1. Is this a free software for recorded times of up to 1.5 hrs? (we plan to record 2 episodes at once due to international time zones, coordination/collaboration)
Completely free. Period. No trial. No watermarks. No time limit. Etc.
Don't get suckered into whatever you might find elsewhere offering to sell it to you.
2. Do we need someone with a tech background to set up or is this fairly user friendly to install on PC and easily used?
Well, some people seem to have trouble finding the "any" key (press any key to continue)... ;-)
That said, there's an Auto-Configuration Wizard that does a quick stress-test on your machine to see what it can keep up with. It even runs automatically the first time you start OBS. It doesn't take much to run the wizard and keep its recommendations, but if you want to tweak it, there's all kinds of opportunity for that too!
3. What is the most conscise and simplest tutorial to use for install/set up/settings and how to record clear hi-def video?
That depends a lot on your personal mindset. What's clear for one person might be hopelessly confusing to another and vice versa. Different people on your team will probably need different tutorials for that same reason.
A "shotgun" approach seems to work well here. Somewhere in all of those search results, is one that resonates with you specifically.
Personally, I like the ones that explain *why* something is misbehaving or *why* they recommend that you do a certain thing a certain way, so I can apply that reason to a different situation and get a different answer that actually works, instead of wrecking it with something that worked "over there" but not "here" for reasons that were never explained.
4. Are there troubleshooting tips in advance to know about?
The newer capture methods that try to grab something specific directly, still have bugs in them. Things like Application Audio, Game Capture, etc.
The older methods that grab whatever's on the screen regardless of how it got there, and the same for an audio device, are pretty much bulletproof. But you then have to control by other means, what ends up in each of those destinations.
It may help to have a dedicated screen for OBS to capture. And then whatever you want it to capture, you put on that screen. Everything else goes on a different screen.
Likewise for audio. Have a dedicated sound card that may or may not even be wired to anything, but it's something to send an application's sound to, for OBS to pick up.
It may also help to not create any content at all on the OBS machine, but have a different machine do that and run an HDMI cord from there to a capture device that feeds OBS. "Separation of duties" often works wonders.
It sounds to me like you're recording VR, so if you have a dedicated machine for each viewpoint, camera, whatever you call it, each feeding a different HDMI capture port on the OBS machine as if they were cameras, that might work pretty well.
Back to audio, OBS's audio processing is pretty bad. The quality is there - no trouble with a small channel count and minimal processing - but if you're doing much beyond a stereotypical bedroom gamer/streamer, you should take a serious look at doing all of your audio work outside of OBS and giving it only the final finished soundtrack to pass through unchanged. The two general ways to do that are with a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation: dedicated audio app on the same machine as OBS), or with a physical console.
I have rigs that go both ways for different purposes. The physical console is not portable, but it keeps the OBS "Desktop Tower" PC focused entirely on the picture. (separation of duties) The DAW on the same laptop keeps that rig portable and self-contained.
And on the topic of laptops, most are not designed for media production. They're designed for portability, to such an extent that the advertised specs only last a handful of seconds before they overheat and throttle way back. The idea there is to load something quickly, and then do nothing while the user looks at it. If you're doing media on a laptop, it really needs to be a "mobile workstation", that actually has decent cooling, which dictates a fair amount of weight and size.
