Question / Help How to zoom in to mouse cursor while recording

You can prepare couple of cloned (Add Existing) scenes/sources with different regions enlarged and switch between this scenes. Or wait until someone add to the studio something like "animation", to be able to change the size of the sources realtime.
 
It's really quite simple to zoom in while recording, open Magnifier and when recording place your mouse in the area you'd wan't to zoom and on your keyboard press "Windows Key" and "+" or "-" to zoom in or out.
 
The problem with using any Windows magnifier is that OBS Studio's own cursor gets captured as well. Even if you disable OBS's cursor, it won't be of any benefit as now you never see a cursor throughout your entire stream/recording. This is because OBS is not capturing the system cursor, but emulating it virtually.

What could be done is OBS have a Hotkey settings option that turns on/off it's cursor when a third party magnifier program is invoked through the same hotkey.
 
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Actually would be lovely to have a built in magnifier within OBS a single shortcut key away. When initiating any Windows functionality there is always the chance something to go wrong. ;-) And how would you zoom to specifically show the score or bring the attention to a certain area of the map within full screen games? An additional effect for the mouse cursor itself is not a bad idea as well.
 
I have just registered to give my recommendation. You can use the software Glassbrick. It runs in the background and will zoom to the cursor when you are hitting the hotkey on your mouse or keyboard. For example the standard configuration is Alt+Tilde key (the one left to number 1).

After hitting that combination, the screen will be zoomed in approximately 200% at the location of the cursor and it will follow the cursor. Display Capture in OBS will recognize that zoom. Hitting the same combo again will revert everything back to normal. No glitches, no extra work. Literally as convenient as it can be.

Does it work in fullscreen games? Don't know. But it works in regular desktop work. I believe, it's also available for Mac. Oh, and it's free (unless you want to donate and support them)
 
Glassbrick seemed very promissing. Thanks Marclee.
Sadly the guy put lots of efforts in the UI, lots of options : Really nice.
BUT : I tried to define dozens of shortcuts for Zoom In, Zoom Out. And even the weirdest ones (to avoid keyboard conflicts of any kind) do not work with most applications.
Try Glassbrick with a simple notepad for example. As long as Notepad is in the foreground, none of your shorcuts will zoom. You have to click on the desktop to make the shortcuts work : Glassbrick is funny but useless.

The best way to get a zoom on something you're doing : use a simple yet ultra powerful video compositer such as Davinci Resolve, and re-work your OBS records later.
 
Not sure if anyone is still following this, but I wrote a small, single executable .NET program (for Windows only, tested only on Windows 10 x64) called Magic Window. It's essentially a useless, function-less Window invisible to us, but not OBS. OBS will capture the contents of the window, but we are free to interact with anything and everything else.

I say "us" because I made it for myself to solve this problem. Potentially others may benefit from it, so they can find it here on this thread as well. I will only continue to develop it if there's incentive to.

You have to configure OBS to capture a Window and configure it not to capture the cursor. It kinda sucks that I'm not able to easily capture the entire display's composition including the mouse, but I get around this by drawing a cursor onto the invisible form.

The behavior is that if the bounds of the "magic window" is outside the primary display, it forces itself back in. Expect the cursor to always be drawn in the center IF the window is within the bounds of the display entirely. There's no "gliding", OBS will see a 16:9 image painted onto a Windows form that you cannot see/nor interact with.

By default, this window is sized to 854x480 and paints a zoomed-in image 24 times a second, but the size and FPS are configurable by passing command line arguments, like:

MagicWindow.exe -width 1280 -height 720 -fps 60

Optionally, in the system tray (the only user-friendly way to kill the app) you can select preset resolutions and/or halve the current form's size, or double it. Tested on Windows 10 only. I assume that it will work on any machine with .NET 4.5 installed, but it might not work on stuff like Windows RT because this .NET app does rely on system calls to set window features that cannot be done in .NET.
 

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wow thanks caharkness for sharing this! only thing i cannot figure out is to make this work with my multiple monitors. it seems to only magnify display 1 which happens to be the display OBS sits on. any advice on how i can change the display or even make it see my extended displays? Thanks
 
44Forge said:
wow thanks caharkness for sharing this! only thing i cannot figure out is to make this work with my multiple monitors. it seems to only magnify display 1 which happens to be the display OBS sits on. any advice on how i can change the display or even make it see my extended displays? Thanks
Click to expand...

I was curious about the same thing and will be making updates to my software to fix this, but if OBS cannot capture a window's content across multiple monitors, it might not be something I can fix.

Actually, half way through writing this reply, I figured out the math required to capture from multiple-monitor geometry. On my setup, it works flawlessly. I'm considering uploading this as a resource so anybody can find it easily without having to hunt down this thread.

The update has quite a lot different with it. It supports making your own configurations/profiles that can be accessed while running. See the "profiles.txt" file and compare that to what you see in the menu when right-clicking the Magic Window icon in the tray.

Here's the official resource: https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/magic-window.823/
 

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caharkness said:
I was curious about the same thing and will be making updates to my software to fix this, but if OBS cannot capture a window's content across multiple monitors, it might not be something I can fix.

Actually, half way through writing this reply, I figured out the math required to capture from multiple-monitor geometry. On my setup, it works flawlessly. I'm considering uploading this as a resource so anybody can find it easily without having to hunt down this thread.

The update has quite a lot different with it. It supports making your own configurations/profiles that can be accessed while running. See the "profiles.txt" file and compare that to what you see in the menu when right-clicking the Magic Window icon in the tray.

Here's the official resource: https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/magic-window.823/
Click to expand...
I haven't gotten to using this yet but just found this and by the sounds of it , it may work for my purposes; I am going to give it a whirl after I post , just wanted to bump this thread and give you props ! If it doesn't pan out for me , thanks anyway for putting in the work for "us", haha , very cool of you !! Will be back with an update ASAP.
 
SumDim said:
The problem with using any Windows magnifier is that OBS Studio's own cursor gets captured as well. Even if you disable OBS's cursor, it won't be of any benefit as now you never see a cursor throughout your entire stream/recording. This is because OBS is not capturing the system cursor, but emulating it virtually.

What could be done is OBS have a Hotkey settings option that turns on/off it's cursor when a third party magnifier program is invoked through the same hotkey.
Click to expand...


I disabled the obs cursor, but still the Windows cursor was recorded and it worked great
Tested version obs 27.1.3
 
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