- In this video, I'm
going to be showing you seven free resources
that you should be using to level up your live streams. These range from resources
that will improve your production value and help
you stand out from the crowd, to tools that will engage your viewers and keep them coming back for more. (soft instrumental) VDO.Ninja is a tool that
I use every single week on my live stream podcasts,
as it allows me to bring in high quality and low latency live video from a phone, tablet, or remote computer directly into streaming software. If you've ever wanted to bring
a guest or multiple guests onto your stream and fiddled
around with trying to capture their cameras from discord, you've probably run into issues
like I have, where somebody leaves the call or somebody else joins, and then all of your
window captures are off. And this is just a much simpler
and far superior solution. VDO.Ninja is all browser
based without any need to download anything, or even
to sign into anything. You simply create a room,
send an invite link to any guests that you want to join, and then you get given unique
URLs for each guest's camera that you can then add into
your streaming software like OBS Studio or Streamlabs
OBS using a browser source. The video feeds are incredibly
low latency and you have full control over the video's bit rate, as well as dozens of other
options if you wish to. Like I said, I use VDO.Ninja
for my live podcast every single week. Ben simply joins our room and
then I have a browser source in OBS studio for Ben's camera
that I can then resize and use in multiple different scenes. In the instances when we have a guest on for part of the podcast,
it's just as easy. And if the guest then leaves,
I'm not having to deal with adjusting a window capture in
Discord or anything like that. Media Looper is a super simple
and low resource way of being able to loop through
different images, gifs, or even videos on your live streams. Most commonly, this is
used to promote your other social media channels, encourage viewers to use
their prime subscriptions, announce new merch drops, or
even show your sponsor's logos. There's control to customize how long each image is shown
for, and also how long to delay before starting to
show the images again, so you can set it up to show each image for say, five seconds, and then once it's gone through all of
the images in the loop, it will then wait five
minutes or something before showing them again. This tool runs locally on your PC, and it's super simple to set up. You can simply add more files
to the Media Looper folder and order them by renaming them to numbers in a sequential order. You then simply add a browser source into your streaming software, and
then it will loop through all of the files within that folder. It even scales your files automatically to whatever width and height
you set this browser source to, so no more having to deal with resizing all of your images to be exactly the same. The Media Looper itself actually
comes with some included assets that you can use
straight away as well as a project file that you
can open up in Photoshop if you wish to edit the text to, say, include your username and
some of your social channels, but let me reiterate this
Media Looper works with pretty much any kind of image or video file, including WebM support, so
you can get really creative and make some cool little
videos that will pop up whenever you want on your live streams. Cross Clip is a website and
mobile app that allows you to really easily convert your
Twitch or YouTube clips and make them into vertical video formats for things like Instagram reels,
Tik Tok, or YouTube shorts. Now, if I can be totally
honest with you guys, I probably scripted this
video a few weeks ago, but since then the guys at
Cross Clip have actually reached out wanting to sponsor some
content on this channel, which is pretty handy, so, yeah, this video is sponsored by Cross Clip, but if you guys could keep
it to yourself that they were already included in this video script before they reached out to sponsor, I'd really appreciate it. To create a video using
Cross Clip, you can just paste in a Twitch or YouTube clip URL, or you can upload a local file
if you have it saved locally. Then you can choose the exact shape, size, and placement of your camera, as well as the area of the gameplay that you wish to focus
on, and you'll also get a live preview of what the
portrait output will look like. There's options on the
right-hand side here for blurring backgrounds or even
adding additional layers. And you can even save the exact
layout that you've used here to your profile, so next
time you create a clip, it'll remember exactly
where your camera is. Once you're happy with your edit, you can then compile and
share the finished video on whichever social media
platforms you want to post it. This just makes the whole
process of creating highlights from your stream for
platforms like Tik Tok, Instagram reels, or YouTube
shorts so quick and easy. Now, this tool is fairly new and it's been developed directly by
