20 OBS Tricks All Streamers Should Know!

obs studio is one of the most powerful streaming programs available and there are a lot of features that content creators might not know about today i want to teach you 20 tips and tricks that i've learned over the years to help you step up your streaming game hello my name is pixel today i'm going to teach you about all the little features that make obs studio stand out from all the other streaming softwares if you want i stream over at twitch.tv pixelperfect with a one instead of an i now for today's demonstration i am going to be using 26.0.2 so make sure you're updated to that version so you get all the features that i'm going to be explaining today and with that let's hop into it okay so the first thing that i want to show you in obs and this is a fresh install on my computer just wanted to show you that so everything you'll see here is set to default i've only added a couple sources over here to make the explanation process a little easier so the fresh install on obs the first thing that it does is go to dark mode but originally obs never supported dark mode that was brought out in an earlier time but you can actually select different theme colors so if you don't like that you can go to black and blue and do the regular grayscale dark mode you can do ratchet which is like a cool aqua blue and then you can do system which is blinding territory now most people probably aren't going to use light mode even though this actually isn't even the original light mode this is not what obs used to look like but this is the four i just use default second we're gonna connect your account so i stream on twitch so the first thing you can do is connect your account uh you can use a stream key if you don't prefer to connect your account but there is a reason for direct twitch integration so click connect account and then just log in like normal so now that i've logged in you can see that it is already connected now the cool thing about this is that when you click apply you actually get direct dashboard integrations that's what the important thing about linking your account is now because you no longer need to use streamlabs obs looking at you don't use streamlabs obs because everything you need is right here and the cool thing here is that you can actually go up to view go up to docs and then open your twitch stats so if you want to see i've got 125 subs right now on twitch got 6 200 followers and we got 43 000 views and all of these things are dockable all you do is just grab the little box and drag and drop it over here this is exactly how i run my obs setup now if you want you can actually even add one more dock that is your activity feed so if you want to see your follows your gifted subs your subs uh bits cheers everything it's all right here so you can have all of these docked here if you want you can have it so that everything you're monitoring you don't need to have your actual twitch dashboard open it's all readily accessible for you right here in obs now and speaking of dockable things number three is actually going to be your stats box now i've talked about this in other videos but the reason it's good to have a stats box is because this tells you exactly what's going on in your system it's like that paper clip dude from microsoft word if anybody remembers him it's more like just your buddy that sits down there i always have this docked right down here so basically what this tells you is that your rendering frames your lag your encoding lag and then it also monitors your network so that if your internet's dropping it tells you that right here you don't need to look at this very often but everything is right here if you need to know what is going on number four's a fun one because it's about custom streaming resolutions so you can go into your settings and in your video output tab you actually are not limited by just streaming at 1920x1080 or 1280x720 you can actually type in custom resolutions and if you've ever stopped in my stream i actually stream at 936p which is 1664 by 936. this is a perfect 16x9 ratio that is the perfect sweet spot for a 6 000 bit rate between 720p and 1080p the thing that's really convenient about this is that if your computer can't even do 720p you can actually go even lower than 720p while keeping it at a 16x9 ratio you can type in custom resolutions and you've probably even seen 900p on a couple streamers but we've actually found out that 936p is the perfect sweet spot for an x264 slow encoder preset at 6000 or even 8 000 bitrate now if you're on a single pc streaming setup and you haven't watched my encoding video yet go check that out uh but i talked about this briefly how you can save power you can actually disable your preview right here just by right clicking on it and then the enable preview and turn that off that will save a lot of encoding and rendering if you have a weaker streaming pc very helpful you just won't be able to see everything that's going on what's also convenient is that you can also change the preview scaling like right now it's set to scale to window so basically if i drag this around it will constantly change however if you change it over to canvas it'll actually zoom in to what your base resolution is or you can also set it to your output whatever you're actually streaming at now i leave it scale to window because sometimes i need to adjust things on the fly and this is more convenient rather than trying to slide things around now the sixth one is called scene projection so i'm going to turn on one of the sources that i added in here it's a selfie from a couple years ago when i still had short hair and what you can actually do if you have a multi-monitor setup or even a single monitor setup this is a really nice way to look at your scene so what you do is you click on the scene you're currently on you right click it and then you go to full screen projector and you click it and now you're actually seeing this scene in full screen so now if i need to like look at something i'm really picky with the way that i set my scenes up so i like to make sure that everything is lined up just so everything is nice and tight within its borders like right now this face cam is all perfectly with inside its own edges and i like to make sure that i do that by using the full screen projector now one of the ways that i actually make everything look so clean and get it all lined up perfectly is called source snapping so source alignment snapping it's right in the general settings here make sure that's enabled and make sure that because it's default that's not going to be turned on make