Create a Circular Camera in OBS (Image Mask Tutorial)

are you an obs user who is trying to create a circular camera overlay so perhaps you are doing a demonstration or you're sharing your screen and you would like to be able to show a nice circle so you can still be on the screen and talk to your audience while you do a demonstration or share something with them well obs does not have a built-in circle pip like this but you can add it pretty quickly so you can use what's called an image mask and that's what i'm going to show you today it's all about how you can create a circular camera in obs so i'll show you how do you actually make one which is really easy and then you can add it to your camera as a filter or an overlay and then you're going to have your circular camera but i'm actually going to share a time saving and i think headache saving tip because when i first started to learn it i was actually kind of guessing where the circle would be and now i've got a tip so you can avoid all of that and do this much faster so that is what we are going to talk about today and some of the ways that you can actually use it and if we have time i'll show you how you can make a little border to go around your circle pip and you can you can make that customize in the color that you want now if you are new and you've never met me before my name is kat and i help people to create more professional and engaging online presentations and i think being able to show your face while you're doing a demonstration is one of the ways that you can sort of level up your presentation because not everyone is doing this especially on zoom calls where that is not expected so it's nice to see all of you here in the chat who are here live today if you have have you ever used this i would love to know if you're an obs user have you used the circular image mask before and let's get into the demonstration and instead of starting with making this image mask which you'll see in a moment i'm actually going to start in obs because this is the part of my trick this is where you're going to save yourself some time and headaches so i have a blank obs kind of scenes here i'm going to move this over a little so you can see it and i'm going to start by adding my camera so let's add my camera source so that's a video capture device and in this case i'm going to be adding my sony which is my main camera but you might be aware if you've ever seen a demo before i crop my camera in because i got stuff in this camera shot i don't want to show you but you're about to see it so when i pick this my cam link 4k you can actually see there's a lot around me and so i want to cut some of that out but i don't want to do that without first so this is where i'm going to add my camera overlay it's going to be over this image so i'm going to resist the urge to crop this picture now i am going to make it full screen and if you do want a little trick so command i'm not sure for windows maybe control f we'll do that full screen it'll just pop and fill so what i am going to do first is actually take a screenshot of this image as it is and we're going to use that to help create our image mask and you'll see why this is so helpful in a moment so i'm going to take a screenshot so let's grab all around the red i want the full thing so i've now taken this screenshot so that's the first step now we are going to open powerpoint because i'm going to show you how to make an image mask in powerpoint because this is one of the easiest ways a lot of people have powerpoint already it's something that's accessible but you can use other things you can use canva you can use keynote really we're just going to be making a picture where we have black and white now you can start to get into gray scale and other colors but for today we're just going to be creating this image mask where we're making a white circle with a black background and once we add that to our camera everything in the white circle will show up and everything that's in black will be hidden so what we're essentially saying is hide everything around the circle and that is what we're doing i see down here patrick obs novice user has not used it yet patrick i'm surprised that you're saying you're a novice user um so we've got just a blank powerpoint presentation so this hack i just took that screenshot now i'm going to bring the screenshot in so i'm actually going to import a picture so picture from file we're going to go into my screen recordings which are in order here oh that's a great one and then we are going to drag this and cover as much as we can we're just it doesn't have to be precise but i am angling this here with this awkward screenshot of mine but this is actually what i'm going to be applying this image mask to so i want to choose the circle based on this picture so now what i'm going to do is take a shape let's take a circle shape and hold down your shift key to make sure that it stays as an actual circle when you draw that way it'll stay in a circle shape and you're going to estimate and choose what size you want so let's release that and i'm going to hover this i'm actually going to temporarily say no fill and i am going to up the weight a little bit of this so i can see it better so i'm going to use this circle as a way to adjust this to see where do i want what part of me do i want showing in the circle and you can kind of move this around and adjust it so let's say that i want generally to be here if i want a little more room i can make the circle a little bit bigger but this is actually very similar to the circle that i have right now you can see that it kind of the the v on my shirt is sort of at the bottom and there's not a lot of room around the top so this is what i'm going to choose but you get to choose what works for you once you've got that positioned you can actually just delete the photo so now what i am going