Because of the class I signed up for, I find myself needing to record and upload screencasts in order to turn in assignments. This caught me by surprise a little bit. I’ve never configured my system to do good ones, and didn’t really know where to begin on a Linux machine.

My workstation is KDE Plasma 5 on Fedora Workstation 31.

Here’s my setup so far:

  • Corsair VOID wireless gaming headset. Acquired refurbished from Micro Center a while back. It’s much better than the laptop microphone, but if I were going to need to do this often, I’d want a real mic.

  • OBS Studio for capturing video and audio from the PC.

  • Kdenlive for editing the video, adding voiceovers and encoding/compressing/exporting the video.

So far, I have found that I really need a script in order to pace myself and avoid filler words. It’s also hard to demonstrate features of a game while reading or talking.

My keyboard is too clicky to record the voice track at the same time as I perform the demo.

The OBS settings wizard produces terrible defaults on my setup; video quality once converted and put on YouTube was atrocious. I should do a follow-up post on the settings that do work well. Likely once I have another screencast or two under my belt.

This is my least favorite part of the course so far, but I’m definitely learning things.

I’m trying on Kev Quirk’s “100 Days To Offload” idea. You can see details and join yourself by visiting 100daystooffload.com.