OBS Open Broadcast System, Slack and Google Slides tips and tricks

OK, now that I’ve been using it for a bit here are some simple tips and tricks for OBS

  1. When you first install it. To get the virtual camera working you need to reboot the machine. Thanks @mcqueen for discovering that one!
  2. If you have a font you like, you can use WhatTheFont to figure out what it is so for instance Trajan is a beautiful Roman font inspired by the Trajan Column from 113 AD
  3. It uses the System fonts that are on your computer. So if for instance you want Adobe Trajan, then there is a free font called Trajax that you can download. Whatfontis.com is a great resource for finding similar fonts FYI
  4. Then when you click on it, on MacOS, it will start Fontbook and you can install it. Note that it will give an error about the name of the font. But it works.
  5. Then go to OBS and add a Text item and then in the Font area, you can select Trajax. Then ou can select a color.
  6. If you have multiple font colorsl then you can copy and paste things and put them together.
  7. Finally, if you have a video you can load it and you can resize it at the corners and if you want to crop. Hold the ALT or Option key and you can shrink it.
  8. The same ting works for Video Capture.

Dealing with fonts on Google Slides and Docs

Sadly unlike Word and PowerPoint, these have minimal font controls. You can only use Google Fonts, so if you want to use a font like Trajen, you have to find the nearest equivalent which is Cinzel Medium. It still doesn’t have the right tracking so it looks a bit condensed.

Slack Sections

If you are using paid Slack, at last, you can get rid of the huge long line of channels. At one point in one company, we have 200 channels that were all identical. How confusing. But with Slack Sections, you can create sections and one-level folders which is pretty nice. The confusing thing of course is that this only works on the web interfaces. You can right-click on the channel and choose Move and then you can go to an existing section or create a new one.

And when you close them the notification icon shows you the sum of all the channel updates. Very handy! Now you have say a dev section and a biz section.

I’m Rich & Co.

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