 Hey, hello world. Hello world. Hello world. I wonder how many of you are watching us today. Hello. Yeah, yes, so today we'll be doing the Google Hangout on Air. So this is the first time I'm trying this. So bear with us if we fail. So we fail gloriously, hopefully. Anyway, yeah, hi, my name is Michael. So yeah, we'll wait for one more person. Hopefully you can join us. Otherwise, we can just carry on first. Yeah, what do you guys think? Yeah, sounds good. Or after you guys? I think since it's going to be recorded, then let's just continue and then. OK. Cool. Or maybe let me just ping Xilong and say it. Ping Xilong, see if he's telling us or not. He's telling us. OK. He's not, let's just start maybe. OK. Can, can. So let's see, let's see, let's see. I can do the slides. Who, who, play, play, play. Customize, presenter, let's see. Oh, I can't do this. Oh, OK. So let me just get this thing out of the way first. Navigator, slightly. Oh, OK, cool. Let me change to, let me change to my screen so that I can, yeah. All right, can you see this? Oh, OK, that's my application screen. Slides, rather. Oh, OK, can you see it? Yep. Yeah, OK, cool. So today I'll be sharing with us, yeah. So today I'm just running a quick volunteer training. So we'll be doing this right now. Yeah, so my name's Michael. If you don't know yet, that's me. And I run this thing called Engines SG. It's basically not for profit, but with a T-initiative. So it's basically our mission is to help document the tech scene in Singapore. Yeah, so, and here we are doing our first recording. This is, we started, I started this in 2013. So this is like our first recording ever with one single camera. So that's us. And why did I started this? Because essentially I created to answer the question, where are the engineers in Singapore? So I guess we want to seek a place where you get to know and learn about the tech community. And in a way, as I do this, I also learn about how to best record and document meetups. Some of the meetups I have recorded in the past. And this is some stats. Currently we have about 2,000 over videos on the website. 8,000 subscribers on YouTube. And quite a few other, quite a few other conferences that we're, and there's a few other conferences and recordings this year. PHPCon, Asia, and so far, I've trained about 50, I think. 50, about 50 volunteers so far. That's a bit, yeah, so we've got 50 volunteers so far. But active volunteers is about 10 of us. That's how our website looks like, our YouTube channel. Yeah, so essentially the crux of today's talk is about how do we do this, right? So essentially the way that we do this is to streamline our workflow. We want to be able to capture all the inputs, the video, the screen, and audio. So you have not seen the videos that we capture yet. So it looks a lot like the videos that we capture basically has all the elements like the video of the presenter and audio of the presenter, and so as a screen capture. So you capture the screen that the presenter is presenting. And with that, you can see what they're presenting and the high resolution, hopefully. So you can capture these things into a laptop via USB. So you basically send all these sources into a laptop and they have all the input sources come in in digital form. So we use a software video mixer that lets us record and stream and edit the video live. So as we are recording, it actually saves the file in a pre-edited format. So it already has a picture-in-picture or has the videos and slides side-by-side. And the audio is already there inside the thing. So the way that we do it is that we do it without any post-production needed. So we don't have to go home and do a fair bit of editing and all that stuff. Then videos are usually uploaded at the end of the night. So by the next morning, the videos are already available for viewing. So there's minimum. There's no editing involved. And then it goes up to YouTube and then gets viewed by people. Oh, sorry. I just pressed the wrong button. Yeah, so the way that it usually works is how it roughly usually works. So first of all, we have the presenters' video, presenters' laptop. And that goes into a video splitter. And the video splitter will basically output a video signal to the projector. And the splitter will basically split the signal into two. One will go to the projector. One will go into our video screen capture 2. Screen capture 2 basically captures whatever the presenter is presenting their slides, their code demos, or whatever. So it's one thing to do. And that is this device here. It connects to the laptop using USB. Then we have webcam. And the webcam usually also captures the video of the presenter. And then we have a wireless mic. So the wireless mic that we use to capture the speaker's voice. And that goes, we could use the webcams or a microphone as well. So in cases where you only have like two USB ports on your computer, you can actually use the webcams audio. But chances are the audio quality on that thing isn't very, it's not the best thing in the world. So chances are it may not be the best. And because the webcam might be too far from the speaker, so you might not even get really good audio. So here's why we use a wireless microphone. And all that goes into the computer using USB. And what we do is that we have a software video mixer that kind of puts it all together. So we also put the video through audio processing. So we have a little thing that kind of converts the compressors that does some audio compression on the audio and evens it out. So basically, it's like, if it's too soft, you make it a bit louder. If it's too loud, it becomes a bit softer, to kind of like even it out. We have an automated script that does this, which I can show you guys later. And once that's done, we usually upload it to YouTube. And then it appears on the website. And when it's on the website, we usually put things like the title, description, and information about the organizer, presenter info. And then we also sometimes put links to the slides, especially if we didn't capture the slides clearly. Also, people just prefer to watch, flip through the slides quickly, so we can put the links there as well. And of course, links back to the event page. This is kind of important because we also want to use the videos to kind of tell the whole world about the meetup that's happening. So if people who watch the video can actually link back to the event and even the organizers of the event and then help and follow them for future meetups. That's usually how we do it. Right. So, and then usually, we try to get permission from the organizer first, so we'll pick up the stuff and we'll bring them to the meetup place. Let's see. This is some of our teams in action. So, yeah, so this is where we recorded the first event. It was the first conference that we recorded in 2014. This is like a gig camp Singapore. Our original video recording was kind of analog, so we used like a VGA port, but we have since moved on to using HDMI. And this is our typical recording session. So we were our equipment in the front, near the presenter and all that stuff. Yeah, so video we have, we use, nowadays we use a webcam in certain places like conference arena or conference room. Like over every recording, we usually use a more fast thing like a webcam corner like this Sony camcorder. Yeah. Yeah. So the video capture, the screen capture tool that we use is something called even media live gamer portable, which is a device used mainly for gamers to record their gameplay. So if they're using PS, we're playing games on PS4 or Xbox, you use this to do that. So to capture their gameplay. So we're actually using the same device that we use to capture the presenter's screen. And we also use, we do the video mixing using a Windows laptop. Usually it's because Windows laptop tends to be, have more driver support for these things. Especially for this guy, this is the driver, the Windows driver for this device is actually a lot better. They've come up with version two of this. So this is what you see here is the version one. The version two is probably a little bit more expensive and uses USB three. This one, this one only requires USB two. And this one goes up to 30 frames per second. Whereas I think the