10 reasons to Connect OBS with Zoom

hello and welcome to stream geeks live so excited to have some of you here joining via zoom others of you watching on youtube and facebook thanks for being here one of the number one requests we're getting on our youtube channel is not only how to connect obs and zoom but why and so i'm here today to answer your questions review the reasons why you should be using a video production software whether it's obs wirecast vmix xsplit all of these solutions support virtual camera outputs which allow creative people like us you stream geeks the ability to bring in videos graphics overlays seamless video transitions we'll talk about ndi we'll talk about countdown timers really cool motion graphics that you can bring into your zoom meetings you can bring them into your microsoft teams meetings and share them and webinar platforms and so much more so what you're going to learn today you can use for live streams you can use them for videos you can use it for private meetings on software like zoom so it's going to be a lot of fun let's get right into the training and i'm watching the chat room mike's going to be showing your comments up on the screen and tess is here hi tess thanks for being here happy to be here as always happy friday everybody thank you for joining us excited to have tess here and uh tess is going to come in from time to time and say hi and answer ask questions and all kinds of other stuff thanks for being here tess how do you like working from home so far well i like some things about it most things about it um you can hear i get to be with my babies but they sometimes like to make a guest appearance so you do have to deal with that well it's so great to still have you here tess is our ear she's listening in the chat room she's in the zoom room as well which you guys are welcome to join so ask your questions let's jump right into it all right so i've got uh obs open here and we're gonna be taking a deep dive into obs but even more importantly i want to start with my presentation 10 reasons why you should be using obs with zoom why would you even want to do this well first of all obs can become a seamless video switcher that means you can have multiple different cameras you can have multiple different video sources and you can seamlessly connect those to zoom and switch between them so that's going to be a really powerful way especially if you have multiple cameras you can see we have multiple cameras here in our production studio and you connect to them super easily so and bring those directly into zoom the next thing is lower thirds and i'm going to show you guys how to do this in obs i'm going to kind of toggle back and forth between obs and zoom but you can build really awesome lower third templates and you can bring those lower thirds over your video mike why don't we go ahead and mute the zoom people until unless they want to talk um and then you can bring those lower thirds directly into zoom and it makes you look that much more professional when you're on those meetings and you're having that those conversations so it's really powerful for that as well the next big one is just being able to play recorded videos i've talked to a lot of people who like to be able to show a website play a video have a countdown timer inject some music into your zoom meetings and it's an easy way to use your camera and microphone with zoom to do recorded video so we'll show that a really popular one that we'll dig into and i'm going to share with you guys is countdown timers everybody seems to love to have meeting countdown timers to make sure people are staying on time and everybody is you know kind of all no i've seen this used a couple different ways one way is just to wait to the the countdown to the meeting but i've also seen this used to let speakers know that they're running out of time and they need to hurry up so timers are great and i'm going to show you how to manage your own timers plus we have free video files that you can use that are kind of custom and really nice also hd recording and streaming so zoom itself doesn't have the best quality of video and i know my friends at zoom aren't going to be happy but it's true that zoom a lot of times by the time your camera gets up to zoom and everyone's seeing it it can be you know as low as 360 p which isn't even hd so if you're trying to record a high quality zoom session do it in obs obs can process your webcam and your video feed in 1080p it can process it in 4k right and if you're if you're doing an interview with somebody from zoom you can bring those in pretty close to 720p into your production so at least your video quality is high in the video recording so if you're recording something for youtube or facebook or an important meeting you're going to get a lot higher quality you can even choose the bit rate which if you don't know what bit rate is bitrate is the size it's really the data that represents the quality of your video so very important stuff then you can also stream with obs now you can stream with zoom and we've got a great video on youtube on how to use zoom to stream so if all you have to do is stream your meeting to facebook you could just use zoom but you can also use obs to record and stream at the same time to an additional destination and it's good to be able to do that these are skills that you're going to be able to use in a lot of different ways another reason why you might want to use obs with zoom and this also includes vmix and other platforms is there's lots of great audio enhancements that you can do to your audio to make yourself sound better and you can enhance your own audio you can enhance the audio that you're recording so if somebody is coming into an important zoom meeting and their microphone levels are a little too low you can boost those up you can add some compression you can add some gain you can add some noise cancellation if there's some background noise you can add vst2 plugins those are virtual studio technology plugins that we'll look at today and this is based on your comments you guys tell me which one you want me to dig into of these 10 that i'm presenting and we're going to jump right in so once i present these 10 let the audience drive the way tess and mike's going to show up the comments and everything and we're going to dig into these you tell me what you're interested in but i've got 10 awesome audio plugins i'll show you how to use another great thing is green screens so you can use a green screen with zoom and that's great right you can have a picture in your background and that's about it but with obs you can build really awesome advanced virtual sets and motion graphics that include your vert green screen background so if you use green screens the opportunities are endless what you can do with videos in your background pictures in your background you can have a foreground and a background which allows you to build those virtual sets you can put live video images inside of your virtual sets virtual televisions you can do so much with obs and then pump all that into zoom so it's a lot more powerful than the standard virtual backgrounds that zoom uses and you can still use some of the cool zoom filters that they're uh playing around with that make you have a beard or all that stuff you can still use that with obs so it's very interesting what you can do there we have free virtual sets that you can download and use with obs so if you just go to i think it's ptzoptics.com virtual sets we can look at that i can share the link in the chat if you guys are interested but i actually spent a lot of time developing 10 virtual sets that you guys can download for free so uh it's very simple i have some on my desktop i can show you how they work we can dig into that if that's something of interest the next reason why you might want to use obs with zoom is camera controls so not only can you control ptz cameras so if you're in a church or if you're in a big space where you want to zoom in cameras to specific areas we have a plug-in for obs that i can show the ptz optics camera controller but we also you also have the ability to fine-tune and adjust your camera way beyond what zoom allows you to do with their tool so you have color correction you have contrast and all of these things that you can do in obs to enhance your video image and we can look at those filters as well another reason that you can use obs with zoom it's hot keys now the way i like to think about this and it's something that you guys should consider is that zoom does have hotkeys