I use OBS Studio with my Streamdeck, a Logitech Streamcam, NVIDIA Broadcast, a condenser microphone via a Steinberg XLR audio interface along with Elgato Key lights and iHue fill lights for my working from home office Google Meets.

Startup and shut downs of the entire stack including launching into Google Meets are automated with the deck (one button to macro up, one to macro down), and with proper lighting as well as NVIDIA Broadcast, the audio and video quality is just amazing. The amount of tech I'm throwing at how I connect with Meet may seem like overkill, but it really makes a lot of sense to spend some time on what's my primary interface with my colleagues and customers.

If I need to quickly mute my image, a scene in OBS that shows "be right back" is an immediate Streamdeck key press away. Next to it is the audio source mute key. It's great.

It's pretty great, works decently, but the sad thing is the author put it out a few years ago, trained it on proprietary datasets, wrote a paper and then moved onto something else, never to be seen again. Now it's pretty much unmaintained since it requires some very specific ML and DSP knowledge to hack on.

https://github.com/xiph/rnnoise

NVIDIA Broadcast in my opinion is better, but rnnoise will do if you can't run it.

Turns out the background noise removal was turned on for my output too.

I know that Slack and Google are slowly baking these features in, but NVIDIA are in a league of their own. AMD not having them made my GPU brand choice easy last time I upgraded.

Sound doesn't stop at the property line.

And babies? That was during lockdowns when my then wife was looking after the young one (we took turns; obviously this applies to when I was in my meetings). Didn't stop the 2-3y child from being very noisy at times.

Regardless of the source, Broadcast does an amazing job of filtering and cleaning it up. Recipients could not hear any of the background commotion.

I also have a very similar setup. High quality webcam, high quality headset, and a few lights pointing into my face to offset the lighting in the room. I have Zoom configured to use original audio and turn off echo cancellation and most audio postprocessing as the headset pretty much does everything I need audio wise. I've even had my partner talking in the same room and others on my VC haven't heard a thing.

My webcam needs almost no touch-up. While I can stream at 1080p easily (and do so with friends over FFMpeg and an RTSP server), Zoom (and I'm guessing Meet) will frequently downsample your webcam output when in a VC with multiple participants to save on bandwidth. A 1:1 chat can have you streaming in full 1080p glory, but I don't ever need a post-processing layer atop my webcam.

The setup is as easy as me turning on my camera and putting on my headset. Make sure you are using Ethernet so you don't run into AP congestion, especially if you have others in the house doing VC as well. But yeah modern high quality VC is almost completely plug-and-play.

Screen 2 will be running any apps I need to show (coding etc.) and screen 3 is at the back of the workbench, which has a downward facing camera so I can show me working on the boards and other electronics.

Switching scenes from main cam to what's on screen 2 to the workbench is very handy, even without a dedicated key pad.

The only hassle is that under Linux, OBS sometimes forgets the camera device designations on startup and I have to pull out the USB connections, re-plug and then go into both camera definitions and re-select the right cameras.

I have device video and audio sink definitions behind he scenes so that the video and audio can be fed to virtual devices inside Zoom or Teams etc.

Edit: Oh, and I have a client plugin which allows me to use my Android phone camera as a roving webcam to highlight things on the workbench such as a scope screen, power supply current reading etc.

All works quite well.

The Arch wiki has fairly in-depth instructions for understanding how udev rules work https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/udev

OBS scenes is the killer feature for me, so it just works well. In addition the AFK one I've also set a couple of zoom levels that frame me better if I decide to slide my seat back a bit.

I even have scenes for sprint planning estimation sessions. 1-3-5-8 etc superimposed over my picture. :D (they are numbered buttons on the Streamdeck).

I do love reading about all these setups though. I feel like so many tech companies and software engineers are new to remote work that these tips can go a long way to interfacing effectively with coworkers. At least in my case it was trial and error until I got what I wanted.

Also, do you know what keystrokes the Stream Deck actually sends? Is it some ctrl-alt-whatever combo, or MIDI, or what?

I'd love something like Broadcast but much more lightweight, but I haven't found a good alternative yet.

I am however issuing a kill of the NVIDIA Broadcast app with my shut down macro as it will otherwise peg the 3070 usage % at a non idling level, which is somewhat worse for power usage, temperatures and longevity (than not doing it). OBS Studio is also shut down, after stopping the virtual camera with a keyboard shortcut. (It's basically reverse of the start up).

