News: As recording a talk is a demanding task the committee, beside bestowing the Best Paper Award, established Best Presentation Award to reward the most engaging presentation. The winner will be announced on the website together with the Best Paper Award.
As the conference will be held online, authors will be required to record the presentation and send it to the organizing commitee, which will make it available to participants on a dedicated YouTube channel. This page includes some instructions to help authors in preparing the recording. Please keep in mind the following time slots:
- Full papers: Please keep your presentation within 15 minutes
- Short papers: Please keep your presentation within 10 minutes
To record your presentation you are free to use the software that you prefer, but we recommend using OBS Studio. OBS studio is a free, multi-platform software for video recording and live streaming. It is particularly useful for recording presentations because it can capture a window of your screen (your slides), your webcam, and, of course, your voice. In the following, we provide you with some simple tips for recording your presentation with OBS studio, if you have never used it.
The first time you open OBS, run the autoconfiguration wizard. Choose the settings optimized for recording, not for streaming, and click “Next”. In the following settings, simply leave the default ones, which should be ok for the purpose. After completing the setup wizard, open the settings (“Preferences”) and choose the “Video” section. Change both the “Base” and the “Output” resolutions to 1920×1080 (FullHD). Then click on “OK” to apply the settings. You are now ready to setup the recording.
In the main window you see the preview (above) and the controls (below).
Before starting the setup, right click on the preview, scroll to “Preview Scaling” and choose “Canvas (1920×1080)”.
The next step is to setup the sources to be recorded. First, we need to tell OBS to record the slides. To do so, open your slides (Power Point, PDF, or any other tool) and switch to presentation mode, to have the slides full screen. Switch back to OBS and in the “Sources” panel add a source by clicking on the “+” button.
To record the slides, choose the “Window Capture” source. A window will open, asking you some parameters. Simply leave the default ones and click on “OK”. A new window will open, which can be used to choose which window OBS should record. In the “Window” drop-down menu, select the window of your full-screen presentation and click “OK”.
You should now see your first slide in the preview window. The size of the slide might not match the preview window: simply right-click on the slide inside the preview, go to “Transform” and click on “Fit to screen”.
The next source to add is the webcam, to record your face while you are talking. While this is not strictly necessary, it makes the presentation less impersonal and more enjoyable. To add your webcam, add a new source by clicking on “+” in the “Sources” panel and choose “Video capture device”. In the first prompt window, simply leave the default parameters and click “OK”, while in the second window you have to choose the device (your webcam). Click on “OK” and you should see your webcam preview inside the OBS preview. You can now drag and resize the webcam to position it where it doesn’t cover too much of your slides (usually in a corner). You can also move the slides to the left of the recording instead of keeping them centered, so that you have more space for the webcam and you can avoid overlapping. The order in which you add the sources also determines the layering, i.e., the last source you add will be put on top. In case you need to move a source with respect to the anothers, simply right click on the source in the preview and move it up/down/top/bottom using the “Order” sub-menu. The final setup should look as follows.
You are now ready to record your presentation. Before recording your presentation do first a test by simply clicking on “Start recording” in the bottom right corner. Switch to your presentation, try to say some phrases and change some slides. Then switch back to OBS and click on “Stop recording”. To view the recorded video, click on “File”, “Show recordings”. This will open the folder where recordings are stored. In the folder you will find an “.mkv” video. If the video and audio quality is satisfying, you are ready to record your presentation.
This is just a basic tutorial to register a simple presentation, OBS is a professional tool, and lets you design your video in countless ways, feel free to explore all possibilities you think will make your presentation more appealing.