Any way to shut off keyboard input to OBS while recording?

[Bobw111]

Trying to us OBS to record training similar to the way I use Camtasia. Seems to work OK until I hit just the right keystrokes then OBS jumps out of the scene I was recording (display 1 plus audio) and into other scenes I have set up.

Is there any way to restrict OBS to just one scene as long as recording is happening when using a StreamDeck Controller?

Or am just trying to whizz in a hurricane?

 

[koala]

OBS isn't changing a scene of his own. You told OBS to change the scene. If you don't want this, you need to make sure you don't accidentally change the scene.

You change the scene in OBS with 3 different things usually:

1. you click the new scene in the OBS window.
How to avoid this: don't point your mouse on the OBS window while you're in the app you're recording. The most easy way to accomplish this is minimizing the OBS window. No window means not being able to click it. The best thing is to minimize OBS to the system tray with settings->General->System tray->Always minimize to system tray instead of task bar. It even protects you from switching to OBS by pressing the Windows hotkey ALT-TAB.

2. OBS is the foreground app, the focus is on the "scenes" widget and you press an up/down or pgup/pgdown key or some letter, so OBS changes the scene accordingly.
How to avoid this: don't make OBS the foreground window while you're in the app you're recording. The most easy way to accomplish this is minimizing the OBS window. No window means not being able to click it to make it the foreground window. The best thing is to minimize OBS to the system tray with settings->General->System tray->Always minimize to system tray instead of task bar. It even protects you from switching to OBS by pressing the Windows hotkey ALT-TAB.

3. you defined a hotkey in OBS with settings->Hotkeys to directly activate some scene.
How to avoid this: go to settings->Hotkeys and remove any hotkeys connected to activating some scene. If you need such a hotkey, change it to something more difficult to press, so you avoid activating it accidentally while you're in the app you're recording.

 

[FerretBomb]

Do note that hotkeys in OBS are hotkeys, not shortcuts. So if you define a hotkey on H, and a hotkey on CTRL+H, both will trigger when you press CTRL+H.
Any time you press a hotkey for any reason, regardless of other buttons also being pressed, it will activate. By design, as that's how it works in professional studio environments.

 

[Bobw111]

Thanks. Obviously I'm new to OBS. I thought I was getting around the scene switching by having OBS running on my second monitor (Display 2) and doing all the work in other applications on my primary monitor (Display 1). I'll have to play with this problem a bit more and pin down what is happening and take a close look at the Hotkeys in OBS. I had to get this recording out, so I used Camtasia for it. However, OBS is my newest hammer and you know what they say about a kid and a hammer... Thanks again for the info. I'm printing it off and hanging it on the wall.

 

[koala]

A second monitor is just an extension of your Windows desktop. Apps running on the second monitor don't stop running and don't stop accepting keyboard and mouse input. The monitor is just extended screen space.

If it is new for you having a second monitor, and the thing you're recording is a game that is running in exclusive (true) fullscreen mode on your primary monitor, not in windowed fullscreen mode, keep in mind there are games that let the mouse "escape" from the primary monitor if one uses the mouse near the screen border. This is an especially nasty behavior, because it makes the game vanish (minimized to the task bar). It is minimized, because fullscreen games that lose focus get minimized by Windows, no way around this. This is a shortcoming of the game. OBS is only a victim of that bad mouse behavior, because it is just hit randomly by the escaped mouse pointer. I suffered from this behavior while playing Guild Wars 2.
A direct workaround for this is not possible, except fixing the game by the game developers. Or not using a second monitor. Or switching the game to windows fullscreen mode and at the same time keep track of the mouse even in combat situations and make sure you never let the mouse move over to the other monitor. This is quite difficult to achieve. There exist helper apps that try to restrict the mouse to the game window, but no helper app is perfect.

 

[Bobw111]

Thanks for the reminder about the second monitor. I was hoping that the OBS software ran in its own memory space for the keyboard buffer, but it's acting to me like it is not. I'm doing something much more evil that running a game on my primary monitor. I'm running Adobe Character Animator, Premiere Pro, Adobe Audition, Photoshop, and either Corel VideoStudio Screen capture or Camtasia 2020 recorder at the same time. Granted I'm doing it on a Dell XPS 8920 I7 with 48 GB of ram and a NVIDIA GTX 1060 with 6GB ram, I'm still knocking the poor thing to it's knees. To make matters worse, I've got 42+ years as a programmer sooooo... of course I think I can just ignore the manual (well... never read it actually) and everything will run the way I want it to because "If I wrote the software it would work that way."

Think I better stick with Camtasia for screen capture, and stick with OBS for Streaming... once I learn it.

I do greatly appreciate the help!