version two goes up to 60 frames per second. For presentation, it probably doesn't matter because you're just presenting slides, it's fine. Yeah, and this is how it looks like when we use OBS. So it's edited, you can see it all side by side and stuff. Yeah, I'll show you a bit how it looks like when we do the setup. And when we do the recording, we usually use like a wireless mic or a condenser microphone. When we first started doing this, we use a condenser microphone like this. So condenser microphone is kind of nice in the sense it captures really good quality audio. But the problem with that is that if you get a presenter that likes to walk around. Like in this case, Martin here is sitting in front. So if the condenser mic is just right in front of him, it's fine to capture his voice. But if he starts walking around, then the audio just drops and fades out or whatever. So it just isn't very nice. So what we do is nowadays we use a wireless lapel mic that they wear, like right now Martin over here is actually wearing a lapel mic. So that helps us get good quality audio, no matter the situation like where he walks to or something like that. Of course, the one that he's wearing right now is a bit expensive, about $800 thing for that Sennheiser microphone. But I'll show you something else that we have which is a little bit cheaper. That's the wrong button again. La la la la la, where am I? Yeah, and then this is how that one looks like. Sometimes we also use a sound mixer. You don't always need this. I think in some situations we do need it in certain challenging venues. But we hardly use this anymore right now. Yeah, sometimes we use a backup recording. So sometimes our system is pretty hardy. It probably won't break, but occasionally things do fail badly. So like the PC will crash or something. So we try to have a backup sometimes. And audio backup is one of the things we do. We also carry this stuff around using a suitcase. So we do have a lot of suitcases lying around. When it first started, we tried to use a shopping bag to kind of carry it around. But the shopping bag will tend to be quite flimsy and breaks. So after two times, it kind of breaks down. So we decided to use a proper suitcase to carry it around. Let's see where are we? Okay, let me try and bring out the slide I was looking for. So what's in our bag right now, right? So in our bag, we have, this is the latest one. Let me see where I got to. Yeah, so okay. So in our backpack, this is kind of like the stuff that we have all laid out. So we have a wireless, we usually have a laptop in our carry bag. And then it has all the things that we need in a carry bag. So carry bag has like the laptop, has our power strip, it has tripods, our screen capture tool, and a bunch of HDMI cables, and our audio setup, as well as the webcam over here. Yeah, so this is an example of one of the sets that we have which I'll show, I can show you that right now. Let me try and bring out the camera. Okay, right, so if we look at, I'll just bring and show you this one right now. So right now over here, layer on this table is basically all the equipment that we have. So what you saw over there in the previous screen, so we have, again, we have tripod that we use to mount our webcam. So webcam is usually mounted on this and put this right in front of the presenter just to capture their, capture the video. So I mean, screw this in first. Yeah, so this one is a USB. So USB basically connects to the laptop. And we also have the HDMI cable. So this is, we have two here, one short and one long. The long one is for situations where the presentation is kind of far, like the presenter is quite far away from the laptop where you're doing this recording. So this one is usually, the shorter one usually connects to a splitter. So this is how the HDMI splitter looks like. Yeah, so HDMI splitter looks like, has say one input and two output, right? So the input is usually what we connect to the presenter's laptop. So we have a HDMI cable like this. It connects to the input and the other side goes to the presenter's laptop. Yeah, and then we have two. So one will go, usually try, I'll put one goes to the projector and I'll put two will go to our screen capture two. So now in this case, our screen capture two is this little buddy here. It's a, it's called the, as I said, it's called the Avermedia Live Gamer Portable. It looks something like this, right? In certain, so this one is pretty hardy for gaming stuff. There's actually another device that we're investigating right now. It's called the Fibon, Fibon 180. So it's actually another device that you can find online. It has a HDMI in and USB three out. So this one also captures the video screen as in the video screen capture. This one costs about 180 US and this guy costs about 200 plus thing which comes out about 100-ish US. So what's the main reason that we are investigating the other one? Is that better in terms of quality or? Which one? The Fibon or this one? Yeah, the Fibon. Fibon is actually more compact and see this form factor is a lot more compact. Right. And it also does something nice, which is to cleanse up the video that comes in so that you can get a clean video output. So that's what I like about this. It's quite a small form factor, which I really like. Okay. So the every media video capture actually is not that clean. Is that what you're saying compared to the Fibon? Yeah. So I would say using the Fibon and also the Fibon works, the other advantage of the Fibon is that it works on Windows, it works on Macs, and it works on Linux machines. Right. Whereas for the even media, it's optimized for Windows only. So if you want to use this on, use, run stuff on a Mac, I recommend getting a Fibon. I'll put a link to the website later on. I'll go notes later on after this. So yeah, so that one is pretty good for you using non-Windows setup. So yeah. So again, so this one, yeah. So from the splitter, so output one goes to projector, as I said. So output two into the even media, there's input here. And then it has USB cable that goes to the laptop, right? So in all our setups, we actually do this thing where we label all our stuff. So you can see that this splitter cable itself has a green dot there. And that corresponds to what we have on the laptop, which I'll show you right now. So this is the recording laptop that we use. And you can even notice here, we actually have a color coding over here as well. So green to plug in the green USB cable like this one. Right, so it's green here. Can you see this? Yeah, so it's green. So the green goes into the green port like that. And the webcam, for example, the webcam, for example, the cable itself, I also labeled it brown. So the brown one goes into this one, right? So it's easier for volunteers who are joining us for the first time or trying out this, helping us for the first time. And it's very helpful for them to kind of recognize which ports to connect stuff to because when you're stressed out and all that, doing this for the first time, you might want to having this is helpful for volunteers. So one more blue one, which is actually meant for the audio interface. So I'll flip back here right now and show you our stuff. So for audio pickup, we have, we have this thing called the road link. So in, yeah, so the road link is like from road because there's a company that makes microphones and all that stuff. So road, this is a, we got a set, it's called a road camera. Oh gee, camera, what's the name of the thing? But anyway, it's like, so what it does, what it has is as a transmitter. So this one is for the, for where you get the speaker to wear this. It's a wireless mic that the speaker wears. Yeah, so there's a wireless, here's the power mic. So, just plug this right in. Is it called the filmmaker kit? Yeah, filmmaker kit, yes, correct. Yeah, the road filmmaker kit, that's the exact thing. So, yeah, so it has a transmitter with a TX here. So this is what the presenter will wear for speaking. And then there's the receiver, which is over here. So the receiver itself has a line out. The line out goes into our USB sound card. So we're using this thing called the focus write. Okay, I don't know if you can see this here. Focus write, which is like an audio