Share Tweet Share





One of the ways I pay my bills is through content production for a trading card game called Magic: the Gathering. In addition to creating written content, I also produce video content in a series called “Crash Test”. Today I am going to talk about the hardware and open source software I use to produce these videos.

The production of these videos is done using completely open source software. The hardware consists of a few cost effective Logitech webcams mounted above a table along with a pair of photography lighting fixtures:

We have three cameras for filming. We use a Logictech C920 as our primary top down camera and two slightly cheaper Logitech C310 cameras for our individual “hand cams” on each side of the table. We utilize a simple green screen support structure for mounting the cameras above us. Having a green screen on hand is also useful when making videos as well. As far as audio goes, the Logitech C920 has dual microphones, so it doubles as a reasonable audio capture device on top of capturing HD video.

For those counting costs that is just under $150 in cameras and around $150 in other equipment.

Now – for the software! The primary piece of software we use for recording the videos is Open Broadcaster Software. Open Broadcaster Software – OBS for short – is a powerful tool that not only allows you to stream live video to services such as Twitch, YouTube, and Hitbox, but it also allows you to record to a local video file. OBS supports Linux, OSX, and Windows.

Using OBS allows us to do a very minimal amount of post-production editing because it allows us to easily create “Scenes” to switch between while recording. OBS has a fairly well-designed point-and-click interface that makes it easy to set up different configurations of text, images, and camera layouts for your different needs:

While we are recording the videos, I use a simple application I wrote in Python for updating the life totals displayed on the screen:

As good as OBS is and try as we might, sometimes something needs to be edited in the videos after recording. For video editing software, OpenShot is my tool of choice. While my needs for Crash Test are fairly simple – mostly clipping out extra bits and merging multiple video files – OpenShot is a powerful tool that supports a wide range of features including 3D animation, curve-based camera motion, compositing, transitions, audio mixing, and vector titles. OpenShot currently only supports Linux, but they have a multi-platform version in the works that will add Windows and OSX support as well.

Wrapping Up

The hardware I use to create my video content is by no means extravagant, but it can be purchased on a reasonable budget and allows me to produce decent quality videos. There are lots of great open source tools for both recording and editing video content on Linux. Just because I have found OBS and OpenShot to be the right tools for me does not mean they are the best ones for you. The best advice I can give is to try out the different options that exist and find the ones that you find the most intuitive.

~Jeff Hoogland