so you can use hotkeys for zoom and you can use hotkeys for obs it's kind of like church and state right you could use hotkeys for zoom to quickly uh full screen someone or pin an image or start the meeting or record a video on the obs side you're using your hotkeys to quickly switch between scenes so we're going to show some cool uh scene animation and motion graphics that you can do in obs and you have the ability to maybe just quickly and easily set up three or four hot keys with a click of a button you can be showing a video going to your green screen doing a virtual set all kinds of things with the hot keys so i really think that's a good reason to be able to control all of your video from a few hot keys going into zoom and then finally scene switching get kind of ties into the hot keys here but there's a really awesome new tool for scene switching with motion graphics that you can download and try out i just heard somebody burp so i know it's camp there's no way that that zoom is muted you have to mute it in vmix and that's it so uh basically it's up to you guys i guess we can unmute zoom now what do you guys want me to uh go into to um start with first so that's the 10 reasons why i think you should if anyone has issues with connecting obs and zoom i can also go over that entire process but i thought we let's throw it out to the crowd um our audience online what do you guys want to see um with obs and we'll go right into it we covered a lot and we got a lot of great questions um in all sorts of chats so do you want to start with some of the youtube questions or would you like to turn it over to our zoom friends um i'll let you decide tess um you just just throw them out at me uh and i will answer them all right let me look at the youtube chat here and see what some good ones can be ed is saying can you talk about the performance issues using obs it seems like you can place a heavy load on your system that is a great question and one of the things that that is probably an amazing place to start and one thing you can do in obs is you can go to view stats and the stats here allow you to see what's going on and it's true that right now uh obs is using about 14 of my cpu um so it gives you the idea now if i was streaming if i was recording that number would go up so there's a couple things you can do to increase the performance of obs to when you're working with zoom as well because zoom can be processor intensive as well and you can keep your eye on whether or not you start to get dropped frames whether you start to you know have a problem with your stream or your recording you can view all of that in the stats now a couple performance um opportunities to increase the performance of your project for one thing in the um in the it should be in the video or was it where am i supposed to where am i here in the video area here if you are streaming and you're starting to get a lot of drop frames the first thing to do would be to reduce your bit rate because you may be having a bandwidth issue or your computer can't handle the bit rate in which you are either recording or streaming at you can also enable you can see here i have nvenc enabled and what that means is i have an nvidia graphics card in this laptop here and i've enabled obs to use it so the gpu the graphics processor unit can handle some of these graphics performance tasks and take it off the cpu where zoom is a lot of times really focused on the cpu and requires a lot of processing power to reduce the bandwidth and does a lot of compression on your computer so i would enable your encoder and take and try these different encoder settings you might not have an nvidia graphics card to use take a look at that um take down the resolution of your um session so basically i have mine set to 1280 by 720. zoom only supports 1280 by 720. so if your setup is for 1920x1080 which is generally the default you better it you know there must be there better be a reason for that if you're trying to do 1080p recordings that makes sense but if you're just doing a virtual webcam output to zoom just set it to 720 that's a significant process saving for your computer and we'll leave it at that there is another way to set process priority as high another thing i really like to do if you are streaming is to bind your ip address to a static ip address with your ethernet sometimes your computer can be using wi-fi instead of a hardwired ethernet connection which can slow things down as well what's next right we've got a lot of questions coming in here tom is requesting more information about sharing videos through obs and we did get some other questions about virtual audio cables as well so maybe we could tie in those together i think that's a perfect time to start talking about that and i'm just going to do a high level review of how to connect obs and zoom the right way so essentially there's two big new things in obs 26 the first one is your virtual camera output and you can see this little button here might can you see that kind of it says stop virtual camera but essentially you can stop and start your virtual camera and when you do that you have a webcam that will output any video from obs into zoom you just need to choose and i'll do it quickly here i gotta launch launch a zoom meeting real quick to do that and essentially in your zoom meeting sign in you can let's go ahead and start one real quick or you know what all right go ahead and just join the uh join the meeting that we have going on here so everyone can see it so essentially um you can see here that i have obs camera now um as my video source and so uh it's being used by another application what could that be um just close and open obs real quick you should be able to of course that would happen when i'm doing a live demo let's see here um it should take anything from obs and output it start virtual camera zoom failed please select another video camera in the settings interesting obs oh obs virtual camera there we go i st i have i have the old obs virtual camera now you have to use the new one but essentially you can see here anything i do in obs will be output to zoom so that is how you get the camera input in so it's very straightforward and the answer i think it was tom's question test you can see here i'm playing a video in obs and it's going to zoom now with video you need more than just the virtual camera right you also need the audio with the video and that is where the virtual audios come into play and i'm happy to start talking about the virtual audio cables because i believe that is where probably most people get tripped up so let's dig into it now regarding uh the full integration of obs and zoom you may also want to have a second monitor and with that second monitor you may want to do a desktop capture of the zoom guests so that you can have a recording of the meeting and the video from the people from zoom so that's what this is showing here this is my kind of crude diagram here i think i have a better one that's coming up but essentially virtual camera from obs to zoom to get the webcam and then we have two virtual audio cables one is used for the microphone input on obs the other is used for the speaker output so that you can actually record the audio from the far end and in order to do that and right now just to give you an example of what we are doing i can hear tess right and tess can hear me because we have this set up right now i am using the audio output of my virtual audio cable to bring my audio from my microphone in to zoom and test his audio and anyone who wants to ask a question in the zoom meeting can unmute and i can hear them because through the virtual audio cable coming from the speaker output of zoom is coming through now mike what i'm going to ask you to do quickly is show that video with show tests just show test in the zoom session and bring that up on the screen and what i'm going to do is go ahead and just show that up on the screen you just take your full screen if you would and what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you guys our audio settings here so go to the little carrot at the up arrow there yep and hit audio settings now what you guys can see here is that cable b has been selected as the speaker so go ahead and talk to us hey there okay we can hear her just if you're if you're testing it go ahead and hit test speaker okay i can hear that now you can also see that virtual cable a as i speak has audio coming in so there's two virtual audio cables one for the incoming audio one for the outgoing audio and that is what allows you