7 ms·

When I was half my age, OBS was unfathomable. I was shooting video on digital 8, editing in Final Cut Pro 4 which was the new hotness, and trying but failing to

When I was half my age, OBS was unfathomable. I was shooting video on digital 8, editing in Final Cut Pro 4 which was the new hotness, and trying but failing to use DSS on my college network. Actual streaming at scale required a massive server and a massive license from RealNetworks. If I wanted to do anything with animation, it was all $$$$$ software. This all took place in a shared lab at my college with stuff I could never afford on my own. Today, people at that age are making lucrative careers out of streaming then doing the things they love out of their bedrooms using OBS. Blender has enabled all kinds of amazing creators, from animation to video editing to 3D printing and even (basic) architecture. Kicad makes EDA! approachable. My teen son has been able to dabble in all of the above in his spare time without spending a dime. I’m in awe of the power of free software and the amazing engineering work that has enabled these projects to be good enough for real professionals to choose first. I hope we see Godot achieve world domination in gaming, GIMP in graphics, and Libra Office + Collabra in productivity. The people who have given us these tools deserve the highest accolades.

sundvor 4y ago
We've come an incredibly long way since Genlock on the Commodore Amiga! 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.
- reilly3000 4y ago
  Oh man that sounds like an awesome rig. I didn’t realize Nvidia Broadcast can reduce background noise like keystrokes until you mentioned it here. Does that really work? If so I now have a reason to buy a new GPU and finally use my cherry mx blues again.
  - NorwegianDude 4y ago
    I'd say that it works very well. So well in fact that as I reinstalled windows and watched F1 on Sunday I was surprised to see that Ferrari had managed to remove the engine sound from the drivers microphone, but at some cost to the clarity. Turns out the background noise removal was turned on for my output too.
    - ketzo 4y ago
      Wow, that’s… kind of insane. Cool. I’m gonna have to check it out.
      - sundvor 4y ago
        It also completely eliminates screaming cats and babies. It's worth the price of the GPU upgrade alone. 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.
        Suzuran 4y ago
        tehbeard 4y ago
        Really telling that your assumption is that it's their kid/cat and not a neighbour's one... Sound doesn't stop at the property line.
        sundvor 4y ago
        For the record my Burmese cats are incredibly vocal; they normally mouth off like crazy before jumping up on my lap - especially when I'm in meetings. Love them! :) 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.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  Please write a blog post detailing your setup. I’d love to do something like this but could really use some hand holding for the setup part.
  - sundvor 4y ago
    Haven't done any blog posts in decades, but if I was to start again it would be a good topic to cover. 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.
    - archon810 4y ago
      Is it possible for you to share a video of a sample broadcast so that we can see this amazing quality and all the benefits compared to, say, a nice 4K webcam alone?
      - sundvor 4y ago
        Sorry I don't really post in public. There's plenty of YouTube videos that detail the impact of good studio lighting on a regular webcam. 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.
- branchysaur 4y ago
  How do you find the memory consumption of those apps? I found NVIDIA Broadcast and a few other streaming utils were passively eating like 3GB of RAM. Not typically a concern until you're spinning up VMs and dev environments and suddenly getting paged. I'd love something like Broadcast but much more lightweight, but I haven't found a good alternative yet.
  - sundvor 4y ago
    I haven't really paid much attention to the memory usage to be honest; running Windows 11 on a 32GB Ryzen system. It was plenty until some of my Docker requirements started getting greedy (my next system will have 64, but also because I play DCS World now on occasion). 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).
- Karrot_Kream 4y ago
  Unless OBS (or FFMpeg or GStreamer) is giving you something you need (maybe correction on your camera or some touch up filters or whatever), I'm not sure if you (the royal "you") really need OBS for this setup. 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.
  - sundvor 4y ago
    Nice setup! 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).
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      Aha now that's an interesting way to do it. I guess in my setup, and my room geometry, I don't need to generally have specific scenarios ready for, say, planning so just turning my stuff on through Zoom is fine. 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.
    - stavros 4y ago
- rb666 4y ago