interface. So it has like, yeah, we're a little bit overkill here. But if you want something simple, you can also use a USB sound card. So this guy for the other, so in the case of the audio jack like this, which you can connect to a simple, small USB sound card. So you use USB sound card, it works fine as well. So what I like about this here is that there is a gain control. So you can actually adjust how loud the audio will be so that you can adjust the volume. Whereas with a USB sound card, it might not have that mechanical thing there. You can just turn to increase the volume. So that's what we are looking for, right? So this one connects to the laptop via USB. So it has a USB connector here. So if you're using a USB sound card, like small USB sound card, you can also, it also basically connects to the laptop through the USB port. So yeah, so that's plugged in, I'm gonna power up. So the one thing I like about the road, this road filmmaker set is that the receiver and transmitter can be powered by USB So what I'm doing here is that on the receiver side, I'm actually powering it with a USB adapter. The USB adapter doesn't come with the package, but you just buy it off the shelf, power adapter. We should work just fine. Okay, so I'm powering it up now. And let me also power up the splitter. So here is the splitter itself. I'm gonna connect this to my laptop so you can see whatever I'm presenting later. Yeah, so off-screen you will see, off-screen you actually have the power strip so that kind of powers everything. Okay, yeah, so once again, the three things, the webcam, which is right behind me right now, so I show here, there's a webcam that will basically capture the speaker presenting. I have the screen capture tool over here. The screen capture tool basically captures whatever the presenter is presenting. So this HDMI cable comes from the presenter's laptop into the input and you have two output, one to the screen capture, the other one will be connected to the projector. And of course, the third thing will be the audio interface where we'll be wearing, I'll be wearing a wireless mic. The presenter will basically be wearing this for a wireless mic, just make him wear the thing, right? So once all three is up, then you can start the software on the even media. So the other things on the table, which I'm not showing you yet, these are here, here's a bunch of adapters which are used for different kind of situations. The video adapters used for presenters. So for example, if a presenter comes to us and say, hey, I only have a VGA output from his laptop, so we have a VGA to HDMI adapter, which basically takes this plug into the laptop, the other one plugs into our recording system. There are also other presenters who may have just a laptop that has a display pod like this. So we have a display pod to HDMI adapter. Then we have a MacBook Air, you are a Surface Pro. We also have a mini display to HDMI. Newer MacBooks, we actually have a USB-C to HDMI, or like, if it's at a venue, there's only HDMI to VGA converter, which also is helpful. So it's a bunch of adapters you see that ring along with all our meetups. We also have a backup camera. So the backup camera is used to capture the video of the screen, and also used to capture the audio. So it serves as a backup. So in case our primary system dies, we can recover the footage from this guy. Yeah, any questions so far? Nope. Okay, cool. So once, so everything is just set up here, and on the laptop, all the connectors are connected. So we have the screen capture, the webcam, and then the audio interface. So of course, my receiver needs to be turned on, or other transmitter needs to be turned on, press and hold. Yeah, so green light. Okay, so this is on right now. And yeah, so I'll now switch over to the laptop to show you what's going on in the laptop. Okay, so this is a recording laptop that will be doing the screen capture. So the software we use, again, is OBS Studio. So open this up. Right, so this guy's up. You should see it running, and let me just turn on this guy. Okay, so OBS Studio looks like this. It has, so right now it has a splash screen. So in OBS Studio, we set up a couple of scenes. So these different scenes will basically be, we set us up beforehand. So let me just plug in the USB port right now to my laptop. Hopefully there will flash. Okay, my laptop, which is on the right of me. So I'll just pretend that I'm doing a presentation and I'll just flash this guy. So you can see right now it's actually a screen recording of what is on the presenter's screen on the right, on this one. And then over here in front is the webcam. So it's the other webcam we're seeing. Yeah, so, and of course, you can see this green bar is moving. It's because this wireless receiver is gonna, is what I'll be wearing. Usually you would basically have this. So you see the green bar moving means you're actually receiving audio signal. So yeah, so I'm gonna try and wear this on right now. Okay, so the soft, yeah, OBS is what we use to record all these things. So on the left-hand side are the different scenes that we hand or rather manually do it. So you can create a new class and then you add the difference of video. So if we're adding a source, you click this plus, just add the video capture or you'll be added here on the right. So over here we have a free source webcam background image which is the, what you see here is the engineer's S.G. logo. So I can hide, say the webcam and the screen cap. This is what you see. This is just, this is a PNG file. We basically has reference place holders where you can put your screen capture or something or the webcam or video. So I can hide this right now. Yeah, so, yeah, so I've set up a couple of scenes. So the first scene would be the picture in picture and where we have one versus on the presenter and then one small one for the presenter talking right now. So you can see him, I'm waving right now. So you can see, yeah. And the different scenes here basically has different sizes. So in this case, maybe the presentation slides are a little bit big. Like say, right now the fonts are quite big. So you want to see more of the speaker gesticulating or talking then use this. Or if you go into the Q and A kind of session, you can actually use this to kind of like see the, more of the speaker rather than the presentation slides. In some situations where the presentation is actually showing like, the presenter is showing a four by three kind of image, we can use this as well. Or you just want to focus on the screen. So you have like, for example, some of these pictures, you want to show just the screen, you can do this or video only. So you can see a video only which is me or black, you want to switch to black side by side, which has, I'm supposed to be like over here. So like side by side, yeah. Or you can do overlap. Like this video is overlapping with the other or you want overlap in full screen. So it's kind of like, hi. But usually the first few should be good enough. Usually this is pretty good enough for everything. So to start recording, just click on start recording. And you'll just start recording the videos into your computer. Let me just show you a bit of the settings. Some of the critical things we should set, we should set in your screen capture is the video. So first of all, set your video up to the base canvas to 1080p, so 1920 by 1080, so that you either not 9, 20 by 1080 or 128 zero by 720. So that's 720p. So usually we'll start first with 1080p, like this. And if it's too, if it's, you cause the computer to be laggy, then you can change that. You should change that down to a smaller resolution, which is 128 zero by 720. But this should be the highest resolution can go. Next would be the output. Output setting is where we set up the video recording. So by default it's set to simple. You will switch this to advanced. They can see the settings here. On a Mac, on Windows, for example, it's important you pick the right encoder. So in this case, I'm choosing Quick Sync H264 instead of X. I think by default it's X264 is selected. That is a software video encoder. So software video encoder tends to take up a lot of CPU, whereas you switch to Quick Sync, which is a hardware which relies on the Intel graphics card's own inbuilt video encoding capabilities. It actually reduces the CPU usage. So it's actually quite good. I would recommend using this if you're using Windows. If you're on a Mac, this one you should try to change to the hardware video encoder. There's a one, so again on the Mac, the X264 is selected by default. So if you're on a Mac, change that to the hardware video encoder, which should also reduce the CPU usage. The reason why I want to reduce the CPU usage is that if the CPU utilization is too high, your video may end up being very jerky. Jerky and your audio may get compromised as well. So it's important to select the correct settings for that. And yeah, and then of course, where you save the file. So the recording is where we set up. So by default, I think it picks FLV as a file format. I usually change to MP4 so that it's easier to deal with or import and view. Also, another thing I do try to do is generate a file name without spaces. So sometimes you have video encoding or rather you do some batch scripts in a command line. You have that has made a problem for you. So we're done. So basically to generate with a string. