15 OBS Tricks all streamers should know

what is up my youtube friends it can take a long time to get up to speed using obs but once you do it it's pretty easy in this video i want to show you 15 tricks you should know as you're learning to live stream with obs studio so let's get to it [Music] my analytics say that 80 of the folks that watch my content are not subscribed am i doing something wrong let me know in the comments but if you're looking for tools tips and tricks to help make you a better youtuber or live streamer you've come to the right place so why not subscribe to the channel and click that bell so you don't miss any new content this first one allows you to change the look of the obs interface these are really easy to access if you want to change how your stream looks visually just go down here into settings and underneath general right at the top you can see it says theme and this is the default one which most people are familiar with but you can just change these to other ones and they take a couple of seconds and they come up and some of these look really unique and interesting and they might be more aesthetically pleasing for you and there are about four different things that you can choose and i actually really kind of like this one now i can't use it because i do tutorials on mine and people would be like well mine doesn't look like that but you may decide to use some of these here is the original one and boy it's kind of uh one of those things where you need your eye bleach after you're done with it but those are the different themes that you can choose and they're pretty cool the next one is really important because you always want to know the health of your live stream so to bring up your stats doc all you have to do is go up here into the top and go to view and then i want to go to docs and i want to go to stats and this brings up a doc that has all the statistics for your live stream from the encoding speed to the frames dropped and everything else and this is really important for you to understand what is going on with your stream so if there is a problem you know whether it's your computer or whether it's your connection and all that sort of stuff now i have a couple of videos showing you how to read these stats so there's a link at the top if you want to check one of those out a lot of people don't know that you can use custom resolutions tailored towards the platform you want to stream on or your equipment capabilities most people don't know you can actually stream at any resolution that you want a lot of people don't think you can stream at 4k but you can if you just go into settings and then video you can type in here whatever you want and this can match whatever platform you're streaming to if you're streaming in portrait to something like instagram or it can just be so that you can lower your resolution or raise it based on the type of equipment that you have so i can put in a higher resolution for my stream right here and you know i just want to set my base canvas and of course my output resolution to the same and once i do that well i could stream in 4k or whatever resolution i want so there you go this is a really good way that you can adjust your resolution if you're having trouble streaming because your machine might be older or what have you you can easily adjust the resolution to your liking believe it or not most people watch live streams on their phone and the output resolution of it doesn't really matter all that much unless it's something you're going to record and use for later in which case especially if you're doing gaming well you probably want to be in 4k at 60 frames per second but for the average streamer or just something that's meant to be entertaining as long as your audio is good the resolution of your stream doesn't really always matter all that much so just keep that in mind and you can change your custom resolutions if you want this next one is an instant performance enhancer if you're having streaming encoder troubles this one is perfect for those of you who maybe have some serious problems encoding on your stream you can just right click on the screen and disable the preview and sure now you can't see what you're streaming but everything else works the same and now your machine does not have to do all of the encoding to create that screen and make it happen uh this could seem like it's disconcerting to stream this way but it's a great way to enable you to maybe stream at a higher resolution than you normally could because your machine just can't handle it so if you're ever at the end of your rope and you want to try to live stream at a resolution that's just not working out try disabling your preview and see how much better your machine runs when it's not encoding your preview and the live stream this can make a big difference if you're using a multi-monitor setup you're gonna love this one so if you have extra cpu power with your machine and maybe an extra monitor there are some really cool things you can do you can go to this multi-view window and you can put this in another window and it makes an easy way for you to change scenes and kind of see what everything looks like at the top you see the preview and the program which would be kind of like using studio mode but this gives you like a layout that you could just easily change scenes one to the other that's kind of cool you can also go up here to view and i can go to multi-view full screen and i can select any one of these extra monitors i have and toss this up onto one of those now you can't see it because i'm not actually recording on those monitors but that tossed the same thing that we just saw up onto another monitor and it makes it pretty simple to just switch from one scene to another and see everything that's going on and here we go this is what it would look like fully on screen and so you can right click on it and you can minimize it and you can just close it by clicking that little x at the top you can also right click on an image and i can go to windowed projector preview or full screen projector preview and there we go we have our exact window projected right there so we could turn off the preview on one screen and turn it on on another screen and that just makes it really easy to just maybe have all of your stats and all the stuff to run your stream on one