to fully integrate obs with zoom now the other thing i wanted to mention you can get the virtual audio cables at vb audio cable uh you can base they're basically free um i think for the for one version of it you have to pay like a donation of five dollars um sorry about that it's just not my company i would give them away for free if i could um and there's a new plugin called obs audio monitor and what that allows you to do and i'm going to show this live just so that we can show this properly is you can see that in my audio mixer here we have an audio source and i can go ahead into filters and one thing i was going to show was the uh the vst plug-ins which this is a uh delay plug-in but i actually would much rather use a compressor um so i could compress the audio a little bit do like a little real-time eq if if i wanted to you could do this for your audio you can do this for the video audio you could do this for the far end guests coming from zoom you can you can adjust i have all these great plugins but the plugin that we actually are interested in here actually is down here and it is called why am i not seeing it here you know what i didn't install it on this computer so you'll have to just take my word for it it's called the audio monitor um so i want to do a live demo of that but i think it's on my other it's on our other computer but essentially audio monitor this is a obs plugin it creates a filter that you can use with any audio source in obs and what you would want to do is you would choose your microphone your videos that have audio anything in obs that has audio and you would add that audio video filter the audio monitor and that allows you to select any device that you want to send that audio to so in this case if we're connecting obs and zoom every audio source in obs we want to send a cable a and then boom you can actually create a custom mix for obs which is pretty cool we could have your microphone louder than some background music you could have your video a little louder than you know another source the only thing that you don't want to do is you do not want to send the audio that you're capturing from zoom and send it back to them because that will create an audio loop so that's the only one that when you're monitoring your audio you do not want to have sent back via cable a now when you're testing and configuring you can just do what we showed a moment ago where you open up the zoom settings of the audio there play that test speaker and see if you hear it in uh in obs and in your headphones that you're monitoring with speak to the people on the far end and zoom if you don't have anyone in your zoom session just look for those levels in that little microphone bar assuming it all works you are good to go now i have some i have some troubleshooting uh options as well that we can talk about if you are having issues with this but tess i'd rather just stick keep going with our q a and uh that should be probably the most helpful for everyone okay star of the c productions wants to know how do you add audio delay to match lips lip sync that's a great question um so and i'll be honest a lot a lot of people have audio sync issues with obs so we actually created an audio sync video for obs see if i can find it here here it is how does it work so this is like the ultimate way to do this so we have this video file that you can download and um man i have a whole presentation on it essentially uh what happens is it's a video file that plays i'd really like to just grab that video file where is that thing essentially you play this video file and it can figure out exactly how much audio delay you have and when you figure that out you can go to the advanced audio properties tab and you can add an offsync now you could use that video that we created and there's a downloadable there and i can send it to you but essentially what always happens is that your video is coming in slower than the audio it always happens that way because audio is low bit rate video is usually high bit rate so it takes more bandwidth to get the audio um the video and then the audio so the video's slower whether you're using an ip stream or whatever there's video latency coming in now essentially what you do is you offset the audio you delay it a little bit even right now we have 80 milliseconds of audio delay on my microphone and i think the audio sync is pretty good so here's a simple tip you can just do an audio test you can record yourself and go like this five four three two one zero do that a couple times and that gives you a visual on you know okay i said five when i saw five and you try to get those two things to match um that's the best way to do it and then what i say to do is you just keep adding 25 milliseconds of latency so start with 25 then do 50 then do 75 then do 100 then do 125 eventually you're gonna say wow that looks really good do not go past once you go too much delay and the audio starts to uh to go the other direction instead of it being behind it starts to go before then it starts to look crazy so just try to find that perfect medium there by adding 25 milliseconds of latency this is mainly just on your live mics and make sure by the way if you have two mics or three mics or like tess and i are in the same studio they must be the same or you will get an echo we got another question asking for tips on how to improve the resolution of zoom that's a great question and it is an issue uh and obs in part is a solution because if you're doing an important meeting and you want to record that obs becomes your ability to record in hd at a really high bit rate looks awesome and then there you have very little control over zoom now the best tip literally the best thing you can do and zoom isn't going to like me for saying this but you can straight up say hey zoom i would like better quality video literally they have customers that they give access to 1080p video quality too so you can say hey i really need 1080p now apparently they charge more for it um so it's something to think about but if you were a customer before covid and when they used to say it was hd and uh it was 720 um you could say hey you know when i originally signed up this was supposed to be 720 i'm not even getting 720 anymore clearly it's due to the congestion of the service but you can just raise a stink with them other than that you should make sure you're hardwired but there's not a whole lot you can really do now i have two two ideas for you though there's two versions of video in obs right there is your webcam video and there is your screen share video what's the difference the webcam video is high frame rate so we can go up to 30 frames a second right probably less probably like 20 frames a second but they usually have a smaller box because they're thinking a lot of boxes right so low resolution high frame rate well what can you do to fix that not much you could pin someone's video which you know makes the box bigger for you or you can spotlight someone's video as the host which makes it large for everyone and that helps a little bit but if you need to show detailed graphics and you really care about someone being able to read an excel sheet or seeing a lot of detail in a picture you can use the screen share functionality and when you screen share generally it will say it will be high resolution low frame rate so they can maintain basically the same amount of bandwidth necessary to have all the video callers and the screen share working in high resolution but again low frame rate you don't need a lot of frames to do a powerpoint here's the final curveball if you want to show a video and the best quality that zoom can do you can actually screen share and hit the check box that says optimize for video and i believe that will give you the best quality video to watch a video with your friends in a zoom call it's still not great but it's probably the best you have opportunity to use inside of zoom here's one for you does this work on mac this whole obs zoom integration yes it does uh it definitely does so first of all uh it didn't like a couple months ago but zoom sorry obs has added support for the virtual webcam output in the mac version and virtual audio cables are from vb audio are now available for mac so you can follow these instructions whether it's mac or pc and that is a new thing uh when when obs first rolled this out they rolled it out for windows and our mac friends couldn't do it um the virtual audio cables were only available for windows for the longest time but now pretty much everything is available for mac