sure you turn that on all three of these boxes are checked i like my snap sensitivity set to 10 so when you click on this sorry it's locked uh let's say it's smaller right this is my face cam now when i move it you can see it's actually snapping to the edge so it's kind of like pulling it in right there and right there is the center right there's the center and that's dead center of there and what this also allows you to do is if you have an uh a face cam overlay it'll actually allow you to snap it right to the face cam as well other sources that are enabled so long as you have all three boxes turned on the eighth thing is uh actually being able to custom crop and reshape things and distort them so if you hold the alt key and then grab one of these little squares right here what you're actually going to do is start cropping so you see how it's not moving but it's actually just taking it away and the little green highlight right here that lets you know that this side is cropped and you can do that with any of these and uh you can just do it right on the fly and this will make it so if you don't have like a perfect 16 by nine face cam you can actually crop it that's how i have this camera set up so this box is actually a 16x9 turned on its side and i just cropped out holding the alt key and shrunk it down to about that that's a rough estimate but that's about what it looks like if i were to show you in my actual obs another nice feature is you can actually distort image size so let's say you have an overlay that's not a perfect 16x9 and you want to make it fit if you hold the shift key and grab one of the squares you can actually make it fit to any size you want now if i let go of the shift key it's going to snap right back to its original source so make sure you're holding the shift key until you make it fit to whatever you need it to so just remember alt crops and then shift distorts the ninth thing is actually being able to use the arrow keys to fine tune this what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to zoom in on the preview scaling so you can really see how this works and so make sure you're clicked on the source that you want to move and if you use the arrow keys you can actually fine tune exactly to the direct pixel that you want now the reason that this is really useful is that if you have a two monitor setup what you can actually do is use what we talked about earlier on the full screen projector make it show up and then on the other monitor you can actually move it with the arrow keys and see just down to that last pixel what you're trying to get and that's how i get my face cams to line up exactly inside of my overlays every time okay so the 10th thing we're going to talk about is groups now when you start adding everything to your stream like your overlay right here and then your face cam and then your mic and then your notifications and anything else banners all that you're going to get a lot of sources in obs and one of the ways that i like to clean all this up is make it a group so what you do is you hold shift and then you click everything that you want to highlight see how they're both like a nice blue now right click them and then go to group selected items so what this is going to do is it actually puts them within a folder and we'll just call this uh facecam group right and now what you can do is if you toggle the eye it'll actually turn the whole thing on and off which is really convenient and then you can hit the toggle arrow and now it's just put away into one thing and the 11th thing to add on top of that is i like to color code my groups so if you right click on that and then go to set color you can set your face cam to purple boom and you if you highlight all of them then set the color it will actually set each one but you don't really have to do that i like to just set the folder to the color because then it'll be easier to see if you have the colors or the folders open so now if i have a folder here and then i have a red folder down below you'll be able to see the colors separating each one either way it's your preference but you can color code and also group them up now we're going to talk about one that's really fun and can give you a lot of advanced ideas this is called scene nesting in the facecam scene this is the source we're gonna be looking at this is like your face cam right so this is what you're seeing me in right now so on here if we were to add a filter and a color correction let's say we turn the contrast up right now if we were to go into the gameplay where i'm in the facecam overlay it's also affected that one we don't want that we only want the one in face cam to specifically be more contrasted now we're going to turn this filter off so what we're going to do is we're actually going to create another scene with the face cam in it but we're going to put the filter on that scene so we're going to go what's called into the nested selfie so we're going to go into here and then we're going to actually add the filter specifically to the scene not the source so you go into filters and i have one already pre-made and this is just going to turn the gamma up so now we've got this in here so now this is how it works now you would think it's going to affect it in the other scene but it doesn't and the reason is because we've put the filter over the scene not over the source right so now what you can do is actually go back in and add a scene as a source if it's not confusing enough as it is as a scene as a source and then add the nested selfie so now you can actually toggle between having alternate things without directly affecting it just understand that you have to put the filters on the scenes rather than on the sources otherwise if you affect the base source it will affect every other one so one of the most important things about having a good stream is making sure you understand audio and making sure that your levels are set now obviously you can just drag the sliders around i've talked about what you should set your levels at to make sure you sound good i've also made a video on making your mic sound professional if you haven't checked that out feel free to go check that out now one of the things that i like to do is i like to set my desktop audio at about a negative eight that usually is pretty comfortable for notifications anything else that's happening on the system but you can actually go into the advanced audio properties specifically type in the exact number you're looking for and then you can also lock the audio now you do that by clicking on the gear and just clicking lock volume now the reason this is