screen and a preview of the screen on another and that can work out really really well make it a lot easier to kind of get a full view of what your audience is seeing so here it is we just turn off the preview and now we have a preview in a small window that we can maximize on another screen or whatever we want really really cool so we can add our stats and other docs in here and yet we still have our previewed window we can put anywhere we want most likely the highest use for this is on another screen but you can just have it tiny on the screen you're watching now and move it around anywhere you want i personally like to have my streams look just right everything needs to line up and look square here we are in obs and we have a source i'm just going to go into settings and show you where these are right here in general under source alignment snapping you want to have all of these checked and this allows you to really have you know more control over where the particular items are on your screen so you can see if i go to the edge it snaps to the edge automatically it'll snap to the top if i go to the center it'll snap to the center it will snap left or right center or even the dead center which is always nice but that's not the only benefit to this it will also snap to other sources that you may have in here so if i go here where i have two sources i can drag this over it'll automatically snap to the other source and that makes it really really easy to organize your windows managing a live stream can be hard this one will take away a lot of that extra stress this one i'm gonna add a chat to your live stream so it's less that you have to look at it's really easy you wanna obviously have your studio opened in youtube and you just go and you pop out this chat and you copy this url right here and any other chat thing that uses a url you can use as well then you go into obs and you go to view and then docs then you're going to go to custom browser docs and you can add one and just type in what doc you're trying to add in this case chat and then you paste the url over here and you apply and click close and it doesn't seem like anything happened you just go up into view and then docs and you'll see your little chat doc right here and there we go our chat doc is loaded into our live stream so now we can easily see the chat along with the rest of the stuff in our interface i mean this makes it so much easier you can also just grab the top of this bar and drag it to any location that you want to put it within your user interface in obs really simple awesome stuff there are some really cool ways you can adjust the visual sources on your screen so there are so many things that you can do obviously we all know you can stretch out the image by just holding on to one of these little nubbies on the edges and it will adjust it correctly but you can also hold down the alt key and drag any edge and it will crop that image so it doesn't actually change the size it just crops out that image now i can remove any of the alterations that i make by right clicking on the image going to transform and then clicking on reset transform and it resets it back to the original shape so if i crop it or anything like that and i don't like it i can just reset it you can also adjust the skew of your images by holding down the shift key and you can see that you can distort these images in any way that you like just hold down the shift key and drag it around now if i let go of the shift key it automatically snaps to the proper ratio so if you're going to do this you want to make sure that you hold down the shift key until you have it shaped exactly how you want it and then unclick the button and that will hold that shape and of course to get these back to their original shape you just right click on them go to transform and reset transform and we are all back to normal really really easy and awesome tools in order to reshape these images and this works for any source video images or even your camera it's awesome sometimes we want to make just minor adjustments to our visible sources so if you just want to make simple minor adjustments to your assets in your screen you can use the arrow keys up down left and right on your keyboard you just select the source in the window and then you use those keys and you can move everything ever so slightly to get it positioned exactly where you want it i use this tool all the time to get those really fine tuning locations all set in it works awesome when you have a really complex scene you can really have a lot to keep track of sometimes we just have way too many things in our sources to keep track of maybe we're using a soundboard or something well you can select everything in there and right click and go to group and you can change it so that everything is in a folder this makes it so much easier to scroll through your sources and you can obviously pick and choose what you want in these groups it's so much easier now you can even take this organization a step further by adding color so you can right click on any of the sources and you can set a color in here it's just one more awesome way that you can organize the sources of your live stream and if i go into this folder i can actually color code the media inside the folder as well i just right click on it i go to set color and then i set that color and there we go this is a really easy way to categorize stuff and make it really easy to find visually in sources you can also remove stuff from a folder just by grabbing it and dragging it out and remove it by right right-clicking and going to remove you can remove a color by right-clicking on the item going to set color and then selecting clear you can also of course set up custom colors in here this is one of the most powerful tools in obs and a lot of streamers never even use it i want to show you now is a way that you can combine a bunch of different things into a scene that you can use for later so right here we have this video of the ferris wheel it's pretty simple this could be your camera source or a video source or any image and what i'm going to do is i'm going to add an overlay on top of this as if it was a face cam so i'm just going to call this frame and browse and i'm going to select my face cam frame in here because we're gonna just pretend that this little video is actually a face