as well still have a lot of questions filing in here is there anybody in zoom that wanted to um speak up and ask a direct question i want to make sure we're not neglecting you ed was there something that you wanted to say yeah actually i want to make a comment earlier when you were talking about the screen sharing because we use zoom i work for a county government and we use zoom extensively for tons and tons of meetings and broadcasting live on air even we're actually broadcasting our peg channel with it and when doing a screen share we found that if you're a powerpoint presentation or a document zoom excelled in that it was nice and crisp and clear but when playing a video screen sharing a video it was quite the opposite and these and i'm running on you know very powerful machines your i9 processors 32 gigs of ram uh you know high-end high-end nvidia cards so what we found was instead of sharing the video we use vmix here primarily and use use the virtual camera and actually push that to zoom when it came to playing like a video other words don't screen share video save the screen sharing just for presentations but anytime there is a video that goes to the virtual camera and and then it looked fabulous mike if you want to turn into speaker view when we're having questions i think that'd be ideal yeah i've got my camera turned off right now anyway sorry okay um well thank you for that now did you try when you were doing a screen share for a video did you click the optimize for video check box oh yeah we have that checked across the board but we just that was just something our own personal experience with it was that video is actually played smoother and better quality when we used them in a virtual cameras versus versus a screen share but and the thing is it would the opposite was true for presentations if you were trying to press put a slideshow through the virtual camera versus the screen share you know the screen share looked much better so that was just something that we came across and i thought i'd share with you no thank you and and that that mirrors what i have experienced as well um so if you have a super detailed document the screen share works great um the issue with the whole thing and i agree with you the video will be smoother with the virtual camera option but the resolution still isn't good enough to read text in a video and i've had you know people have talking to they have these nice videos that have infographics and they're trying to read the text in the video and the resolution even with a virtual camera isn't great it's smoother because you're seeing higher frame rate but the resolution isn't high enough to really like read small text would you agree totally agree with you totally agree yeah i mean the whole thing with the zoom you know that's webrtc based so it's you know you're it's a trade-off there versus the rtmp streaming which is a very old technology been around for 20 years uh the webrtc is you're you're get you're gaining speed so that that delay that latency is really low but you're giving up quality so there's always that balance and i i think that technology from things i'm seeing seeing coming down the pipe is going to shift where we're going to get a higher quality especially with the new codex there you know the 265 codex and such coming you know coming down that we're going to we're going to see that paradigm shift but yeah okay we're in the just just in its embassy right now you know you it's such a great perspective because i do think the global infrastructure that zoom is building and everyone else is just expanding a lot and so at the same time as the infrastructure grows the codecs that we're using become more efficient and that together is going to you know provide a lot higher quality whether we're going to see 4k in this decade i'd say yes i'd say you probably see high resolution 4k zoom meetings and full video in in real time yeah definitely definitely i totally agree with you there totally agree i mean there's especially with the new ndi cloud based systems i mean there's just some remarkable technology coming down i this is just i don't want to go down that rabbit hole because i know you're trying to focus on this but i do appreciate your time yeah no thank you for the question and tess i think that was a great idea if there's anyone in the zoo meeting who wants to to throw a question in feel free and or we could just keep going with the with the zoom or the youtube questions what do you think tess hi keith keith hello i'm keith collins i want to talk about this sure microphone the mv7 available like at guitar center or online perhaps you have experience with it uh what's really amazing this this usb microphone is professional quality uh it connects to your computer with usb it has a professional audio xlr output on the back so you can run it with a pa system if you wish or any other audio gear but what i really love is that it has a headphone jack and it has software so you can use a display that's digital to dial in how much of the computer you hear and how much of your own voice you hear so it's really comforting to hear your own voice the way others will just directly with this device so you just plug any headphones out into it and there you go so it also comes with software that allows you to set things for presets to make you have an announcer voice instantly it has compression built in and eq and you can certainly use the other things with obs but you know i i worked with virtual a b a bit and i found for something real quick and fast this gets me some of the functions i needed uh without having to do any extra work so i just wanted to share some happiness uh it's 249 dollars thank you so much for sharing that keith i'm a big fan of sure we have the shure sm7bs in our podcasting studio huge fan but they don't i think that that was a huge innovation with sure i'm happy to see them have the whole sure movie line of usb products with the basically they have profiles right there's like five or six super simple profiles that you can click between to enhance your audio yeah so smart because the vst-3 plug-ins from our vs t2 plug-ins available in obs which we can dig into are great now uh they're a little complicated to use you need to know what you're doing but the nice thing about those plugins being available in obs is that you can add those to the incoming audio so you can enhance the audio coming in from the far end of the zoom call which is generally the issue right you've got somebody who's the ceo of the company he's using a built-in microphone to his laptop and it doesn't sound very good now hopefully we can get him a sure 7mb oh what's that you got there keith well i am holding a behringer euphoria class audio mixer this uh once again is a little outboard device they make a two-channel model that is about 120 bucks this one is four channels uh for the geeks you can see on the back there are plenty of connectivity options with this thing but what's really nice with this is that you can dial in all kinds of incredible things with incoming audio sources one of the things sure points out on their website is for podcasting and and conferences one of the best things you can get is the standard sure sm57 microphone that's true and so what's cool about these is it uh will automatically reject everything except your voice that's right in front of it these are 110 dollars uh they have a professional xlr cable so you have to have this and a mixer like what i just showed but we use two of these when i'm doing virtual webinars for our dental society meetings and we don't need to hear the dishes clanging around in the background and you can even get them with a switch so this is a way to really up the professional audio quality for hardly any money at all i'm glad you mentioned that as well one of my favorite microphones of all time for the money and uh you're right it works like a shotgun mic almost you can get right up on that mic it doesn't pick up the side sound and audio is one of the most important things that we're dealing with here um most people using zoom in a meeting situation throw a conference phone on the table which is designed to pick up everything in a huge radius and it's much better if you can to to have those directional mics directly to the people who you want everyone to hear so the s m 58 is highly directional and and rock stars use it every time you see a big performance almost always they have those 110 dollar mic this other one that i showed the mv7 it has settings for near and and farther placement of the mic