OBS is commonly used for video game streaming, but it's a great tool for any scenario where you need to take live audio and video from different sources and display them at the same time or transition between them.
I've been using it to make a corny music interview show with my local musician friends during the coronavirus shelter in place. Whereas a lot of my fellow musicians are streaming from their phone, I'm able to connect a mixer to my computer and stream the show with really good audio quality.
The B in OBS hints at streaming, but it's also fantastic for purely recording. It's honestly surprising how lacking that space was before OBS. I remember using FRAPS/Taksi a bit, and stuff like Camtasia, but there were all pretty awful to be honesty and definitely not free or open source.
I really like using the recording feature to do sound checks. We go through all of our checks, then I watch the video locally in VLC. That way I'm certain when it goes live it'll sound the way it's supposed to.
I wish more people would do this. Or maybe OBS should have some (opt-out) warnings for when your audio is either unbalanced, too low or too loud. I seen way too videos or streams with bad audio levels.
It feels like OBS has been here forever but I remember the days when I had to use Camtasia. The software was actually surprisingly good and easy to use but for the amount you were paying, it wasn't worth it, not to mention the proprietary recording format wasn't doing it much good.
Agreed. I used it just this week to record my screen (have used it in the past for streaming) and was blown away at not only how easy it was to use, but how small the files were and how well it integrated the encoders my system supported.
I've been using it to make a corny music interview show with my local musician friends during the coronavirus shelter in place. Whereas a lot of my fellow musicians are streaming from their phone, I'm able to connect a mixer to my computer and stream the show with really good audio quality.