Newbie question - how to capture video from a selected area

[simonides]

I've been using OBS Studio for a couple of days to capture webinars and I'm very impressed. I love the way I can set the duration of the recording and that the resulting video file is relatively compact compared with some other programs I've used for this purpose. One thing that eludes me so far is how to capture video from a selected area rather than the whole screen? Is this even possible ?

Thanks in advance!

 

[koala]

You can use window capture to capture one window only, and/or you can use the crop filter or just press and hold down the ALT-key and drag the borders of the source to crop to some smaller area.

 

[simonides]

ah, I realise I was using Display Capture. I'll experiment further.

thanks for helping!

 

[simonides]

I've been experimenting further with Display Capture and Window Capture, and I just can't work seem to be able to define the area I want to record, if not the whole screen. Here's an example, I'm playing something on VLC media player, I have menu commands and icons etc. at the top and bottom of my screen, some from Windows, and some from VLC media player, that I don't want to record so how do I set the area to record? I'm using two screens, one with the material to record, and the other displaying OBS Studio - does that make any difference?

Koala mentioned a "crop filter" but I'm not sure what that is, or where to find it, sorry for being such a newbie!

thanks!

 

[koala]

Right click your source->Filters. Add a crop/pad filter and configure the numbers to cut as much lines from the borders. As alternative to this crop filter, click on the source in the preview, so the borders appear as red. Then press and hold down the ALT key and drag the red borders with the mouse at the handles. Move the border, so you crop the source accordingly.
It's not clear why you want to capture the vlc window - if you want to capture a stream, you can include it directly by using the VLC media source of OBS, or better you use one of the many stream downloader apps to directly download the stream data.

 

[simonides]

thanks, I'll work on that. The reason I was capturing the vlc window was that I'd previously captured a number of webinars with a different product but realized that as were each .avi files over 6GB in size, it was inefficient to store. OBS Studio let me save them as .mkv files occupying about 150MB. Fantastic! Where would I find the VLC Media source? I only see Media Source (among others) - Is that what you mean?

 

[koala]

If you install VLC with the same bitness as OBS (usually 64-bit), and if you install it to the standard location recommended by the installer, a "VLC media source" should automatically appear in the list of source types OBS is offering with adding a new source. OBS detects the VLC installation and uses the VLC dlls for playback in this case.

 

[qhobbes]

If you just need to re-encode large .avi files, you can just use VLC for this by going to the Media menu and selecting the Convert / Save... option.