but it is a condenser mic and it's more likely to pick up the sound of the dishes in the kitchen even though it's 30 feet away so i found that the handheld mic is the best at eliminating any background noise yep i've got a couple here in this studio i absolutely love them um thank you for sharing that that's awesome all right tess what do we got next we certainly got more good conversation happening travis is asking about an issue he has with his camera how to zoom in and out on obs without creating multiple screens and stretching the screen experience zoom in and out now is he talking about optically zooming in with the ptz camera or is he talking about digitally zooming in between multiple scenes he's actually using a black magic okay um and what is he trying not to do hello hi can you guys hear me yeah um so i'm streaming for my church right and um right now what we have is a sony camera um and we're using it with um black magic one of our problems is that we're unable to zoom because we're not connected to the camera directly um we're streaming through obs and um the issue that we're having is when it comes to zooming in we have to stretch the screen you know how you would okay yeah so is there a possibility where you could zoom in like instead of stretching the screen i mean it's you can't connect to the camera but is there a possibility that we could zoom in travis you need a ptz camera yeah oh my god i mean all right so you kind of almost need a ptz camera to be honest yeah that's impossible right yeah i mean you you literally need a ptz camera to do what you're asking to do and you definitely need even with a black magic camera you need to be connected to the camera like if you see my screen here what you're asking what you seem to be asking to want to do is to actually zoom in with optical zoom right so this camera i'm using is a ptz optics 30x camera and from 75 feet away i can zoom in you know to a head and shoulder shot of a pastor at the front of a church so that's what you're asking for some black magic cameras have remote controllable lenses but digital zoom you could get away with digital zoom a little bit but be careful with it because as you're saying that it pixelizes pretty quickly yeah it drops a little quality um the good thing about it is the camera is a very good one so it doesn't yeah but um the also the things that the thing that we struggle with is lower thirds um uh we do a lot of live low efforts right and uh we don't do stuff like easyworship or any of these software what we do is we would have um those loafers created in advance or um we would use um facebook has this feature where it connects to obs um where you would uh use a browser source we would use some browser source to make low efforts but is there like something that makes it much easier like to do live low efforts like probably not sure if what you guys are doing in live but that is one of the things that we um so there's a couple of things uh to think about there one is is are you trying to bring in social media comments from the viewers live or is it just the titles for a known amount of people that are going to be coming into the show for the production okay so it's so the titles right and also let's say let's say if we're gonna let's say if the pastor is preaching right and then we have to change the scripture or something of that sort or the name of somebody you know it's not it's not always pre-determined um you know something might pop up now and then so we want to be able to change it live or to change it where we could well we're looking at speed at the same time let me see if i can open up a quick presentation i don't want to go on too far of a tangent here but uh we just had the worship summit live where we were talking all about how to optimize obs for you know live streaming worship services and i want to show you really quickly uh what the trinity united church is doing because i think anyone using obs can learn from this one of the things they do is they're very organized with the naming of their scenes so literally every scene has a time so if church starts at 10 a.m they have a scene a name and a time and then time just goes right down the list you can see kind of if you can see my screen here i could you know what probably i should probably take my own advice and share my screen so you can see it in a high resolution here since we were just talking about that but essentially um what they do they do something that i've never seen uh done before and you can download literally a 25-page guide that uh john roberts wrote about this because i thought it was so genius i was like john can you write this down can you share it with us and here just screenshot that or or find that's ptzoptics.com worship streaming but essentially i'm not going to go into all this right now um i do think it's really important to when you build your scenes to number them and put the time and then for example if you have a sermon right but sometimes the pastor is on the left sometimes they're on the right sometimes they're in the middle you can create thr like see how he has 13 here start left start right he has these alternate scenes so he's prepared to go to a different scene if the pastor is is presenting in a different way but here's the answer to your question that i found really amazing what he does is he's got a computer at church right and the computer at church is running obs all of the titles are using text files that are synchronized by the google drive now it could be synchronized by dropbox could be synchronized by microsoft cloud but essentially all of the titles all of the lower third titles in obs are referencing text files that he updates before he even gets to church so he updates the date he updates the prelude he updates the post lead he up he updates the copyright text and if there's hymns you know and there's there's uh lower thirds for the hymns he updates all of that before he even gets to church so i found that pretty amazing he also has uses obs groups and i don't know if anyone's using these groups but i found this to be very smart inside of an ob any given obs scene he'll have folders that are d that could be possibly different based on how the worship service is going to go so for example when they do their hymns he has a folder of sources that are if live so if the hymns are going to be recorded and streamed live he's got a camera he's got an ndi camera here he's got an audio source he has a preset which actually zooms the ptz camera into that space um if it's not live if it's a video he has a whole nother folder with the video that's coming from google drive right he uploads the video from home and as soon as he gets to church it's ready because they're synchronizing off all the same files so i found that to be incredible there's a lot more to to what they're doing over there i thought it was so incredible just thought i'd share that with you travis just a couple ideas there of things that you might be able to do yeah that's awesome um um you showed something here right and that that is something that's very important as well um we've had errors in unprofessional errors where you know we have the browser source on the same screen right and then we have a low effort on that same screen sorry there you go all right so we had an issue where um we had the same like we had let's say one browser source and then we had um another lower third and something else on the same scene and we had these errors where when we send this screen across like two of them would show the same thing like two you'd see the browser source comes up and then the the the lower first comes at the same time and it clashes together and what we had to do was we had to click on the eye you know the eye to close it up but i find that was very well it was a bit unprofessional um but i think well and also making a lot of screens i i found that it kind of impacted the performance of obs i'm not sure if it's our pc that we'll have to upgrade but making a lot of screens and having browser sources and different things in them it impacted the performance of obs so that's that that was one of the issues as well okay well i don't know how i i think i want to keep going with the questions that we're getting but it sounds like you should be using uh groups which is a folder of sources so that you can hit that i hide icon for a whole group of sources instead of going through and manually kind of it's more of amateur style that doesn't look so professional doing them one at a time group them together and yeah i mean you