OUR EXPERT
Michael Reed was caught talking to himself while using the computer, making him the ideal person to tell you about screencasting.
Screencasts are videos with a voice narration, often used as a tutorial that explains how to do something within an application. They can also be used to create videos that provide commentary on a subject such as a photo collection.
We’ll start by making a recording with OBS Studio (https://obsproject.com), an application that can record the video and audio output of the computer to a file. Then we’ll import the audio into Audacity (www. audacityteam.org) for a quick tidy up. Following this, we’ll take the audio and video into video editor Kdenlive (https://kdenlive.org) for the final edit. By the end of the process, we should have a crisp-looking video with a clearly intelligible voice track. Add music to taste.
We’ll assume that you have OBS Studio installed and running. Some versions of OBS Studio start with the docks that we’re going to need minimised. We’re going to need the Scenes, Sources, Audio Mixer and Controls docks, so re-enable them all, if necessary, by selecting them in the Docks menu.
Use Scenes to save time
Scenes are settings profiles that are tailored for a specific job. It’s a good idea to use this feature, and starting a new scene resets the current settings back to defaults. Do this by clicking the plus icon at the bottom of the Scenes dock. Once you’ve started a fresh new scene, the first setting to look at is in the Sources dock. This is where you add video and audio sources.
For example, for a typical screencast, the sources might be the screen along with the input from a microphone. We’ll start