So I'll only have all the software running for the duration of my meeting. I've put the cam on a flexible arm, easy to push out of the way when done and I confirm the light is off.

The shutdown also sets the video lights down to "warm ambient" levels rather than turn them off - especially on dark winter days, they do improve my mood.

And fwiw I had to explain my use of the Streamdeck to my tax accountant; they were cool after hearing a version of the above. :) The macro features are such a stress reducer, really.

(And no, I never stream anything. Would rather not broadcast my ugly mug in public, but at least with this I can cast myself in the best possible light - pun intended - to my colleagues).

I’d love to do something like this but could really use some hand holding for the setup part.

It can be a bit costly, but found it well worth it now that it's done. I'll send you an email in case you have any specific questions.

Logitech StreamCam is one of the better webcams. I have it on a flex stick that I pull down in front of my 32" - I have 3x of those plus a smaller above.

I'd love to upgrade it at one point but there's not really a large number of compact cameras with good optics. I might look into GoPros, but am not really to keen on spending much more as I'm happy with the current results.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imh2cH4CnaA

(As an example, a hair light is an overhead light that’s typically used to give hair more depth and detail. The poster talks about a key light, which is the strongest light in a standard 3 light setup)

I imagine ihue is the brand of light. Or maybe just a misspelling of Hue’s brand.

And I have two, one above to the rear right and another to the rear left doing exactly what you describe.

It helped me to become fluent in early animation in Macromedia flash, photo editing in Adobe products and html in Dreamweaver and Frontpage or music production with the earliest versions of pro tools and cubase.

All long gone and failed tech, but since then I was able to pursue a career in IT and ever since using proper licensing for those enterprise products we use at all those projects. (btw circumventing and copying is legal in Switzerland for private use)

I don't think kids should get a free pass to pirate software but software houses should be a bit smarter and make this software available to the youth for free. They will mostly become lucrative clients in the future.

Macromedia Flash is still going strong, just rebranded as Adobe Animate. The web use-case vanished, but it's still one of the top 3 tools for making 2d animation (including for TV shows).

I mean, it worked at the time, but so frustrating when you wanted to show off 60fps in Crysis or whatever, and the recording ended up being less than 30 fps.

... wow! It's simply always amazing to me that I can turn on a cheap mirrorless camera and get sharp, clean footage. That footage is fed into my PC. I feed in a "cheap" USB microphone and get crisp audio. OBS takes all of this, and every other asset I throw at it, and combines it all into a live stream of video and audio... in real-time.

And then I stream it to the rest of the planet in less than 100ms.

A friend of mine is learning Unreal Engine 5 right now. Meta Humans are just crazy good. The real-time lighting in the engine is f-ing bonkers! And the fact there are tens of thousands of high poly, free models as well as high-res scans for materials (textures) just blows my mind.

What a time to be alive.

What has hindered GIMP from mainstream adaptation is its clunky UI, and that has not really changed in any significant way, or at least not significantly for the better.

I'm a programmer, sysadmin, devops "ninja" and I can juggle just about any stack. And I can use any painting-program you throw at me, without training. But GIMP I still have to look up basic stuff, like how to draw a rectangle.

GIMP will never be mainstream, because it's made for specifically trained "expert-users" only, without any easy path to glide into for new users.

I don't entirely disagree with this criticism, but it's interesting to note that in the past years the GIMP project has received significant contributions from ZeMarmot project so the artist-developer feedback loop is shortening.

There's been major advances lately and given more time/resources i believe the actual team (and new contributors?) could really make GIMP even better.

For years, GIMP was much slower than Photoshop especially so when loading and processing large 100MB-plus .tif files and such, so much so that I considered it unusable on all but the very fastest machines. To be fair perfomance has improved in recent versions but it's still significantly slower than PS in many functions (e.g: when making edits waiting for the screen to refresh throws one's workflow out and makes it harder to accurately compare 'before' and 'after' edits).

Similarly, adjustment controls are slower to react and their ergonomics are significantly inferior to PS (that said, PS's aren't perfect either but they are better).

Then there's the removal of the 'fade' feature from the menu - probably one of the most used features in both GIMP and PS (one really has to wonder what's going on in the minds of its developers).

Talk about shooting one's self in the foot then this has to be the quintessential example! I know and understand the reason for this change but if GIMP's developers deliberately wanted to alienate a very large percentage of its users then they couldn't have chosen a better way. For me, the removal of the 'fade' feature was the last straw, I simply no longer use GIMP other than to test new versions as they arise.