might need to upgrade your pc i'm not sure yeah thanks for that yeah no problem all right tess what do we got lower third mike zoom all right i got a crime baby so uh you're gonna have to excuse that really quick we are getting questions about um live streaming with zoom for worship i'm gonna mute myself now okay go ahead that's fine so there are two ways to obviously live stream a zoom meeting with uh with obs or with zoom itself so those are the two ways first of all i do want to say as we've been you know going to this new hybrid style of worship and a lot of people are watching worship online due to you know social distancing restrictions i still think it's important to include an element of zoom uh i don't think that it's wise for worship leaders to for worship leaders to just do a one-way broadcast um i think that there's so much more that can come from having an interactive zoom session even if it is just for breakout rooms right coffee rooms um you know a follow-up meeting with the pastor i think that if you're just live streaming you're really missing out on what can be uh creating at least a virtual fellowship opportunity of course it's it's the best obviously if we could all just get together on a sunday and worship together but i i think that the live stream by itself is too much of a one-way um broadcast and i don't think pastors and worship leaders are doing a good enough job responding to comments right and that's sort of why um i created some of these guides on how to connect obs and zoom because if done properly you can see what we're doing right now there was a 10 or 20 minute presentation that portion of it was one way but then it's very much interactive it's it's uh you know looking at the comments but also opening up a live mic for somebody to say something and that's what we're showing here and that is what's possible and with a little bit of thought process and we've published a lot of materials on how to do this and i've spoken to a lot of worship leaders who are doing exactly this giving their pastor and their worship leader an in-ear monitor so they can hear the folks on zoom setting up a television so they can see the folks in zoom see the people they're talking to saying hello and then i also believe that a worship leader needs to be in that zoom meeting they need to moderate that zoom meeting they need to mute that guy's mic who keeps coughing right and mike needs to mute them sometimes when they're oh that's why so i'm the host so mike can't even do that there's too many zooms going on mike can't even mute these people if he wanted to but somebody should and figure that out you can have co-hosts and as a worship leader as the pastor you're on stage you can't be doing that you need a worship leader to be looking at the zoom security um now i talked to a lot of churches about security in zoom and they don't want to have a waiting room and they don't they want to let anyone in and that's part of you know man you know the christian you know traditions is you let anyone in everyone's allowed in but with that being said you do need to be have somebody in your meeting who can block a person who's opening their mic and just going crazy or muting everyone during important portions of the service so kind of went on a tangent there but i'm a firm believer that live streaming is great and it can spread the message of god it's very shareable people can watch your live stream on facebook and then feel what's going on especially during these times when we're not sure is the church open is it not open are people going in do we have to wear a mask are children allowed like there's questions and people used to you know two years ago it was like church shopping it's like which one should we go to that looks great now people have a whole new set of concerns and so live streaming is a really great way to let them you know from the safety of their own home figure out what they're comfortable with based on what they're seeing but the next step in that journey is let's get on a zoom meeting let's let's have a spiritual sharing session let's do breakout meetings let's have our youth get in one zoom breakout session i think there's so much that can be done with zoom breakout sessions so i think the connectivity of obs and zoom or vmix and zoom or wirecast and zoom is really important and providing your pastor with that affordable in-ear monitor and a television so they can see what they're doing is really going to help foster this hybrid world that we're trying to move into i don't think any church that started streaming is going to stop right you know there was a time when when i talked to a lot of pastors who said we don't want to stream because you know we want people to come into the church we don't want them to stay at home um i think that that is no longer the case and i think that there is a some of the churches i've spoke to are telling me we can't believe it there's people tuning in from australia there's people coming from cities away that moved away and now they're joining back and meeting old friends and it's becoming an amazing thing and you know everyone's supporting the church in the best way they know how in these strange times so there you go that's my thought on it hopefully if you have any questions i'm happy to answer them crm is using a ptz optics 20x usb camera to live stream with zoom and i think that this is a nice way to kind of talk about next steps what are some obs alternative software options if you're looking to you know take that next step in your production great question uh the thing i love about obs is a it's free and b it gets better every six months to a year plus you know we looked at a lot of the plugins and there's so many we barely even scratched the surface today in our session about the plugins we will be posting new videos on youtube so please hit that subscribe button if you haven't already because i'm gonna make new videos based on your guys comments that we've got about what plugins are the best and how to use them and i think obs can practically do 90 90 of what most people need but if you are looking for those next steps um you know vmix has become basically our preferred platform and that's what we use here um if you're a mac user wirecast ecamm live really great options um but i'm you know again i mean this shows about obs i'm a firm believer in obs i would push it as far as hard and as far as you can and if if you're not getting where you need to go um then i would i would look at vmix if you're a windows user and i would look at wirecast if you were a mac user i noticed today we're getting a lot of like introductory questions about using streaming software welcome because i assume that you're fairly new to our content um paul what would we say to all of our new friends right now who are just starting to use this type of software how can they get the best information to learn sort of these basic um features let me see if i can find oh i got it all right perfect um so one thing that is super simple uh is to get the free unofficial guide to obs so i wrote this book you can get it for free just google unofficial guide to obs i have updated it recently so this book is really good i also wrote a book called helping your church live stream that i've updated a few times i'm trying to keep it as updated as possible um if you're interested in uh wirecast i have one on wirecast and i have these are short booklets right you can read it in an hour or two but what i like about especially the obs guide that so many people are getting into is that let's say you're a church and you've got obs and you're the only guy at or girl at the church who knows about obs it's really nice to get that second or third person involved get that volunteer involved get that person who's a little bit technical or maybe who's musical and get them involved so they can collaborate and having the book and just being like here you go read this book now we're talking the same language now we're we have the same vocabulary now we have a little bit of a shared direction and that's when you can get two or three people involved and we haven't even scratched the surface we're going to have to do another show about this test but i'd like to in the future talk about ndi and the ability to turn your smartphone into a camera right so if you've got a small team of people who know what they're doing you can use obs which is totally free you can have your friend take their iphone or their android and get a really beautiful shot of the pastor from a side you could have another friend