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, that's the key essential thing. If you do live streaming, you also choose this. So this tab here, you can pick that you want to do a stream to a streaming service like Twitch, Facebook Live, or YouTube, you can actually do this all here, right? For example, YouTube, you just need to put a stream key. I won't go into that right now but actually that's about it. I won't go into the streaming stuff because that's really not what this video is about. But if you want to set up the streaming capabilities, just click on start streaming. Make sure you start streaming. So right now, I can click on start recording. So testing one, two, three. So this is not very recording. Okay. Yeah. Hi, hello. So this is actually recording me right now doing my thing. Yeah. So I'm done. Stop. Then I click on file and show recording and that's where my file will be saved. So this is probably today. Yeah, it's today. So this is actually recording. Oops. Sorry. Yeah. Okay. So that's the, so yeah, so that's it. And so when you're, as you're recording this, so click when you start recording, you can actually change between the different scenes and you actually record the different scenes as you record. So if I stop recording and I play back that video, I should be able to see the scene switches when I switch between scene one, scene two, scene three, like right now over here, see? Yeah. So you actually remembers the different scenes. So basically you're doing live editing. Yeah. So this is the default mode that you get into. There's an advanced mode that you could try also, which is we call it a studio mode. So studio mode shows you the, on the right hand side over here is the actual thing that's being recorded. On the left hand side is where you, when you select the different scenes, this is like a staging set up, set up. I want now to transit to this scene, click on transit. You then just record this scene, right? This is a bit more advanced and I would, I would recommend you only do this when you have real experience, but if you're doing it for the first time, I would recommend just changing to, remove the studio mode. Yep. Yeah. Is it clear so far? Yep. You mentioned that you will sometimes do audio post-processing. So where does this come into play? I see you're recording the audio source directly, right? Yeah, I'm recording audio source directly. So let me just switch back to the laptop. Okay. Let me just try to laptop now and... Okay. Yeah. Let me share my screen over here. Okay. So if we go to our, our GitHub, so we have engineers for the win. Yeah. So we go to our GitHub page. There's a thing called GitWiki. So inside here, we have a folder called scripts. Yeah. The scripts folder essentially has all the scripts that we use to, all the scripts that we use for recording, for, sorry, for doing audio processing. So we have a couple of scripts here. One is a multi-norm. Multi-norm.sh basically, normalization and compression of multiple files. So you actually, it relies on two things. It relies on FF impact. As well as another software called Socks. So you don't use this on a Mac. You just need to install these two software using Homebrew. And once you have these two, what it does is that it takes the video file and then it takes the video file and, or rather you point it to, you basically do multi-norm and a folder name. And it will take all the files inside that folder and kind of like, and do the compression on it. It looks like Chi-Liang is in. Can we see Chi-Liang? Hi. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Yeah, I can hear you. Hello. Yeah. So right now I'm just going to run some of the scripts that we use to, that I use to kind of like optimize my videos. So the first script I use is called multi-norm. So this one is actually used to again, to kind of like do audio normalization. So you will record something, an event and the audio is too soft. You can use this to kind of like adjust audio level. It's kind of nice. So it basically acts on a folder. So it takes a folder, you give it a folder name. It takes a, give it a folder name. It will basically run through and kind of like compress or do some audio optimization on all the files inside there. So you record a meetup and you have multiple speakers. You, I break, I usually break it down onto smaller files. And each of the files, I put inside one folder. And then, and then this script will basically process all the files inside the folder. I have two other scripts that I use. One is a split video and trim video. Let me try and see what is this for. Right. So the trim video, the split video for example, is actually used to remove a few minutes off the front or the few seconds off the front of a video. So you have a video where you, maybe you will start recording a bit too early. Then you can use this kind of trim off the front part of the video. And then there's another one, which is a trim video, which actually takes the, I think it's the first, it takes the, removes the tail end of the other video. So it's like, you have, you record a bit too much video towards the end. You can use this kind of trim off the tail end of the video. Go file that thing happens, like zero zero. And then this is where it stops at. Basically what it does is that you will basically trim off the back part of the video. It's useful if you don't want to use a full on like video editor to kind of trim stuff. So these are the few scripts that I use, a multi-norm split video and trim video. So Gen Thumbs is actually something I use to kind of generate a thumbnail. Like it basically looks at the video and find a ZEC frame. You basically tell which key frame you want, like a timecode. Timecode being like hour, minute, second. So you tell the timecode, you basically capture that into a JPEG or a PNG file. So yeah, some of the scripts that we use. So you can go to that, our address, this is git wiki. So we go inside git wiki, so this is a script that we use to edit our videos. And so inside git wiki, we also have our background images. So what I showed earlier, the OBS for example, the events, not events, sorry, backgrounds. So this background has all the images that we use for this, for those things like follow us image. And PNG like this one. Yeah, so this would be helpful for you to constructing your background for the videos, for the OBS videos. I also included, if I'm not wrong, a keynote file. So we use an OBS template keynote. So this one keynote file gives you, it is essentially what I use to generate all these things. So we also have used this in other places like JSCon, for example, OBS. We have some backgrounds that we use there. Yeah, like this. So we actually basically use a keynote file, all this comes out of the same keynote file. So the layout is pretty much the same, picture in picture and a few others there. So we can go use this as a video source in your OBS for the background, for example. So that's git wiki. We also have, in git wiki, we also documented the different ways of doing recording. So if you want to do a basic recording, intermediate with one