Next semester is starting up soon, and one of the most useful things I've taken to doing is recording lectures. I doubt I'll ever be able to get the quality anywhere that would be considered 'good', but I have no idea what I'm doing outside of some trial and error, so I imagine I can probably get it quite a bit better with some optimizations.
Set up... recording with a laptop, and a Ugreen 15728 to capture both video and audio. Everything's done on OBS Studio. I sit at the front of the class with the webcam mounted to a little tripod and aimed at the projector screen with the end goal of basically having narrated powerpoint presentations.
The field of view of the webcam is way higher than I need it to be, so I zoom it in by fitting just the presentation to frame in OBS... which works, but probably 75% of its resolution potential is lost to just cropping it out. I don't think anything can be done about that, since the webcam doesn't have a physical zoom and I can't position it anywhere closer to the screen than I have previously. ...and the resolution as-is comes out... okay. They're powerpoints, and with the exception of the odd bit of unusually fine font, the final product is readable, in a 1995 jpeg kinda way.
I think the real room for improvement is managing the lighting settings - the issue is that the camera is still recording the bits that aren't actually being saved, so if the room lights are on and the ppt has a dark background, it gets 'corrected' to where the light font on the page also get kinda blacked out, I think because it's compensating for the bright surfaces beyond the edges of the presentation. Room lights off with a light background ppt, it all gets white-washed. Tweaking the gamma and... backlight? whitelight? in the device-specific settings I can usually get it to where the text is readable, but again, it kinda looks like shit.
Audio... I used to have some of those interview mics for the prof to wear, which were great quality for the... like two or three? times they actually decided to wear it. They were for some reason opposed to doing that, so they'd just set it on the podium and let it record from there... and then walk all over the front of the classroom, making audio quality all over the place. Tried using the mic on my gaming headset, with the entire headset perched next to the webcam, but it captured me breathing and typing more clearly than the prof; admitted defeat on audio quality and have since used the ones built into the webcam, and they do okay, but with that same kind of barely passable quality as the video.
I've seen some optimization guides, but pretty much all of them are geared toward streaming or web conferences, not lecture halls, and their tips only yielded slight improvements.
I don't really understand what any of the settings actually do, so I just fuck with the sliders or check the toggles and if it makes it better I keep it, if it doesn't I put it back... but I'm probably doing something in a stupid order or overlooking a whole category of settings. Literally just figuring this all out as I go - no prior experience with this or similar software.
...I know my recording conditions and equipment are all far from ideal, but I do share these recordings with my classmates, so if any of know any optimizations I can make with the tools on hand, please let me know!
Thanks all!
I get the prof's individual permission to record. I don't have permission from the school at large... but I don't necessarily need permission to do something like shove a cable into a free HDMI port, assuming there is one. At least until IT sees it and chews me out.
Prefer not to do any post editing - I've had to a few times if I forget to pause when one of the profs or students goes into story time mode and starts spilling a bunch of personal details. It's nursing school, so those moments are usually kinda sensitive so I make a point to NOT save or upload those moments. Anyway, just going in after the fact to delete the 30 second chunk takes no time at all; but then exporting the video project back into a video format I can upload can take an hour or two... and I get home from class at like 10pm so I don't want to start an hours long project at that point. The upload itself takes more time than I'd like, but there's usually enough to do to keep me busy during that time getting all my stuff ready for work the following morning.
Slides from my comp would be a good option for most of it - annoyingly they so use some web-based presentation software sometimes. Another poster had a similar suggestion there, which has me wondering if I can link up the two comps via cable, treating theirs as an output and mine as the input, then record their screen with OBS. That would also allow me to position the webcam a lot closer to the podium itself for use solely as a mic, so that might be a two-birds-one-stone solution.
That's what I did before I got the webcam. Quality was great, but you called it: battery. They're evening classes that run 3.5ish hours, so with a good dent in the battery already just from being in my pocket at work all day, even having the phone plugged in while recording it would still die about half way through the class. It was also weird with recording length... after iirc 45 mins or so, it would just stop and save what it recorded as-is, so I'd have to (often fail to) remember to start another recording when it did that. Then stitch them together later with OpenShot, which again adds a super lengthy export to the whole project.
I wonder if my own phone would work for that. Battery/video recording was a no-go, but I imagine audio recording can be done with the screen off and is a less power-hungry function, to it might be able to just passively record audio. That's a different app too, which hopefully means the 45 min thing isn't a factor. Would still need post editing, but would be nice to at least have it as a backup. I have had a few times where something happened and the audio just cut out for like 20 mins randomly.
I'll see what they let me do with the slides. So far the profs have all been okay with recording, so I'd be willing to bet they'd be on board with trying these kinds of workarounds.
Thanks!!
Yeah, I feel you. I used to come back from school after 11PM and I just wanted bed as my shift at work would start 7AM.
I mentioned the schools because, usually, they have some equipment you might be able to borrow and use (tripods, cameras, capture cards).
I saw on the other comment that the professor uses a podium. Are there any more cables coming out of the podium? Besides the one that goes to the projector.
You will need a video capture card/USB for that. One with pass-thought Podium => notebook (with capture device) => projector Or a splitter. Podium => spliter. splitter A => notebook (with capture device), splitter B => projector
The good ones are expensive. When I was undergrad, the podium had the splitter and I just borrowed the capture card from the uni AV department (nowdays some might have everything you need by the podium).
Alternatively, can you run OBS straight from the podium computer? So you don't need to worry about extra equipment.
You might be able to run it in portable mode from a USB storage, and no need for permissions to install. https://obsproject.com/kb/portable-mode
I have been using this software when I just want to cut things out, and merge similar format files. It is very fast (as long as the output is the same format as the input).
https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
You need to test, I it will depend on the app, your phone battery and storage.
I used this app once to record 40 minutes with the screen off.
https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Voice-Recorder
I imagine 3.5 hours should be doable. (a wireless lavalier to connect to a phone can run +4 hours).
I usually use a digital audio recorder in a pocket with a lavalier mic connected by cable, for long recording sessions.