  What on earth is an "iHue fill light"? I don't get any hits on Google for this term.
  - wsinks 4y ago
    A fill light refers to what the light is doing - it’s making the shadows of your frame a bit brighter so the camera can pick them up. (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.
    - sundvor 4y ago
      Thanks, yes it's the Hue light - as sibling comment pointed out, I dragged in the app name for one that controls them. And I have two, one above to the rear right and another to the rear left doing exactly what you describe.
  - Angostura 4y ago
    A Fill light is the counterpart of a spotlight
  - traxmaxx 4y ago
    There's an app called iHue https://www.reddit.com/r/Hue/comments/46irji/introduction_new_app_ihue_easy_remote_light/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Hue/comments/46irji/introduction_ne...
    - sundvor 4y ago
      Cheers, yes I mixed the app name in there in my post - thanks. They are Phillips Hue Play Light Bars; love them.
- ben174 4y ago
  Where does Scala fit into all of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imh2cH4CnaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imh2cH4CnaA
ehsankia 4y ago
I remember when you had to use Fraps to record your game, and a shitty proprietary webcam software to record that, then somehow mix them together like you said. Honestly mind boggling that there was not really a solid way to capture screen and webcam before OBS. It makes creating videos so much easier. OBS is honestly probably the greatest open source software out there in terms of quality and value.
- robswc 4y ago
  Fraps was awesome lol, that iconic FPS that most people left on just to flex.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    I don't know, it really degraded the performance of whatever you were playing compared to today's hardware solution (that comes with basically all GPUs) for recording stuff, directly from the GPU without any performance impact. 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.
    - robswc 4y ago
      lol oh yea, it wasn't "good" but at least for me at the time it was the only option I could find and if you got the settings right it was the best looking one. I was also young so there may have been better solutions out there but I could at least get FRAPs running.
867-5309 4y ago
pretty sure ffmpeg would have been a thing back then
josteink 4y ago
> I hope we see Godot achieve world domination in gaming, GIMP in graphics, and Libra Office + Collabra in productivity. The people who have given us these tools deserve the highest accolades. 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.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "What has hindered GIMP from mainstream adaptation is its clunky UI," 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.
- southerntofu 4y ago
  > 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.
Beltiras 4y ago
I remember having been stymied by my US Amiga being NTSC so I couldn't do PAL video (living in Europe), otherwise I could have done some work for advertising agencies. Would have changed the trajectory of my life back in 1986.
movedx 4y ago
I haven't had the same experiences as you regarding "the old way" of doing things, but I can provide my take as a content creator today. ... 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.
ghaff 4y ago
When I was in school I was interested in film--and was part of a film (watching) crowd that I still stay in touch with. I even went so far as to sign up for a film course once. 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.
7speter 4y ago
I might be about 3/4 your age and I’m just in awe that within a few years, streamers went from needing a whole other computer to, uh, transcode their stream, to being able to easily do everything they need on one machine, while playing demanding games and or doing other tasks on their machine.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
> When I was half my age, OBS was unfathomable 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.
underlines 4y ago
I was born in 86 and started to use the internet in 1998 on a 56k modem. First thing I learned was how to join IRC, Usenet and later napster/dc++/torrent to download and use cracked software and copy games from my uncle and use no d-keys. 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.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  > All long gone and failed tech 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).
- jonnylynchy 4y ago
  I was born 10 years earlier and had much of the same experience simply because that's when things started happening broadly on a consumer level with the internet. I used Flash professionally for several years developing ads, mini-games and silly animations. Actionscript (an ECMAscript implementation) was great. Javascript is just now catching up.
ttul 4y ago
Editing on the computer? Luxury. In the early 1990s, all we had was a camcorder and a VHS machine. Editing was nearly impossible, but we still managed to make a few bad films as teenagers.