camera, there's a few other things that we do here. So we can watch this, go through this to kind of see how we evolve into our current day. If you don't want to spend so much on all these equipment that we have, you can look at this and maybe try the one of the more entry-level approaches, not so expensive approaches to this. Yeah, essentially that's all I have, I think. Cool. Yeah, that's, I think that's all I have. Any questions? You mentioned you have different setups or different sets of equipment, like what are the major differences between those? Is this just like a newer version of a splitter or adapter or something like that? In engineers, actually, we have quite like five or six sets. And as much as I can, I try to use the same equipment, I buy the same equipment for the different sets. I set three, set four, we probably have exactly the same stuff inside. So like we have the road link, wireless mic, we have the focus right, audio interface, and pretty much everything, we try to keep it the same as possible. The newer stuff, the newer set that we are buying, we actually try to use the focus we try to get the Fibon screen capture tool instead. So yeah, so this is, again our setup is evolving as well. We're trying different things, like even today, I'm actually trying a different like audio, a cheaper pickup mic. So like what we have here is this thing called the Boya WM4, which is a really much cheaper wireless mic. So compared to the road filmmaker set, and this one is huge right, but this one is really small. Yeah, but there's audio quality. If you are listening to what, to this video right now, this is basically the audio quality you'll get. It's anything costs, okay this thing, this guy costs about $300 sing, I think $300, $400 sing, this one only costs about $90 sing. It's much cheaper. So it's a bit more easier to, for people who want to try, want to do this, like probably cheaper for people who want to try to do this. Yeah, I'm looking at road link in Lazada, it's like thousand seven ringgit, so it's like crazy. Yeah, it's not, it's not cheap. Well, we have, our setup has evolved from, we tried some expensive things like a Sennheiser, we also actually have a Sennheiser wireless mic as well, which is actually used mainly for our conference set. So if we talk about difference, we have more key that than more powerful equipment for our conference recording setup. We also have what we should, I'll show you here today is basically out of the common set that we use for our, most of our, our meetup recording in Singapore. And we're also evolving and trying out what is, what I call a starter kit. So a starter kit of sorts, which, which has things like the boya, which has things like the, this, this fee bond, and essentially all that can fit into a small package like this. So essentially what we're trying to do is move everything into, because what the main complaints that our volunteers have is that to carry that luggage around is kind of like, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of like inconvenient, right? So if we can shrink it down to a small like a little backpack or things that can stuff in the backpack and carry on with you, I think it's just possible. I can share a bit of bomb list right now based on our build materials list, which actually just includes this guy and this guy and then the splitter and a few other things which are a lot cheaper. So set costs about $500, $600 sink, which is a lot cheaper. Yeah. So of course you want to, so the variation is usually in our, in the type of audio interface and audio recordings, audio recording quality that we're going for. Yeah. So that's essentially it. Cool. Right. Since we are also touching on the build material and the cost of stuff, I was just wondering whether you can share like, how, how does engineers, Singapore, funds, all these operations, like, I know that you guys have like a Patreon going on, like, like, how, how do you guys support your operation if you don't mind sharing? Sure. Sure. So no more we have a Patreon page, which we got some money for and we also do some ads on our YouTube channel, but that doesn't give us much money. That's over $200 every two months. The other thing that we do is actually charge a small fee for conference recording. So when we do cover conferences, we do charge a small fee and that money is used to roll into buying new equipment or maintaining our equipment set. Yeah. So that's usually how I do it. Of course, the seed money comes out of my own pocket. Yeah. So, but after a while, recording conferences and all that stuff, it helps in, helps in getting this started. On the side, I also use, I also have a conference that I run. The conference is called PHPConf Asia. So from the PHPConf Asia, we also use that, I also use that as a way of like getting, using some money from that into buying some of the sets that we have here. Yeah. So that's essentially how it got started. Yeah. Great. Great. Thanks for sharing that. And Sophie, do you guys have any questions? We can't hear you. I think your microphone knocked out. Yeah. Can I still get out? Yeah. Well, message. Can't hear you, bro. Can't hear you. Do you accidentally mute yourself? No, right? Anyway, maybe you can message us your question. How? Test, test, test, test. Okay, got it out. Okay. I think I set the threshold too low. I think I ran enough quads and I actually did some conversation with Michael before. So I think I, for right now, I think it's, for me, it should be no-for-wrong now. Oh, okay. But maybe like working out all the captures and stuff, especially when setting up. Yeah. Yeah. Like we really need to look at how we, because we mainly tried on macOS and it's been giving us so many problems. Also, I discovered something today. I was recording, the presenter was using a limit laptop with free land. Apparently, free land doesn't like cloning. So when they, when he sets the screen to clone, the video output doesn't work. So he has to split the screen instead of cloning. So these are all the captures that we'll face during recording. So I think that somehow I have to keep a knowledge base of this kind of tips and tricks somewhere. Right. So yeah, about troubleshooting, maybe I can share with you some of the little tips and tricks that I use for troubleshooting, right? So for troubleshooting, you can see my screen. Can you see the screen right now? Yeah. Okay. So some of the things that we do, or rather some of the problems that we usually have encountered with our setup is when presenters switch between, when you switch between different presenters. And the first thing that usually craps out in us is the the screen capture, for example, when we change from presenter A to presenter B, the screen capture tool still freezes on the old, on the first speaker's last screen. Or another problem that usually happens is when midway through the slide transition, it, for example, the presenter and I was presenting in slide number five on the screen. But over here, our screen capture is presented. We only see screen slide number two. So which means usually that's when we know that the AVerMedia has crapped out on us. So quick way to fix this if you're on a Windows machine is to double click on the screen capture tool like this, click on deactivate and activate again. And that usually reboots the screen capture setup. And that usually helps in getting things restarted. You may lose a few seconds of footage. But as long as we can capture it back, it should be fine. Yeah. So that's the main thing we do for troubleshooting. Restart the screen capture tool. The second thing that usually happens is when the audio craps out in us. So we want our volunteers always keep track of this audio bar over here. So green, yellow, red. So make sure your audio level is always in the between the green and yellow zone. So right now it's not really in the yellow zone. I can increase the volume a bit. So yeah, from this, from the presenter. So yeah, so as long as it's in the yellow zone, it's okay. So usually when what are things could go wrong is suddenly the audio just craps out. So if it craps out, we try our best to see what's going on. So what usually what happens usually is that when the presenter present mute on this guy. So if