Elgato Stream Deck for convinient controlling video recordings

Video recordings of yourself and the screen you want to show something on are not that easy. My tool for this has been OBS Studio for years, which is also excellent at recording the screen.

Introduction

With OBS Studio you can not only record the screen, but also add other video sources, such as webcams. Then you also want to control the various sources and you can do this either using the Source Record plugin or you have to remember a lot of keyboard shortcuts to hide or move the webcam, for example.

Touch Portal is another alternative, I used it for a long time on the iPad, but it has the disadvantage that it connects via WiFi. My new PC does have WiFi, but then I have to make an exception in the firewall for this app.

The Streamdeck

These smaller problems eventually lead to an Elagto Streamdeck, although I am not a gamer and do not stream. The deck is connected via USB and can then be set up with the Elgato software, which is available for both Windows and Mac.

You can assign actions to a total of 15 buttons here and you can create additional pages to expand it, which you can use if necessary.

The Streamdeck with the 15 hardware buttons costs around €150 and is not that cheap. But when you see the almost endless configuration options, I think the price is OK.

Not for OBS only

There are also plugins for different apps or different icon collections, etc. However, some plugins in the Elgato Marketplace are also chargeable, such as for Lightroom, Photoshop or Da Vinci Resolve.

You can also store program actions on the page that you need very often, for example. Or when I think of working from home, I put some settings for Zoom on a page. This means I can turn off the camera or microphone at the touch of a button or show another application.

Setup on Windows and for OBS

As a first step, I have now started setting up the deck for OBS Studio. Dirt can then turn off the webcam with the push of a button, display it full screen or bring the screen back to the foreground.

The first attempts with it went pretty well, especially because pressing a button with an icon is simply intuitive.

Conclusion

I am very happy with the Elgato Stream Deck and just think it’s a shame that I didn’t buy one sooner. It is quite easy to set up and is connected via USB, so there are no delays or even connection interruptions.

What I haven’t found yet is an option to use the deck under Linux.

ciao tuoche