Twitch to help streamers create follower and subscriber goals directly integrated into chat. No longer do you have to have
distracting and intrusive overlays directly on your
stream if you want to display a goal for you and your community. This new tool built by
Twitch can be set up to only show in your chat. And maybe the best thing about
it is that as people follow or subscribe to your stream, the progress towards your goal
is displayed next to their notification for all of the
rest of your chat to see. So for example, if you set a
follower goal of 500 followers, or a subscriber goal of 25 subscribers, every single time someone
follows or subscribes to your stream, the
progress towards that goal will be shown in chat. Also, whenever a new goal is
started, or when a new goal is completed, a banner is shown
across the top of chat, similar to the one that you
see with the hype train. To set up either a follower
or subscriber goal, you can do that through
the Twitch dashboard, and you also get the option
through a browser source to add this directly into your
stream, if you wish to, but there's not much customization about colors or icons or anything like that. So I actually prefer not having
this embedded in my stream and just remaining in the
chat, because as I said, it reminds people every time
somebody follows or subscribes to your stream, it
reminds them of the goal that you've set for your community. Triggerfyre is a tool that
allows your viewers to control various different parts of
your stream through OBS by redeeming channel points that they get from watching your stream. The things that they can
control can be as simple as displaying a gif, or
triggering a certain sound, or as advanced as swapping scenes, toggling sources and enabling filters. This is a great way of including
your viewers in your stream and rewarding the loyal watchers
with cool ways to interact and directly affect what
your stream looks like. All you have to do to set this
up is to connect Triggerfyre to both your Twitch
account and to OBS Studio through the web socket plugin. And then you can set
up rules based on your channel point reward names and
the things you want to happen in OBS Studio. Then next time one of your viewers redeems that reward through your
Twitch channel points, the action in OBS is
automatically triggered. Spending some time really thinking and getting creative about what your viewers could control on your stream is really the secret sauce here. It's what's going to make
it really engaging for your viewers and keep
them coming back for more. With all the design
choices that you make about your stream aesthetic,
why are you still using a boring box or a rectangular
border for your webcam? Applying a shaped mask to your
camera is a super easy way to make your stream a little bit more unique, and it's so simple to do
within your streaming software. If you've not used a mask before, all it is, is a black and
white image that when applied to a video will hide all the areas that are black and show all
the areas that are white. NerdOrDie have a collection
of over 60 free web cam masks that you can download
available in 16x9, 4x3, or even portrait orientations. If, however, you're after
something truly unique, you can easily make your own mask in something like Photoshop or GIMP. And then to apply a mask in
OBS studio or Streamlabs OBS, simply click on your camera source, select filters, add an image mask filter, and navigate to the mask you want to use. You should then see that your
camera source has changed to have masked out all of those black areas, allowing for a more
interesting camera shape. This tool has been developed by fellow YouTuber, Nutty,
and it allows you to create batch files which can
run multiple different actions in OBS Studio simultaneously. It sounds kind of similar to multi actions in the stream deck, but the difference is, is that the stream
deck's multi actions run sequentially with a
notable delay between each, whereas Noobs CMDR can
run large and complex sequences of actions in
OBS Studio all at once. If you've ever wanted to
build a fancy transition for your stream, which
involves scene transitions, toggling sources, changing audio levels, and enabling effect
filters, this tool makes creating those a breeze. Similar to Triggerfyre, it does require that you've installed the web
socket plug-in for OBS Studio, but then you can choose
as many different actions as you like with optional
delays in between. And once you've created all
the different batch files that you want to do to run your new super advanced complex stream, there's no need to have
Noobs CMDR running anymore. It's just used to actually
create the files initially. So that's a collection of
seven of the free tools that I use for my live stream, but really, I'm keen to
learn from you guys too. So let me know down in
the description below, if you have any free tools or resources that you use often for your live streams. If you've reached this point
in the video and enjoyed it, please do give the video a thumbs up, that really does help. And I'll catch you in the next one. Peace.