you're using a road mic like this, sometimes the presenter accidentally kicks mute on the thing. So we have to unmute it. So that's usually what all the things that happen or when the battery runs flat. So sometimes the battery indicator is not very, it doesn't audible like indicator that things are going wrong or battery is low. So usually try, in our set, we try to keep like some spare batteries. So we can switch it out as we go along or when things do go wrong. Nothing that could happen is, you know, if audio goes away, you try to pull out and plug it back in the audio interface. One other thing to check, which I think go through just now. So in the settings page, right, maybe so what we do is in the audio setup audio, I usually just pick the actual device I'm recording. Instead of keeping it to default, I'll just pick the actual device instead of using the default. Because if something goes wrong with your default settings, then you see, you know, yeah. So I usually just pick the actual device I'm recording from. So that will basically help us in. Yeah. So this guy, and I usually mute the other things like webcam and all the other things I usually mute them so you don't have any audio coming from those things. You will turn on the audio on the webcam as well as your recording device. You may not having like echo effect, which you don't want to see. So yeah. Yeah. So that's essentially some of the. Because I think there's a lot of problems we face when we were trying to set up the splitter to go back to the projector. At least that's what the session that we had tried to record previously is when we tried to connect the source to the splitter and then the splitter back to the projector. The projector doesn't like it. I think have you faced any kind of issues like this? Because like from your troubleshooting and from your experience, is that part of the setup pretty stable for you or it's been flaky or so? Yeah. It depends on the splitter that you get. It depends on the quality of the splitter that you get. So usually I get this brand. The brand. Yeah. My review is I actually got this on a recommendation from Michael and it works afterwards. Yeah. Before that, when I tried to record Jimmy's event, it's like chaotic. Like just sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And I took HDT-CP for granted. Then Michael reminded me of this. Yeah. Then I cut it and it works. So I will get this specific brand, Vue HD. You can get this on Amazon. It's a little bit expensive, but 40 plus plus including shipping. But it actually does the trick very, very well. The other thing you could try to get on, you also does the HDT-CP magic trick that Chee-Liang just mentioned. So with this, you can use this with a normal splitter. But for troubleshooting for splitter, usually what we do is we just power cycle the splitter. We turn off the power on the splitter. And we turn off the power on the splitter. And then we pull out all the things like all the connectors, all the HDMI stuff, you pull it all out and power cycle the thing. They plug in one thing at a time. Just to kickstart the video. Usually what the sequence will usually be, the presenter, the presenter HDMI goes in first, then the projector, then the screen capture. So that usually re-kicks the whole thing, reset the whole thing. So power cycling, the splitter is one of the solutions. Another way you could do this is to actually tell the presenter, please use a specific resolution. The recommended resolution I tell my presenters to use is 720p. That's a good resolution for like, in terms of text being legible, and in terms of support in our recording setup. There are some presenters whose default resolution is super, super high, which for some reasons, they may not be supported on the projector or may not be supported on our video capture tool. So we usually tell it, please switch to 720p. That's a good balance of readability of the text as well as support in our video. Yeah, so these are a few tips and tricks I can try. First, you try to reset the HDMI splitter. If it doesn't work, ask them to change the resolution or like what you don't need to try them. On Linux machines, when you are doing screen mirroring, you may give you a very unsuitable resolution. So you got to make sure that they set it up. Usually if you don't mirror it, you can set the resolution independently on the laptop screen as well as the presentation. So that's some of the things that I do. Just to add a bit of my findings, it's actually not necessarily scientific, but it works for me right now. So what I notice is for the splitter, I normally prefer the number one output to be the projector and the second one to the capture. It works for me most of the time. And also sometimes when you plug in the splitter, be a little bit patient because there will be a bit of delay before something show up. So don't quickly to unplug it. So just wait a few like 10 to 20 seconds something like that. I'm not sure, it just works for me that way. Yeah, I agree. I also had the experience where you plug in the thing, it takes like a few seconds for the thing to register that I'm now plugged into this projector or whatever. So it takes a bit of... So another thing you could try to do also is a troubleshooting would be to connect the projector directly to the laptop and see whether it goes out to the projector properly. So just to check that your splitter or whatever else is actually working properly. Yeah, there are some situations also where the power supply for the splitter may be a bit wonky so that if it's connected to the power supply, if it's a bit loose or whatever, you jiggle it the wrong way, it just cuts off power which you get a lower quality stuff, you'll probably be dead. So be careful also how you place all your stuff. So yeah, one thing I've not really talked about is your placement. Where do you put your equipment vis-a-vis the presenter, right? So usually I try to put my laptop as close to the front as possible because the webcam resolution or the range which is capturing the speaker is actually very, it's not very good if it's too far. So try to put it as close as possible to the presenter and then of course where we put our splitter as close to where the projector connectors are. And so the first thing we try to go there to do it when go to a venue is to figure out where the presenter will stand, where the projector is, where the HDMI connectors are to the projector and then that's how we figure out where to put our equipment. And in terms of angle, usually I try to put the webcam on the side profile so you're seeing the side profile of the presenter from the front. So that is roughly better if you put and try to keep your webcam away from the presentation screen because if you have the presentation screen along with your webcam in the picture or whether we have presentation screen and your speaker in the picture it tends to wash out the whole thing. As in you either can't see the presenter properly or the presentation screen will be too bright. So we try to put our webcam like pointing at the presenter but not at the screen at all. As in the screen is a bit too far off to the corner so you won't see it. You get what I mean? Yeah it's like not having the screen as a background for the presenter's video capture right? Yeah correct. So that's important to yeah and then of course audio and what else is there. So when we do a setup at any venue we first thing we try to do is set up our splitter and the presenter's laptop first so that at least when the presenter knows that his stuff can go to the screen he'll be less and less anxious. So then we proceed to set up the rest of our things. So in terms of a sequence we try to set up the splitter and so that at least the projector goes well then we set up our laptop to make sure we can capture it. So chances are if we go to the projector it should be safe coming to our system. Yeah so that's the kind of thing that we do. Yeah and you'll notice that I also have a little setup here. You will look at my camera. You will look at the blue little piece of plastic here. I use this as a kind of like equipment organizer so there's one Velcro here. So that the Velcros are like kind of like so I stick those Saudi species to