Using a presentation clicker for scene control with OBS and AutoHotKey

here's an ordinary presentation clicker of course if you're pre-recording lectures you might not be using one of these because you can use the keyboard but some people will want one for accessibility and some people just prefer the way you can click through slides without having to look down it can make your presentation more fluid my click has got a forward button and a back button as always it's got a button to blank screen which is sometimes useful and it's got this button which goes out of the presentation and restarts it from the beginning which i've never found remotely useful wouldn't it be nice if we could reprogram that button to do something helpful like for instance switch between the two views i showed you in my obs tutorial i mean obviously you can do that i'm not just wasting your time here and to understand how you have to know that the dirty little secret of most clickers is that as far as the computer is concerned they're nothing more or less than an ordinary wireless keyboard that's only got about four keys which are keys that do something in specifically microsoft powerpoint on my clicker the forward and back buttons actually press page down and page up which it turns out take you forwards and backwards through the slides in the same way as the arrow keys the blank button is actually full stop or in american english period and the other one is a bit unusual because it alternates between sending the escape key to exit the slideshow and function key f5 to restart it these key mappings are usually hardwired into the clicker there is no way to change them and so they are exactly the same as pressing keys on the keyboard computer doesn't know computer doesn't care you could in principle type all your full stops using the blank screen button if you are so inclined using this forbidden mystical knowledge it should be easy enough to see how to use the clicker with any software that lets you define your own keyboard shortcuts which would include the ever wonderful obs so this is something i covered in my previous video we have two scenes one called webcam main view and one called the main slide heading corner and i set up a way to switch between them on the settings menu under hotkeys i have the z key assigned to one and the x key to the other so that pressing those two keys allows me to do the switch so all i actually have to do is go back into those settings and change the keys to the clickers keys incidentally if you're not sure what the key mappings are on your clicker then this can be an easy way to find out simply select an option press the buttons and you'll see so that's page up page down blank screen is full stop and this one toggles between two different keys so i'm going to leave function f5 for main slide heading corner and escape for webcam main view having done which i can switch back and forth between views using the clicker quite naturally however when i try to send the size forwards and backwards it doesn't work why doesn't it work it doesn't work because powerpoint has not got the focus obs has got the focus powerpoint needs the focus which means i need to click on it show you that there in order to give it control of the keyboard input and you will see now i've done that these buttons work properly now the good news is that obs by default we'll still let its hotkeys do things even when it hasn't got the focus so when i press this button it still changes the view unfortunately we've got the slight problem that powerpoint which doesn't know any better bless it is still responding to this and thinks that i want to do that which is not very helpful so what can we do about that then well some clickers you can reprogram so they press different keys this is not one of them the easiest fix i've found is to use a free piece of software called auto hotkey to actually remap the keys themselves so whatever you press as far as the computer knows you've pressed something else so you download this and install it in the usual fashion but auto hotkey is not the kind of system where you use an interface to tell it what to do you have to give it instructions in the form of a little script might seem tricky if you're not used to this but if you just follow what i do it's straightforward now there are probably clever ways of doing this i'm very new to auto hotkey but this is what i came up with don't worry about this bit at the top this is all standard recommended setup that i've just pasted in you just need to know about these three bits here so the plan is to hijack the escape key and the function f5 key and redirect them to the most bizarre improbable combination of key presses i can think of then set those keypresses up as hotkeys in obs but don't tell powerpoint so these instructions here say every time i press the escape key i mean hold down control and alt and the open square bracket and then hold that pose for a hundred milliseconds a tenth of a second and let go the hold is important for obs in particular at least in the current version because it's notably slow at picking up when you use this method i found this was a real problem whenever obs hadn't got the focus when it wasn't the active window and of course we need powerpoint to have the focus so these instructions here do the same for function key f5 except it's remapped to control and alt and the close square brackets i've never come across any software that uses either of those triple key combinations so even if i open something by mistake and don't notice my collector presses are not going to cause trouble this does mean that i've lost the escape and f5 keys completely i can't use them in any software as long as i'm running this thing so just in case i need to get them back in a hurry i have this bit at the end which says if i press ctrl alt escape then the auto hotkey script will shut down and it will start messing about with the keyboard all together and if you don't fancy typing all that out i'll put a link to it in the description for this video so i need to save this with a file name ending in dot ahk for auto hotkey if you've installed auto hotkey then that file will then look like this and when you double click it it doesn't look like anything's happened but we have now applied our auto hotkey keyboard malarkey the way to check if it's running is if you go to your windows system tray you'll see a little auto hotkey logo and if you mouse over you'll get the file name of the current script so when i return to obs go into the hotkey settings as before you can see that page open page down and dot have their usual values but the other key is now toggling between our two obscure combinations so i set one of them for one scene and the other one for the other and just to make this clear it's at the level of the keyboard that this has been remapped so even if i press the ordinary escape key or the ordinary f5 same difference so while that auto hotkey script is running if i can actually go into powerpoint and try to press function f5 do that until i'm blue in the face won't do anything in powerpoint what it will do of course is control the view in obs this is actual recorded output from obs that i'm showing you now powerpoint has got the focus and so i can at long last i can go backwards and forwards through the slides and in and out of the presentation using one and the same clicker so having seen the principle you can probably spot other opportunities you could use the clicker to control other software including thanks to the beauty of auto hotkey software that doesn't let you define your own keys and you can use the approach to control all sorts of other processes so one possibility for instance is the pausing and unpausing of recordings as a nice quick way to make a fluid video without much editing work as i discussed in a previous video so let's have a look at that in obs so i'm back on the hotkeys menu pause recording and unpause recording are up at the top there this time rather than reassign the button of uselessness i'm going to sacrifice the blank screen button which as you will recall is a dot there we go i could of course change that using auto hotkey you'll notice rather cleverly obs has various sensible combinations set up as toggles so if i choose the same button for pause and unpause i can just use it to switch between the two okay now let's record a little lecture of course i'm showing you the clicker for illustration the whole point of this is that in reality you can be much more unobtrusive so where shall we start let's start with in this lecture i'm going to be telling you about the development of the 13th century trebuchet and its relationship 2 2 2 2. what was i going to be talking about oh yes and its relationship to the development of the reduced instruction set computer in cambridge in the 1980s our story begins as it begin our story begins one bright cold day in april in the autumn of of of i forgot what period i'm in hang on uh gonna look that up oh yeah um 12 27 of the common era so moving swiftly on and let's see what happens when we play that back in this lecture i'm going to be telling you about the development of the 13th century trebuchet and its relationship to the development of the reduced instruction set computer in cambridge in the 1980s our story begins one bright cold day in april in the autumn of 12 27 of the common era not an award-winning performance by any stretch but it shows the principle and of course you can have one button set up to do the pause and done pause whilst leaving the other one switching views like that although when i tried this i found i it was very difficult to get my head around the two buttons being side by side doing radically different things i kept pressing the wrong one so i have preferred to use the keyboard for one task and the clicker for the other that works a lot better for me so i hope that's been useful and i will leave you with one more bit of obs plus auto hotkey magic this is a version of something from one of my previous videos i've extended my auto hotkey script a bit so it has this extra command which on saying a full stop or blank button not only sends an obscure key press but waits a second and then sends another one this combined with the appropriate hotkey assignments means that i can do this thank you very much for watching and i'll see you again soon

Channel: James Sumner

Views: 4,090

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Id: BzS4cDzOrUI

Length: 11min 42sec (702 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020