cam or something like that just so you can see how useful nesting scenes is and there's the one i'm looking for i just click open and there we go we can see it's pretty simple frame and i'm gonna make this frame a little bigger and i wanna fit our little image in there so what i'm gonna do is crop off the top of this image so it fits in here with the alt key and then i just drag this edge and there we go so now our image fits in here so now we have a scene that would have a face cam or a video or whatever you want it's just two simple things and you can see i have to select both of them in order to move it around well there's an easier way to just use this over and over again in a lot of different scenes so i'll go into scene 2 and i'm just going to click the plus and i'm going to go to scenes and now i'm going to add that scene i just created right here and click ok and there we go you can see my box is already created it moves around all in one you can add any kind of filters or anything else and i can reuse this camera over and over again and i know it's going to look exactly the same in every scene so basically i only have to set it up one time and i can use it in all kinds of different scenes and that is the power of the nested scene if you want to find out more about the amazing things that you can do with nested scenes there's a link at the top as usual for another video that goes a lot deeper into how these work when you're thrashing around a scene or you have a complex stream you're trying to manage it can be really easy to accidentally hit the wrong thing so a lot of times if you're live streaming and especially if you're a gamer maybe you're using the scroll bar a lot to go back in your chat or something like that you can accidentally select your audio really mess it up and it could be 20 minutes later that you finally figure out that the audio in your stream is all messed up so here i'm going to add an audio source and i want to show you a really simple trick where you don't have to worry about this there's our audio source and we're just going to adjust the bar to where we want it for our stream and then all we have to do now is right click on this and we can go to lock volume and now you cannot move this we can't accidentally adjust it with the scroll bar or anything else you can still mute it but you cannot accidentally adjust the volume and all you have to do is right click on it again and unlock the volume if you want to change it on your own but this is a really easy way to avoid accidentally adjusting the volume sources especially if you have a bunch of them here's another trick to unclutter your overlay here i'm going to add an audio source into this scene right now so i'm gonna just add a scene that already has one there we go it's a little bit of footage from the witcher and i'm gonna move this scene down so we can see our other two audio sources and so now we have three audio sources but two of these don't actually have audio so it can be a little annoying to have to look at them all the time but if you right click on these and then you select hide boom you no longer have the audio for those sources it's not cluttering up your audio mixer it makes it a lot easier to do this now if you wanted to unhide them you just right click an audio mixer and click unhide all and it brings all of those sources back this is a really easy trick to spice up your visual sources so here we are we've got two different media sources and i'm just going to go into filters and click the plus and then i'm going to go to image mask blend and in image bask blend i'm going to browse to the locations where i have the masks created and i'll explain to you how the masks work in a second i'm just going to select one of these and click open and then i'm going to go up here and i'm going to select alpha mask and you can see now we have our video source in a circle and you can use this for any image source so video or your face cam or whatever you want and we're gonna do another one on this other image over here and while i show you how to do that i just want to explain that all these are are image shapes in black so one is a black circle in png format and the other one is kind of a rectangle and it's just black with a white background png file that creates these masks and you can create these masks in any image editing application there are a lot of free ones out there that you can do it in if you want to know more about how to create these there's a link at the top of the screen so i can show you how to create these masks and even more really cool ways to use them this last one is really going to help with thumbnails or promotion on instagram twitter or facebook so if you go into settings and you select hotkeys you can scroll down and see this screenshot output and all you have to do is type in a key that you want there and apply it and click ok and now when you use that hotkey it's going to take a shot of everything that's on the screen and it's going to save it into the location that you're setting says it's going to do all the recording so you can see here all of my screenshots are saved to that location and these can be used for thumbnails or all kinds of other promotion for your live streams it's really cool stuff are there important features i missed let me know in the comments and if you want to see how you can create custom overlays for your live streams using free software you should check this playlist out right here and if you're always looking for tools tips and tricks to help make you a better youtuber or live streamer subscribe to the channel my name is michael fire jr thank you so much for watching have a great day and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Michael Feyrer Jr.

Views: 12,273

Keywords: obs tricks, obs tricks 2020, obs tricks 2021, obs tricks and tips, 5 simple obs tricks, obs live stream tricks, obs live stream tutorial, obs professional look, obs setup 2020, obs streaming tutorial, obs studio guide, obs tips and tricks, obs tips and tricks 2020, obs tutorial, obs tutorial for beginners, advanced obs tips, how to make your live stream look better, how to make your live stream look professional, professional live stream, professional live streaming setup

Id: kdE7_SFQ_QE

Length: 17min 36sec (1056 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021