some of the equipment so I just Velcro it down. So it's kind of nice to kind of like arrange things here like this so that eventually I can store this in a bag like in a bag. So at least translucent bag here that I use to carry this little setup. So yeah it's kind of like and you notice if you look back pack or if I set up here at the corner there yeah that's fine. Here we have a bunch of like carriers and bags and stuff so that's used to yeah arrange and organize your equipment. So that's the usual setup. Yeah cool. Any any questions? Any other questions? All good? Yeah I'm good. Okay yeah if you go to the website you go to our yeah so back to this right. You go to OBS there's actually like under I think background you find there's a JSON file. This JSON file is actually the configuration file for our setup but it's only for Windows though. So what you do is that you you can drop it into your into Windows. Let me show you where that is. So you're on Windows machine. Yeah switch back to this one. So yeah you're looking at in Windows and and you click on file I think there's a settings folder. Yeah so inside here there is this is profile data let's see no not profile data somewhere else hang on basic yeah basic and scenes yeah. So you can actually take that file from GitHub and just throw it in here. It should show up as a scene collection over here. Right so you will appear here as a scene collection you can then edit it to to suit your your setup. So there's one clue. So once because I think it points to our our file path for these images if you drop in that file it can just or you just double click on this and change to the path of your just not mine or something you can use you can use this to capture your to to use your background images. Yep was that clear. Okay yeah so you can use that to get your get your stuff um yeah let's try that cool. Wow okay it's been we've been doing wow. One hour straight with one hour. Wow yeah cool um I'm flies. Yeah uh hope hope hope this session was helpful and useful um and if you have any other questions do feel free to ask me now or can you drop me a mail or a message later in the Facebook Messenger. Sure sure let's see somebody's anyone here I'm just checking whether somebody's watching on YouTube live. Maybe not okay two watching so anyway. Right uh yeah I wish you all the best um do share with me your experiences as well like anything that you learned during the course of your setting up your setup equipment or when you're sharing your stuff was quite helpful also and I've been I've been doing this for like a couple of years so there's a lot of this knowledge is kind of stuck in there uh I try my best to kind of share but sometimes it's nothing compares to just troubleshooting on your own and figuring yeah uh oh yes one other thing that I actually have in in the github uh if you go to the github page there is actually a section called the guide book so the guide book was something I I prepared just for the for prison so that kind of like tells you what to look out for our packing list stuff that we have in the in the bag setup procedure so it says find a suitable location take note of where the video cable for the projector is located take note of where the power nearest power socket is located does the venue have a table for you to place equipment if not get a stable chair you know set up your power strip so that then you can serve the rest of the equipment on top of your around your power strip uh set up hdmi splitter hdmi cable so the presenter and organizer can check what's going on uh if it's not realistic to keep the splitter on the equipment organizer just remove it and put it in position near the speaker and video keep you to cable uh place the laptop do not switch it on yet so basically the recording laptop put it up somewhere where you're going to be your table whatever connect the charger and set up the tripod the webcam so why have I actually have a note on my on on on the laptop which says to connect all usb before starting computer right so you basically connect all the usb ports before you start the start the laptop yeah so yeah connect all the cables usb cables and stuff uh wireless transmitter make sure the lapel mic is turned on make sure there's enough power start the computer then you start the computer and start obs studio and once and you can usually what you have time start try to do a good good try to do a capture so that at least you can figure out whether your your screen capture is doing is doing working properly yeah sometimes to test for whether the audio is out of sync yeah yes so um one of the tricks I do to make sure stuff is uh not it's still in sync uh is to uh just restart obs once in a while all obs kind of like craps out and just um video is out it's out of sync so usually what I do that is I just restart it another thing is that make sure your audio just use this audio instead use this as mic auxiliary device as the only audio instead of like adding audio one by one over here you can add the audio device but I'd rather use the mix the main audio set main audio thing I think in the past what I did was I tried to add the audio as a separate source which actually caused it to be even more out of sync whereas if you switch to uh using this mic auxiliary it usually keeps in sync but if it does really go really badly out of sync there is actually a way to fix it you go to I think advanced audio properties so you can kind of like move the move the off sync offset you can actually move this a few times a few a few milliseconds in the past I I when I was using an older setup the older version of obs had a lot of bad audio sync issues so I had to like adjust it to quite a few milliseconds away so that was kind of a pain but yeah right so that is essentially it la what else is there oh there's actually that document that I have let me try and see where I can bring that up let me try and bring out the other document yeah okay so I'll share this link with you guys in a while and I actually prepared a document for when I was doing forced asia and if for me I think somehow seems to be a pretty good thing uh right now let me just show you this so yeah this one I'll link I'll share this with you guys right so yeah so what this is is like a volunteers guide um you know to start launch obs before you start help the presenter wear the wireless mic help the presenter to connect the laptop uh it's a screen capture okay uh it's a video feed okay uh it's audio level okay uh but okay but good to try and basically try to do a recording just to see everything works out properly start recording click on start recording uh it's okay to start a little bit earlier so they capture a few seconds before the start so it's actually okay to start a bit earlier la because I rather have some extra footage that I can trim out rather than no footage at all right so you notice you click click start it actually doesn't actually record at that point where click start they actually only starts writing to file maybe a split or one or two split seconds after that so usually it's okay to start a bit earlier um one other thing I also try to do is that uh make sure that screen is not the screen that you see in obs is in sync with what is being presented so it's always good to be alert la sometimes you freezes up then it's quite bad you might just crash that's an unfortunate also la so be careful but uh I actually emailed them and they released a patch afterwards really that's a new version for a latest version 2018 so the support is really good oh yeah yeah the obs guys they've been updating the software quite regularly which is good uh it's a lot more stable now than when it used to be when I first started like 2020 2013 so yeah so also nothing I also try to do is look at the file check that the file size is actually the file is actually growing there were there was one there were a couple of times where I thought I was recording but it actually didn't record at all which is quite quite scary so after that one time that things failed so badly immeasurably I would click on like file view uh view recordings to kind of like look at the file and make sure that the file is actually growing as I'm recording so so during the recording also make sure the