How to Draw and Annotate on Live Videos!

If you have a webcam, a computer, and a tablet like an iPad, here's how to add drawings and annotations to your videos, composited seamlessly in real-time for recording or streaming! We walk you through the process of setting up OBS Studio and iPad capture software to put your illustrations and notes on-screen--all with free software!

Shot and edited by Norman Chan

Tested is:

Intro bumper by Abe Dieckman

Thanks for watching!

[ruudbremer]

extra tip. i would make a red box on the green image that will match the obs streaming window. This will represent the window to draw in when you have stretched out the window capture.

[jordanholmes]

High school teacher here. I’ve been wondering what kinds of video editing stuff I could do while we start the new year in distance learning. Thank you so much for another idea! I do a lot of drawing and writing on my white board and this could work well.

[mtdong]

Love this idea! To help you see what area of your fresco canvas will actually be displayed on screen, I'd add a 16:9 rectangle in a contrasting color (I.e. Red) to your fresco canvas and scale your window capture in OBS so that rectangle is just barely out of frame. This will act as a guide/boundary to draw within. Thanks, Norm!

[UloomiKarimOfficial]

This is an all in one video on basic controls and how to use OBS, annotation and chroma key! WAY better than all the other videos that teach a skill! 💯👍🏽

[loxdhen]

You better believe I'm gonna recreate this in Windows Paint.

[rommiemex]

I did the exact same thing with a streamer friend a few years back for overwatch vod reviews. Great idea, and nicely executed with the ipad!

[Yathuprem]

The app devs when seeing this, will change the water mark color for sure.

[Kevin_Eder]

Maybe for the next video make a DIY teleprompter to see the drawing while looking at the camera?

[OnceinaSixSide]

Awesome Norm, cheers! For anyone else trying to get this effect while video editing, say with something like a Wacom all you gotta do is screen record your drawing software (ie Photoshop) with a green background layer which you can then key out in your video editor.

[DarkNemesis]

Another Highschool teacher here! This is really great Norm! Thanks alot!

[JanTuts]

If it's just for annotations, do your eyes a favour, and use BLACK as your background and chroma key...

[saitansky]

Wow thx for showing us that, I was searching a better way than the traditional transparent board we use at university, really good alternative, since a lot of our teacher are working from home also.

[ActuallyRedWizard]

You could probably also get away with annotating after the fact by running your previously recorded video through OBS in place of your Webcam. Record another window in OBS of your video player and have the Tablet layer overhead. This could solve your "drawing while addressing the camera problem at the cost of another step in editing.

[joshhardin]

I would suggest, to help with drawing while looking into the camera, a simple DIY teleprompter project with some teleprompter glass, a wood (or pla if you have a 3d printer) frame, and a video monitor that's been set to horizontally mirror your computer's output. from there, you tell OBS to give you a monitor window and full screen it on the prompter video output. - this is also FANTASTIC for video calls because you can look at the other person's face on your prompter's monitor while looking into the camera behind it.

[TheAshenCrow]

This is a really great video! It certainly seems like there are a lot of steps to make this work.

[IceMetalPunk]

I have a Windows 2-in-1 tablet laptop, and I (weirdly) had trouble finding an app for Win10 that could draw on a fullscreen image. The desktop version of Photoshop seems to not be very touch friendly, always scrolling with touches instead of painting. In the end, I just coded up a very quick, simple, and dirty HTML5 canvas implementation to run in a fullscreen browser, and that did the trick! Understanding where everything in the frame is relative to the blank green screen is pretty hard for me, though that's probably just my failure of spatial visualization 😂 Nice tip!

[alyssonlago]

Thank you for sharing! This is amazing

[boys_and_pizza]

omg! My stream audience is going to love this! YOURE THE BEST! SUbbed

[HotSpotAction]

Thank you For showing and teaching me How it works and how to install It works perfect

[MDigitalProductions]

I always thought of doing something like this, but this so clever! Thank you for this!