hide your webcam at certain points. But there are always situations where you either don’t want your face on the slide, or you want to explain something in full screen (so people aren’t just reading ahead on the slides). How do you handle that? Maybe you’ve got a second screen and you switch to a different scene. That can happen seamlessly, but it doesn’t always.
With this solution, you define right inside the presentation, per slide, where something should happen. You’re controlling pre-defined OBS scenes directly from the presentation. That means you can focus entirely on your slides while OBS just runs in the background. Easy as 1-2-3.
Here’s how:
Install a websocket plugin in OBS that listens on port 4444. Enable it in OBS under “Tools”, then “Websocket Server Settings” (tick “Enable Websocket”).
In OBS, define your scenes for the recording in GitPitch. In my example, I show a browser window with the GitPitch presentation and my camera. I named the scenes things like
OBS-reo(browser window with camera overlay in the top right). You can then assign these scenes to individual GitPitch slides.Start GitPitch Desktop and your presentation. If OBS is running, GitPitch will detect it via the websocket and know it’s allowed to control OBS.
On the slide, enter the command
@obs[OBS-reo]. The name has to match the scene name in OBS exactly.Save, and start the recording or stream in OBS.
In GitPitch Desktop, click the green “lightning bolt” icon to start the presentation. Press “F” to go full screen.
Depending on the slide, OBS will now record or stream using the pre-defined scene.
I’ll be the first to admit that I got left and right confused a few times while putting this together (a clear directional impairment on my part). But between what’s written here and a bit of trial and error, you should be right. If not, give us a shout.
The German original lives at reinergaertner.de, my blog since before most of the internet existed (1997). Translation: AI. Quality control: me, squinting. Apologies in advance.