important is because i like to use my scroll wheel a lot and sometimes if your scroll wheel is touching this it will actually start moving it unintentionally so by locking your audio it will never move even if you click on it you actually have to go back in and unlock the volume now it's not going to be very common that you're moving your audio so that's why i like to lock it because once it's set and everything sounds balanced make sure that you're the main focus then there's the gameplay and the notifications just lock it and then you never have to worry about it again so the 14th thing that i want to tell you about and it actually goes along with locking and cleaning up your interface is you can actually hide media sliders so one of the things that i do is i have an animated overlay here that's considered a media source but it's not actually making any sound so i don't need this slider so all i do is i mute it just to make sure that if anything ever bugs out there's no audio coming through and then i actually just go in and hide it so now it's back to being clean now i can see my desktop audio and i can see my mic source as well and if you ever need to access that all you do is click unhide all and it shows right back up and they are in alphabetical order so you'll be able to find it right away so number 15 is custom face cam shapes so when i used to stream super mario maker i liked to have a custom face cam overlay that didn't look like other face cams you can actually add a mask to make your face cam look any way you want and you do this by going into filters and then you're going to add an image mask blend filter here and you're going to make sure that you change the alpha mask to the alpha channel it's going to default to color channel you want the alpha channel what that is going to do is it's actually going to remove the negative space the thing that isn't there so this image here actually is a direct shape of this rectangle here so now if you look my face cam specifically looks like this so how this filter works is it operates by using a ping file png and then whatever has an alpha layer transparency it will remove from the source that it's been applied to so i'm using what's called a bubble mask and it literally just uses the same image and then i apply it directly to it and then if i wanted to i could put the bubble outline in there and it would sit directly on top of that so why don't we do that we'll add the image and we'll just call it image and then we'll browse and we'll do the bubble outline and then all i would have to do is resize it to where i want it gotta play around with it a little bit make sure the edges touch use the arrow keys to fine tune it and there you go you now have an overlay speaking of streaming if you haven't feel free to go follow me over at twitch.tv pixel perfect i'll leave a link in the description down below don't forget to also hit the thumbs up and subscribe to the channel to help me grow i greatly appreciate it we already have almost 400 members in the discord and i've made a couple free goodies and overlays as well as outlines for you in there they're free for you to come in and get just hop into the discord link in the description down below as well number 16 is custom stinger transitions that's this little box down here in the corner now what this does is it actually makes it so when you jump from scene to scene it looks fancy so basically right now it's just cutting right that's just a hard jump it's jarring it's not enjoyable to look at so what you could actually do is change it to let's say a fade and you can set the millisecond the duration how long it takes to fade between each one now that's really basic and a lot of people either use just cut or fade you can also use slide or swipe but let's say you want to add a custom singer transition you can actually go down here and click add stinger and then name it to whatever you want we'll just call this one nova for example and we'll hit okay and then we're gonna go find the file that it is now this is one that i have used specifically from nerd or die and this was just called stinger transition and then they gave you five colors this is from their nova package and i absolutely love this one so we're just gonna add the blue one because they don't have purple hit open and then you would think you're done but first we're gonna show you how it works so we have the nova one selected so when you hit it you see how it changed before the stinger transition even initiated we actually have to go back into the properties of that and change it so we're gonna change the time to frames now i stream at 60 frames per second and each stinger transition is going to be different you just got to kind of fiddle around with it until you find the sweet spot i'm going to guess 60 seconds is here now if you want to hear the stinger transition every time you change a scene you can actually change the audio monitoring to be monitor only mute output or monitor and output so it'll actually make it so only you hear it but stream doesn't or you could do it so you and stream both hear it but i leave it off because i don't need to hear the transitions i just let that happen on stream and then i always make sure that i have this set to crossfade if you set it to fade out and then fade in what's going to happen is every time you change a scene your voice is going to go really quiet and then it's going to come back in and that's really frustrating if you let it cross fade it's actually going to make it so that your voice stays consistent all the way through each scene so always make sure that it's set to crossfade monitor off and then you can even click preview transition so now you see how it's gone it's changed that was too early you saw how it changed the scene still before it actually blinked so what we have to do is try and guess we'll say 80 frames and then preview transition still too early so then you just set we'll say 90 frames preview transition and that was actually just a little too early we'll set it to 100 frames preview transition it's going to go boom now you don't see the scene change go over and when you change this it's going to go flip and now we're on the other scene and that's a custom stinger transition now what's really cool is you can even take this one step farther and you can actually set dedicated transitions to specific scenes so if you were to right click on the nested selfie and let's say we go to transition override we want this one to only do nova so every time i go to this scene it's going to do nova right but there's a catch if you have this set to nova every