the president is always in view in the video feed so it's like the webcam like right now I when I do this I'm actually seated down but sometimes in most situations the presenter may be may want to walk around you may start strolling left and right and stuff like that so that's that proves to be challenging so you what you want to do is you present as a volunteer you want to make sure your camera is always on the on the presenter and turn the rotate the mic the webcam or even reposition the webcam tripod so that you can get a better angle of the of the presenter uh yeah the change scenes are properly to focus on presented presentation or the speaker usually for q and a we only we use the sets we use the video only seen so that you only see the speaker talking to the people in the audience um in some setup we actually have a separate mic to record the audio of the q and a but usually the web the wireless mic that we have now should be good enough to capture the background audio as well so that would be good enough for q and a um yeah so at the end of presentation uh after presentation perhaps uh during q and a do remember uh after the q and a uh do to stop the recording so basically we have a work one a separate video for each of the presentation uh why why we do this is so that it's easier for people to search for videos and watch videos uh watch different uh segments of the talk after the talk like in mid up in singapore usually we have two or three uh two or three speakers so we try we keep we just record one video per speaker so we stop and start between them after the presentation remember that we treat the wireless mic there are some times that the speaker just walks away and for like to return you the mic so just basically ensure that they return it to you um and remember the click start recording again before i want to add something on the stop like there's there's a buffer period so if you stop you actually lose several seconds of depending on your buffer setting you lose several seconds of the video so uh let the speaker finish and like give it like some some time before you stop it really or else you lose that final few seconds of it yeah so if you look at our setup right sometimes we also we have this thing called um follow us so we use this as a closing slide uh usually that will be you know add some virality we need to but you know so yes it's just optional we're not always uh required yeah so yeah what else is there and um oops i was like oh yeah here yeah okay troubleshooting if the screen freezes just you know double click on the screen capture deactivate it reactivate audio is off check the cables are okay uh make sure that the speaker didn't accidentally mute the wireless mic so that's usually the main reason why things go wrong or also the battery level so if battery dies on the on the transmitter or receiver then you have to make sure you just we just um change the batteries if those situations which is those are situations where i i really appreciate that we have we we have a backup um we have a backup camera that we have and this camera is actually used we use is the point at the presentation slide uh at the same time it also records audio so the we can if things go wrong uh or if our audio goes out or crash or laptop crashes we can use this to kind of like fill in the gap that few seconds when things are not in sync or when your laptop crashes you use this to kind of like reconstruct the presentation even pick up the lost few seconds that is in between now this this is uh this Sony web uh handy camera it's only cost about two three hundred dollars on lasada which is it's not very high res but it's 720p um i actually use this uh as a primary camera at at uh ruby ruby conf kl yeah so it's actually quite okay la it has optical zoom as well so it's kind of nice so so why why i point it at the screen is because the slides are really the thing you want to do that we find most important um so we want you want to destroy what we call this we call the slides and the audio of course on these things actually decent it's not awesome it's just decent um and yeah so yeah that's about it uh yeah i think i'm okay uh i don't have any and uh guys if you have any i want to add something to the like audio level like uh why why is it like you have to keep it in between green and yellow uh when you monitor it even though like sometimes when rate sounds really good like because it's very loud but when you when you look at the product the the file that you recorded it might be popping like crazy then that that the audio is not usable so when it's red it's not good news so try to keep it like uh upper green and middle yellow is the best that's the reason when you monitor it's very tempting like you you push it all up and it's very clear for you and the product isn't yeah that's my little tips so yeah keeping audio keep the audio level uh moderate should be good enough i agree i i like that the latest version obs actually shows you the the the green bar so like it has now has a color indicator last time this thing you never used to be there right so latest version actually has this color indicator and even the uh the the decibel level and all that stuff if it gets a bit too hot you can one tip we can try to do is actually reduce it like over here right now you can just reduce it over here yeah but usually at maximum should be fine lower is fine because you can push process it but if it's too much then the audio is destroyed so yeah correct so the the script i have uh usually can fix like if it's too soft too loud we usually can fix it for you which is kind of nice um one other thing i which may not be an option you guys want to use is that for my volunteers i actually have a website which i provision for them to upload files i can do a quick demo of how it looks like if yeah so i actually prepared a website um that looks something like so it's load.engineers.sg to the end of the day my volunteers here and they pick the file pick the event that they're recording to upload it will pre-populate with the data for that particular event and what you do is just browse for the file and upload it it's a real set that i wrote and it essentially has um it also uses like an nginx server to kind of like do uh do some stuff yeah to yeah so you can find the source code somewhere here i think it's esg servers so this is the source code for that particular project yeah it has an ansible script and where you can use to prepare your own application and stuff um optional don't have to do this uh we're still small enough so right now i just give everybody access to the youtube account right now yeah at least right now because we're still very small yeah so what i did in the early days was i i just grant admin access to all my volunteers and they and they essentially can upload um the videos on their own to our youtube channel so which is kind of helpful uh this one is uh pretty organized if it's when it comes to like more and stuff yeah so for force asia i think when we did force asia sofi was there right for force asia we actually had a separate website just prepared for force asia it was just like upload of force asia dot engineers dot esg or something like that so and then basically it's a separate site which has even down to the track level uploads so we can upload a video file targeted at a particular track that's the kind of customization we can do but we don't always do it but as a proof of as a proof of its effectiveness in force asia we were able to upload like 200 videos in in three days yeah three three four days we will upload 200 videos so again it was all distributed and all the volunteers were uploading the files on their own the server side actually does it actually runs through the script to normalize the audio and then push the file to youtube and all that stuff right yeah it's a bit of an overkill if you're just running a small outfit but it would be nice if you do actually grow to that level yeah it's very nice thanks yeah i mean i could polish it up and offer it as a service but let me think about it yeah okay yep okay i think that's it um thank you so much michael thank you thank you very much thank you very much thank you for your time all right see you again bye you guys bye