with another smartphone and maybe you're putting it on a tripod or maybe you're setting up a ptz camera i mean there's so many things that you can do um but i think the key is getting two or three or four people involved and i think that these books are a great way to get started that's why we wrote them and our team is continually updating them and we give them away for free you can go to ptzoptics.com book and you can download any of them if you've got a printer you can print it out right now totally for free so tess if you can just share that it's a ptzoptics.com book tess already did it there you go so start with the book print it out for free email it to your friend and it's just tried and true advice on how to use obs wirecast vmix and then i have one specifically for houses of worship and we try to keep them as up to date as possible there's something else that i wanted to add a lot of people are asking how to get in the zoom room if you didn't receive that email that means that you're not on our live show list um so i'm gonna also link to where you can sign up to be on our live show list so you can get those zoom links and participate on our next show all right tess well it sounds like you're adding some conclusion um style um information so i think we're pretty much wrapping up um if there's any final questions throw it out there otherwise we are going to wrap this show up we're going to do another follow-up show i think on the same topic test but i'm going to flip it around a little and i'm going to try to go a little bit more advanced so we're going to set up a multi-camera production with obs we're going to do ptz control we're going to turn our smartphones into cameras we're going to be doing animated lower thirds i'm going to show some cool motion stuff we're going to connect with zoom and that was kind of what i wanted to do today but it seems like we wanted to i wanted to throw it to the audience and be like what do you want to talk about so hopefully we did a good job with that i think uh our next show we're gonna get a little bit more advanced we're gonna push obx obs to the max if you're waiting for our next show get the uh book and read it and by the time you're uh by the time our next show rolls around you guys are gonna be experts and you're gonna be asking all kinds of crazy questions and i hope that uh we all move forward in the same direction yeah and remember to go ahead and scrub through this video if you missed anything that you think uh you want to review it is available on demand and there are a few more questions paul if you did want to continue to dive into it i don't know if you have time no we have a little extra time that's fine okay um usama please repost your question because i think i've lost it in the chat somewhere there's a lot of great uh questions coming in living springs retreat is asking if there's any way to integrate the zoom chat comments into your live stream ah it's a great great question and i've tried for so long to do that there is a way but it's painful so i'll show my zoom chat there's a way there if there's a will there's a way but this one is just painful all right so basically if you guys can see my zoom chat here this is the chat and essentially you can click this little button here and you can hit save chat and when the chat is saved you can go into it and you've got your chat okay that's the chat that's all the chat there's no automated way to get this chat i have talked to zoom about it i have tried to get an api i have tried to figure out an easier way to to grab this there might be a way to get a plug-in for obs to parse this information into an easier way but what i'm getting at is currently there's no api to do it so there's no service you can buy to do it but you can download it you can copy and paste it into a text file and that text file would be referenced in a lower third so let's just say we've got a text file here and instead of it actually being a piece of text you click read from file and that file let's just put it on the desktop real quick and say new just call this zoom chat this is this is you know the type of stuff you kind of have to do with obs sometimes click ok all right so there's nothing in that file yet but when i click save now it's here so you could theoretically build a zoom chat lower third and whenever you got a really good zoom chat and this could be helpful for like a pastor or somebody who's looking at the screen keith this is your question thanks for all the great info and leadership so let's say that's keith's question right uh somebody if you wouldn't mind somebody just put something in the zoom chat just just to show this real quick so somebody pop something in the zoom chat just anything else and i'll throw it into the lower third as an example so thank you martin said this is something we go ahead over to our pad here boom save now it says this is something now it's not i don't think it's a horrible workflow and here's why if you have obs set up the way we were talking about today where you've got a lower third and it says zoom chat information and um it's referencing a text file that's on your dropbox or your google drive that can be updated from anyone in the world so you could have somebody in your zoom meeting just uploading updating that text file and boom boom boom your obs is showing the latest comments from zoom it's a manual process but in many ways you want it to be a manual process you don't want every zoom chat to show up there just the ones that you find inspirational or important to address during your live stream so that's the way to do it you can do it um there's no automated way to do it currently that i know of and i've tried i have tried all right is anything else tess are we good to go i just want to answer a crypto text question we do have udemy courses paul how do we find our udemy courses that's a great uh that's true and and and that's again that's something that um udemy courses i'm trying to think of you to me course obs i can maybe search paul richards on you to me because it is your you know udemy channel um but do we have a better link i don't know well here's a link to the one for obs and um what we'll do is um i will i will share a free coupon code for that um i'm just trying i think how we'll get it to everybody on the next live stream at a minimum but essentially it's great because you can read the book and then you can take the course and they both mirror each other so i wrote the book to mirror the online course so do that and then our next live stream you can come with all those questions and uh you know i think we'll get a lot done we're gonna do these live streams once maybe twice a month and um you know we've got so much great video content on our youtube channel all about this stuff that uh go on a self-discovery journey binge watch some stream geeks youtube videos maybe take a udemy course maybe grab a book print one out hand it to a couple people get up to speed and then because i feel like sometimes our live streams test we're talking about super advanced stuff and i do want to kind of wind back and and be like all right let's get the udemy courses let's get the books we want to get you guys up to speed so that we can again inch back up to bleeding edge technology right because there's so much you can do with obs i even find out new things every day that i can do with obs so i think we want to start at the foundational level of what is obs how what is the best workflow on how to use it and then we'll start building blocks okay how do we do animated lower thirds how do we bring the zoom chat in how do we do all these awesome things and then everyone's got live streams are going to become better and better and better and that's what the stream geeks are about that's right thank you guys so much for all of your questions today we can go as long as you'd like paul because we've got so many uh great learners here today so let's keep going for a little more um just just keep throwing the questions at me all right frosty frog have we tried capturing the zoom chat via window capture and put a chroma key uh and crop filters over it that is a great idea 100 yes you can do that let's go ahead and show how essentially what you would do is you would go to obs that's a great idea now the the the reason why that didn't come to mind as my first option uh we're gonna go to display capture here uh mike can you just flip the um the obs screen on so everyone can see that and i will also share my screen in oh actually i'm not going to share my screen and zoom