Yes, I know about the alternative way of getting around this now-missing 'fade' feature but that's not the point. Forcing users to use a (seemingly) better approach at the expense of convenience and or for ideological reaons is not the correct way to go about the problem. Forcing users to adopt new ways of working for questionable reasons - as Microsoft does with its GUI in every new version of Windows - is, unfortunately, typical of the hide and arrogance all too often seen in the software industry. (BTW, I am aware that removing 'fade' solved some problems and supposedly quickened development but nevertheless that's no excuse.)

Simply: GIMP's developers are good programmers and image experts but they've stuff-all knowledge about user ergonomics - one has to wonder if they ever use GIMP to do any realworld image editing at all - that is other than to tweak multiple instances of Lenna! If GIMP's developers are serious about making the program anything more significant than their playtoy to test image algorithms then first and foremost they need to employ an ergonomics expert on their team.

I've lots more instances of GIMP problems but this is not the place to raise them.

In my opinion, GIMP won't ever become mainstream until its developers change their high-minded attitude and become more flexible in their approach to users' needs. This is harsh criticism I know but I'm only stating the facts. Few would be more keen than me to see GIMP succeed in a big way but many others and I have aged quite noticably whilst waiting for it to do so.

Many of us have waited years to shed finally the yoke of Photoshop especially so since Adobe introduced its extortionate subscription/rental model and we cannot do so until we have viable alteratives. The problem is made all the worse for people like me who have refused to upgrade PS to its subscription version. As it has been in place for quite some while we're now left with dated and ageing software.

Nowadays, GIMP is needed more than ever as a strong and viable alterative to Photoshop but having watched its glacial progress over decades I reckon the only effective way to bring it up to speed is for users to pay some nomimal fee, perhaps $20 or so. Paying develops and greatly expanding its development team seems the only practical way to make it happen.

Like i said, the feedback loop with actual artists has tightened in the past years, especially with ZeMarmot project becoming real active in development.

> first and foremost they need to employ an ergonomics expert on their team.

Well "employ" may be the problem. I believe there's two or three contributors who will accept donations, but nobody is actually employed to work on GIMP full-time. If you know of ergonomics experts who'd like to contribute some time to a free-software project, or can produce a full-fledged UX audit for a few bucks, i'm sure that will be of interest to GIMP people.

> I've lots more instances of GIMP problems but this is not the place to raise them.

Maybe not, but thanks for taking the time to point out two downsides (slowness, and removal of a feature that's key to your workflow). Hopefully you can find time to contribute to the project: identifying hot/slow code paths doesn't have to be very complex but is very workflow-dependent so a report of yours can be very useful for optimization purposes.

As for the fade option, i have no idea what this debate was about. Please don't hesitate to post links to blogposts or tickets in the future.

I agree totally, in many places GIMP's UI is both counterintuitive and clumsy but that's not the only reason in that there are significant performance issues. For one, unlike Photoshop, GIMP 'dribbles' its screen refresh rate which is most distracting and annoying.

If the developers found they couldn't easily increase the screen refresh speed after some adjustment then why didn't they delay its updating until the computation had finished (the 'dribbling' being more objectionable than a delay)?

I don't have the time or inclination to become familiar with the huge job of understanding GIMP's source so I've often wondered why its screen refreshing is significantly worse than PS. From observation, PS cleverly only updates the relevant (viewable) changes rather than the full 'effective' screen at any given point in time so changes appear almost instantly. This problem and the UI one put GIMP out of the running as far as I'm concerned.

BTW, re your last paragraph, note my comment about ergonomics in my comment to southerntofu.

But things were just moving past casual amateurs shooting on Super 8 film--which in addition to low quality got expensive in a hurry. Video cameras were huge things with big battery packs. I quickly decided the whole thing was more trouble than it was worth and just stuck to 35mm still photography.

"Just" an iPhone and modern editing software would have been a revelation.

I'm assuming you're a little younger than me. When I was a chunk less than half my age I was shooting video on a (very expensive) Sony VX2000 and editing in (very expensive) Premiere 4, and streaming using very clever SMIL and a (very expensive) RealNetworks server licence.

Now I still shoot on a Sony PD150 (high-end version of the VX2000) because I just love shooting SD DV, or on a Canon HD camera, and edit in DaVinci Resolve (free, unless you buy Studio which I haven't yet). I can upload to Vimeo or Youtube, or just fire up a Docker container on my server to run Peertube.

I use Kicad pretty much every day, which again is Free as in speech and free as in beer.