single time you change it's still going to do it obs doesn't know what transition to use it only ever defaults to what's over here so if you want fade to be here and you don't have an override now it's only ever going to fade each time you use it however now that i've set a dedicated override to nested selfie even though it still says fade over here it's going to use the nova transition and this is really cool when you want to specifically delegate different scenes if you're talking to your chat at one point versus if you're playing games i like to use the actual dedicated transition for when i'm going into games if i'm just showing for example my right monitor on my streaming pc i'll use the white so it makes it look like i'm sliding over to the other monitor if i'm going into a game i'll use the full scene transition like you like you saw with nova otherwise if i'm just talking i'll use fade and that's it now by default obs does not start at an mp4 format for recording videos it actually defaults to mkv now in the settings you can automatically change that by just going to recording format in the output tab here and changing it to mp4 but there is an issue with going to mp4 if my computer were to crash right now i would lose this entire video now the reason mkv is a desirable file format is because you can actually still save the file even if my computer were to crash the only thing is you need to convert it now what you can do is go into advanced and then select under recording go to automatically remux to mp4 now what that's going to do is once you're done recording it will automatically convert it but it'll save the file first just in case your system crashes you'll have a backup and then you can actually reconvert it into an mp4 this is a great way to save any footage i've seen a lot of let's players that i used to watch lose their footage because their computer crashed or they had a blue screen of death something that made it so that they couldn't preserve their file format so i would suggest starting with mkv and then remuxing down to mp4 number 19 is going to be how to save native clips from obs directly so what you can do is go into settings and then go into output now we're going to enable what's called a replay buffer so what this does basically is it's going to start recording the last 20 active seconds constantly so it's only ever going to save those 20 seconds or whatever you set it to i'd set it to 30 that's what most twitch clips are but what the nice thing is this is going to save it directly to your computer so set your replay time to 30 seconds it's only going to use about 9 megabytes of ram so you don't have to worry about that at all click apply and you're actually going to see over here start replay buffer so now we're going to go down over to hotkeys and we're going to find the spot where it says replay buffer save replay and we're going to make sure that we set a hotkey for this so for me i'll just say let's set it to f9 so let's say i hit a crazy shot in warzone or some other game that i'm playing i can just hit f9 right away and boom it'll save the last 30 seconds of whatever just happened now there's only one catch to this and you need to make sure that when you're streaming you also make sure that you have your replay buffer running if you just click start streaming but don't click start replay buffer it actually won't save your clip this has to be running along with streaming in order to make sure that it will capture that moment so make sure that when you start streaming you have replay buffer set and you also have your hotkey set it would be nice if obs had a feature where when you started streaming you can also start your replay buffer i don't know if there is an advanced setting that i may have missed somewhere in here i know you can start recording when you start streaming but i don't know about the replay buffer so just make sure that you have that started you can also set your replay buffer to a hotkey so if you wanted you could have a cheap workaround by having your start streaming and start replay buffer bound to the same hotkey so now every time i start streaming by hitting the one key my start replay buffer will also kick in this is basically just a fail safe to make sure that your replay buffer is also running while you're streaming now wherever your recording output is set to in your output settings that is where your replay buffer is going to go so right now it's set to users my username and then videos that's where all of my replay buffers as well as my videos are going to go so if you have your hotkey enabled when you save your replay buffer that's where your clip will go and lastly the last one that i like to show that actually i take a little pride in because i suggested this in the obs forums about four years ago and it finally got put in after i was told that my project idea had been approved was a native screenshot of your overlay so i like to make a lot of my overlays i made this overlay it was based off modern warfare when it first came out now obviously not without the cropped edges and everything but the specific edge box when you're first loading in go ahead and look at that it's very similar and i like to make my own overlays so one of the things i always had to do was take a screenshot of what was happening with the print screen button put it into a photo editor and then start editing it that way now you can actually get native screenshots and you do this by going into settings then going into hotkeys and find your screenshot output so all you're going to do is bind it to a hotkey we'll say f1 click apply and then once you do anywhere where your output is set to just like your clips were that's where your screenshots are also going to go to so if you want to take a screenshot of your overlays or notifications or something that's happening on screen you want to make a pose it'll now have a native screenshot of whatever your canvas is resolution all right guys there you have it if you haven't go check out my best encoder settings video or my best microphone sound settings video over here on the side if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment down below or hop into the discord and until next time i'll see you in the next video peace oh through the car no way

Channel: P1xelPerfect

Views: 256,355

Rating: 4.9433818 out of 5

Keywords: streamer, streaming, streams, twitch, gaming, set up, tutorial, how to, live, live streams, live streaming, obs, slobs, stream labs, intro, beginning, beginner

Id: zXRNPozVRZg

Length: 23min 15sec (1395 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020