sundvor 4y ago

We've come an incredibly long way since Genlock on the Commodore Amiga! 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.

reilly3000 4y ago
Oh man that sounds like an awesome rig. I didn’t realize Nvidia Broadcast can reduce background noise like keystrokes until you mentioned it here. Does that really work? If so I now have a reason to buy a new GPU and finally use my cherry mx blues again.
- NorwegianDude 4y ago
  I'd say that it works very well. So well in fact that as I reinstalled windows and watched F1 on Sunday I was surprised to see that Ferrari had managed to remove the engine sound from the drivers microphone, but at some cost to the clarity. Turns out the background noise removal was turned on for my output too.
  - ketzo 4y ago
    Wow, that’s… kind of insane. Cool. I’m gonna have to check it out.
    - sundvor 4y ago
      It also completely eliminates screaming cats and babies. It's worth the price of the GPU upgrade alone. 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.
      - Suzuran 4y ago
        tehbeard 4y ago
        Really telling that your assumption is that it's their kid/cat and not a neighbour's one... Sound doesn't stop at the property line.
        sundvor 4y ago
        For the record my Burmese cats are incredibly vocal; they normally mouth off like crazy before jumping up on my lap - especially when I'm in meetings. Love them! :) 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.
imwillofficial 4y ago
Please write a blog post detailing your setup. I’d love to do something like this but could really use some hand holding for the setup part.
- sundvor 4y ago
  Haven't done any blog posts in decades, but if I was to start again it would be a good topic to cover. 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.
  - archon810 4y ago
    Is it possible for you to share a video of a sample broadcast so that we can see this amazing quality and all the benefits compared to, say, a nice 4K webcam alone?
    - sundvor 4y ago
      Sorry I don't really post in public. There's plenty of YouTube videos that detail the impact of good studio lighting on a regular webcam. 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.
branchysaur 4y ago
How do you find the memory consumption of those apps? I found NVIDIA Broadcast and a few other streaming utils were passively eating like 3GB of RAM. Not typically a concern until you're spinning up VMs and dev environments and suddenly getting paged. I'd love something like Broadcast but much more lightweight, but I haven't found a good alternative yet.
- sundvor 4y ago
  I haven't really paid much attention to the memory usage to be honest; running Windows 11 on a 32GB Ryzen system. It was plenty until some of my Docker requirements started getting greedy (my next system will have 64, but also because I play DCS World now on occasion). 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).
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
Unless OBS (or FFMpeg or GStreamer) is giving you something you need (maybe correction on your camera or some touch up filters or whatever), I'm not sure if you (the royal "you") really need OBS for this setup. 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.
- sundvor 4y ago
  Nice setup! 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).
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Aha now that's an interesting way to do it. I guess in my setup, and my room geometry, I don't need to generally have specific scenarios ready for, say, planning so just turning my stuff on through Zoom is fine. 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.
  - stavros 4y ago
rb666 4y ago
What on earth is an "iHue fill light"? I don't get any hits on Google for this term.
- wsinks 4y ago
  A fill light refers to what the light is doing - it’s making the shadows of your frame a bit brighter so the camera can pick them up. (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.
  - sundvor 4y ago
    Thanks, yes it's the Hue light - as sibling comment pointed out, I dragged in the app name for one that controls them. And I have two, one above to the rear right and another to the rear left doing exactly what you describe.
- Angostura 4y ago
  A Fill light is the counterpart of a spotlight
- traxmaxx 4y ago
  There's an app called iHue https://www.reddit.com/r/Hue/comments/46irji/introduction_new_app_ihue_easy_remote_light/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Hue/comments/46irji/introduction_ne...
  - sundvor 4y ago
    Cheers, yes I mixed the app name in there in my post - thanks. They are Phillips Hue Play Light Bars; love them.
ben174 4y ago
Where does Scala fit into all of this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imh2cH4CnaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imh2cH4CnaA

ehsankia 4y ago

I remember when you had to use Fraps to record your game, and a shitty proprietary webcam software to record that, then somehow mix them together like you said. Honestly mind boggling that there was not really a solid way to capture screen and webcam before OBS. It makes creating videos so much easier. OBS is honestly probably the greatest open source software out there in terms of quality and value.

robswc 4y ago
Fraps was awesome lol, that iconic FPS that most people left on just to flex.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I don't know, it really degraded the performance of whatever you were playing compared to today's hardware solution (that comes with basically all GPUs) for recording stuff, directly from the GPU without any performance impact. 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.
  - robswc 4y ago
    lol oh yea, it wasn't "good" but at least for me at the time it was the only option I could find and if you got the settings right it was the best looking one. I was also young so there may have been better solutions out there but I could at least get FRAPs running.

867-5309 4y ago

pretty sure ffmpeg would have been a thing back then

josteink 4y ago

> I hope we see Godot achieve world domination in gaming, GIMP in graphics, and Libra Office + Collabra in productivity. The people who have given us these tools deserve the highest accolades. 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.

hilbert42 4y ago
"What has hindered GIMP from mainstream adaptation is its clunky UI," 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.
southerntofu 4y ago
> 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.

Beltiras 4y ago

I remember having been stymied by my US Amiga being NTSC so I couldn't do PAL video (living in Europe), otherwise I could have done some work for advertising agencies. Would have changed the trajectory of my life back in 1986.

movedx 4y ago

I haven't had the same experiences as you regarding "the old way" of doing things, but I can provide my take as a content creator today. ... 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.

ghaff 4y ago

When I was in school I was interested in film--and was part of a film (watching) crowd that I still stay in touch with. I even went so far as to sign up for a film course once. 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.

7speter 4y ago

I might be about 3/4 your age and I’m just in awe that within a few years, streamers went from needing a whole other computer to, uh, transcode their stream, to being able to easily do everything they need on one machine, while playing demanding games and or doing other tasks on their machine.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

> When I was half my age, OBS was unfathomable 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.

underlines 4y ago

I was born in 86 and started to use the internet in 1998 on a 56k modem. First thing I learned was how to join IRC, Usenet and later napster/dc++/torrent to download and use cracked software and copy games from my uncle and use no d-keys. 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.

wongarsu 4y ago
> All long gone and failed tech 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).
jonnylynchy 4y ago
I was born 10 years earlier and had much of the same experience simply because that's when things started happening broadly on a consumer level with the internet. I used Flash professionally for several years developing ads, mini-games and silly animations. Actionscript (an ECMAscript implementation) was great. Javascript is just now catching up.

ttul 4y ago

Editing on the computer? Luxury. In the early 1990s, all we had was a camcorder and a VHS machine. Editing was nearly impossible, but we still managed to make a few bad films as teenagers.