No File Images Appearing in Any Application Windows Recorded in OBS Studio 27.2.4

[Jeff Lemke]

I have watched prescribed demo videos for OBS Studio, but my screen doesn't show what the demo video screens show. I'm running Windows 7 Pro and am trying to record my Adobe Premiere CS6 user interface screen to create a demo. I can get OBS Studio to show Premiere's user interface, but it will not show the content of any file that's open in Premiere's stage window, nor will OBS show or record any drop-down function dialogue boxes in Premiere. The same thing happens with Photoshop. OBS will show and record Photoshop's base user interface, but will not show or record any file window that's open in Photoshop, nor any drop-down function dialogue boxes. Is there an incompatibility between Win 7 and the latest OBS Studio I'm running, or is there a setting I need to change somewhere?

 

[WBE]

Depending on the software you record, any popup windows, hovering GUI elements, etc. might be considered as different windows. In such cases you can try to use a Display Capture source instead, since that... captures anything on that display.

A drawback when having only one screen: OBS Studio itself will be on it too. You'd have two options: after pressing Start Recording, minimizing OBS and do your demo. Afterwards use some simple video editing software to cut away the first few seconds of the recording and the last few.
Or: assign a hotkey to Start Recording and Stop Recording and have OBS minimized entirely when recording the demo. Think thoroughly about which hotkey to use, you won't be the first to have the spacebar assigned to recording and find yourself ended up with dozens of small chuncks of video when typing...

In both cases: do some testing to familiarize yourself with that way of working! And have any email or antivirus popups etc. disabled that might show up at that display.

 

[Jeff Lemke]

Depending on the software you record, any popup windows, hovering GUI elements, etc. might be considered as different windows. In such cases you can try to use a Display Capture source instead, since that... captures anything on that display.

A drawback when having only one screen: OBS Studio itself will be on it too. You'd have two options: after pressing Start Recording, minimizing OBS and do your demo. Afterwards use some simple video editing software to cut away the first few seconds of the recording and the last few.
Or: assign a hotkey to Start Recording and Stop Recording and have OBS minimized entirely when recording the demo. Think thoroughly about which hotkey to use, you won't be the first to have the spacebar assigned to recording and find yourself ended up with dozens of small chuncks of video when typing...

In both cases: do some testing to familiarize yourself with that way of working! And have any email or antivirus popups etc. disabled that might show up at that display.

Thanks for your reply, WBE. This seems like either a bug or a weird oversight on OBS's part if their multi-source capture software cannot capture all the dialogue boxes and open file windows in an application. I'm finding this hard to believe since OBS Studio is now in its 27th version.

So what would be a true Display Capture source, and what would you recommend?

 

[WBE]

It's not a bug, but a matter of your choices and what you're aiming to do... If you'd like OBS Studio to capture a specific window, it can do that by using a Window Capture source (note: Window is singular). When i.e. capturing a PowerPoint presentation, this works fine. In such situations you do not have to bother with any other program windows, popups etc. that may appear on top of it. So there are advantages to using Window Capture.

But a Window Capture source is not the best option if the program you'd like to capture has multiple windows (that are actually considered multiple windows by the Operating System). In such situations a Display Capture source might be the best choice.
https://obsproject.com/wiki/Sources-Guide

So what would be a true Display Capture source, and what would you recommend?

Is is actually called a Display Capture source. At the Sources list, click the Add (plus) icon and look for this source type.

 

[Harold]

There's also limitations in how much of the windows are shown to obs in the APIs used to capture windows, that's why the menus and such don't show in window capture.

 

[koala]

OBS not capturing overlayed windows like menus or dialog windows or the additional layers of the apps you mention is a design decision by the OBS developers, not a bug, and not an oversight.

As far as I know, capturing such secondary windows would be a huge amount of work to implement and may be not fitting in the current programming design. I assume, since you can always use Display Capture as workaround, actual work on such a feature has probably not very high priority, if at all.

 

[Jeff Lemke]

Thank you all for your input. I changed my approach from using Window Capture to Display Capture, and that worked fine, although it also required me to carefully manually size the Premiere window on my QHD-resolution (2650 x 1440) monitor to precisely match the 2K resolution of my desired video resolution output, then carefully position the full OBS display capture window so the Premiere window would exactly fit my video program window in Premiere so there'd be no resizing necessary (in order to maintain maximum image sharpness). This also makes me wonder what use Window Capture has in OBS Studio. Anyway, I was able to successfully record what I needed this way.