sorry guys the reason why is because um i need to capture the screen so we're going to do a display capture and we're going to choose display 2 we're going to click ok and that didn't work so we'll try sometimes display capture doesn't work as much as actually let me turn this off and it probably will sometimes instead of display capture i'll use window capture and when we do window capture we'll say yeah give me zoom boom i got it now so essentially what i've done here is i've gotten the zoom chat but so that is a way to do it frosty frog and i'm glad you said that the reason why i don't like that let's finish this though before i say that filters crop crop off the left by 500 crop it off by 1200 crop it off by 1400 this is the reason why i don't like obs that much sometimes because it's like i'm gonna make like guesses sometimes but there we go that is the zoom chat and so there it is boom we got it but the thing i don't like about that is a it's only gonna be shown really in that way and b it shows everything so you don't really have control over what is being shown and i as a producer you know if someone could say something crazy right now and be shown to everyone on our live stream please don't do that be appropriate um so yes you can do that thank you for that recommendation frostyfrog brian joined late and wants to know have we used an ndi virtual input to bring audio visuals into zoom that is a good question um we did not uh i was more we had we did talk a little bit about using ndi input now that is something i'd like to quickly show and then then yes i would like to talk about ndi output but mike do you have the ability to show this camera above let's show let's show this above camera real quick i want to show this so basically i don't know how well that looks but this is my camera and my this camera is using something called ndi capture it looks better like that so mike why don't you go ahead and bring my ndi camera into the production here so essentially what this does there we go um is this is going to be a video source into obs or vmix or whatever you're using so here we go it just makes it sort of mute it i i think that there might be a new but look how good that looks i mean this is like a my phone is now a live camera inside of our production and i can go right to the plus symbol i can click ndi source now i might name that camera but i'm not going to right now and literally every source available on my network which you can see we have quite a few is going to come down now here is my iphone see it work boom that is how easy it is to take your phone and put it into the production i don't know if everyone's seen our production space here here's mike mike's working hard over here behind the desk here's our zoom session now i'll be honest we're not using obs we use vmix and there's good reasons why we use vmix but it's not free um anyway we can switch back from that um just wanted to show that quickly because um let me admit that admit the next person um that is how easy it is to get ndi sources in to your obs production so if you have an ndi camera i think this is an ndi camera here if you have an ndi camera um you can bring plug it in via ethernet and this is a ptz 30x ndi camera from ptz optics you can zoom it in 75 feet away control it with obs bring the video in obs and you just need one ethernet cable regardless how do we bring ndi into zoom you can but it's not my favorite way to do it and if you really are enjoying that let me know but i believe it's easier to manage and it's more reliable to just use the virtual camera for your video and virtual audio cables for your audio you could have in order to use ndi properly you need two computers that alone is a deal breaker for a lot of people right i wonder why i use two computers ndi with a network in between allows you to send the video and audio from one production switcher let's say obs to another computer running zoom and then you're sending audio and video but then how do you get the audio back from zoom into obs with ndi is my question to you because i'm not sure that's why i don't recommend it all right to ask what's next unless uh he has the answer to that question we'll keep moving on does anybody have the answer to that question anybody on zoom yeah that seems like a tricky one travis just commented saying you can do this using a mixing board unless this is a separate conversation okay um does the ndi app on phones work on vmix as well yes it does and uh the better your phone the better the quality the better your wi-fi the better it will use it will work and if you're really getting advanced some people like to use you could bring your phone into zoom via obs and that's kind of cool because now obs can have your main camera your audio all that and then you can throw a phone in the mix you can throw two phones in the mix right you can do quite a lot with um ndi camera app i love it another thing to consider by the way is something i haven't even thought of but now that i'm thinking about it it's the the reverse of the ndi app which is the ndi capture so let's show this again mike so what this is is the opposite of um this is the opposite of the ndi camera this is you want to zoom in on a little bit we got our ceiling camera can zoom let's see here what can it focus yes it can this is the opposite of the ndi camera app this will capture anything on my phone so now i can just peruse around and mike this is actually something i wanted to try anyway can i just play mario kart for a second here oh mario kart is uh mario kart's off let's try mario run all right mike can you bring that that ndi source in so this is now an ndi source on that's available what the heck is this all right is available in obs or vmix now the reason why i bring this up is imagine if you had zoom running on your phone right so really quickly i do have zoom running on my phone and i should be able to join this meeting and i should be able to bring zoom directly into obs with this so that's something i never even considered what's the meeting number on this let's see here it is i guess i shouldn't say it over the live stream don't say it tess i'm asking you to break the rules that's not nice i think i have to hit oh oh just tell me test and we'll we'll keep the bad guys out okay nine four four zero three four eight five eight six zero what's the password five eight six zero four six hopefully julia's not watching all right i'm gonna join without video mike what does that look like on your side from my phone look at that pretty cool huh can you let me in tess well there we go you go to participants i don't see anybody in the waiting room are you in i'm in oh i see i see it um it's not really pulling through properly it's just showing that oh that's weird i saw our feed for a second there now it's me oh because i'm talking mike's going to try to refresh the ndi i don't think that the ndi capture i would i just just was interested to see if the ndi capture app is not working yeah i thought that i just i thought it might work um but i think that's a little bit too much for the iphone to do so yeah oh you know what the broadcast just stopped it it's not really designed for that so uh sorry i just went off on a tangent it was time we're experimenting now maybe it's time to close the show is there any final questions we're getting some nice comments in here um but i think that's kind of wrapping it up for for the questions okay yeah we're getting some pretty advanced stuff and i think it's a good idea to stay basic with this one catch up next month so that'll be march our march live stream is going to be coming up we're really excited about it um please just let us know in the comments email me and tess paul.richards at streamgeeks.test.protesto streamgeeks.us let us know what you think our next show should be about i think i've got a pretty good idea based on your feedback so thank you so much for watching the show hit the subscribe button so you can we got some cool videos coming out don't we mike we got some really cool stuff coming out uh and it's all based on your guys's comments and what we think everybody needs to to push the envelope forward in the video production industry so thank you so much everybody take care

Channel: StreamGeeks

Views: 19,785

Keywords: streamgeeks, live streaming, video production, youtube live show, facebook live show, video production studio, live streaming studio, streaming studio, video production professional

Id: Z4tYGQJwWIw

Length: 82min 56sec (4976 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021