to do is actually create change the background because this circle is going to turn white so let's i want to be able to see it so let's format the background in powerpoint solid fill but instead of white we want a black background now i can still see this because it's blue but we are going to change this to white so we have the shape here it's currently blue and we want a solid fill and we want our solid fill to be white and then we can either take off the line or just turn the line white but right now what i have done without guessing where to place the circle is i know exactly where it's going to overlay on that camera frame so that that's it i've just created the mask now you can actually create different shapes if you want to get fun you want to have maybe a triangle or maybe you want sort of a painted look where you've got there's all sorts of things you can do you can absolutely do that for the purpose of right now i'm just going to show you the circle but you can anything that's white is going to show up it's going to show your camera anything black is going to mask that part of your camera so that's how the image mask works so now what we want to do is export this so you i'm going to go up to powerpoint and say export and i want to make sure the file format is actually a picture so you could do jpeg or png so i'm doing png and i'm going to say circle mask uh where did i save that okay wait i'm gonna do this one more time so i know exactly where i saved it oh so this went under screen recordings okay let's actually just put it on my desktop so this time i'm going to say circle and you can see that i practice this circle mask and it's not pdf we want to make sure it's png so let's export that okay so now it's on my desktop it's a lot easier for me to access we are going to put that down so now we have my camera here i'm actually going to get rid of the double effect so we have my camera in obs i'm going to you can either right click on source the source itself or in the preview window and we're going to apply a filter and so this is an effect filter so we click on the plus and we say image mask and now i'm going to call this circle mask because it's a circle shape you might have other shapes other things that you do and now i'm going to browse and pick circle mask which i just created and there you go it has now everything that was black on that picture is now blocked out but it's already sized exactly how i want and a few other demonstrations that i've seen people have just went in and they made a circle and when they overlaid it it wasn't where they wanted so they kind of had to do a duck and dodge thing this way you don't have to do it so import a screenshot of your camera first into whatever you are using whether that's powerpoint keynote canva to create this image mask but this is how you do this so now you can see that the actual picture it's bigger but i've cut out everything around it so now we can position things so let's actually say that i wanted to let's kind of replicate what i was showing before so i have my circle here and let's add a border so i have my overlay pack that i'm going to bring over here so i've got the blues and the brights let's take because i've updated the circle pack so that it has these two circle overlays let's just drag and drop that over here and we're going to stretch it until it's about the size we want kind of bring it down here adjust it so i would say that looks lined up and what you can do is actually grab both your overlay and the other one together and you can actually group these which is a nice bonus so now i can just move this together so if i don't like where it is i don't have to drag both of them so this is a huge plus to be able to group these things together they can hang together that's pretty sweet right so now if you are setting up your scene let's say i am demonstrating how to make something in powerpoint i can now add in my sources i'm going to say window capture and let's add my powerpoint we'll say that i'm going to do a demonstration in powerpoint so now i grab my window i look for powerpoint wow there are a lot of options on here where's my powerpoint when i practiced this before it was here and now it's not and okay here wait let's open powerpoint first so let's just move it to the side for a second oh come on well it wouldn't be a stream if uh they weren't all showing there we go there's powerpoint so now we have powerpoint let's do that um command f trick to get that centered and then we're going to drag this down below so that now we have this and remember we've grouped oh sorry let's lock this powerpoint in place so i don't accidentally move it but now if i click on this group i can adjust how big do i want this circular pip to be i want to make sure that it's not covering the controls you could put it over here but it might cover some of the controls so i'm going to just kind of put that over here so now i have created this scene so i can do my demonstration i can have myself in the picture and let's say i want to have another demo where i don't have myself you have a couple of options but what i'm going to do is just duplicate this scene and just say demo no picture and picture because i won't be in that one and so in here i'm just going to actually you can either just hide these things hide the group so now it's just here or you can actually delete them and not have them in the scene so now i can switch between the demo what where did my camera go what oh they hid but i was trying to hide them in this one oh there we go so you can switch proceed between scenes so that you have your demo one where you are showing and then you have your just demonstration if you want to hide yourself from the scene so okay let's just see okay this is basically the entire demonstration however actually i'm going to go to this one and i am going to in my ecam i'm going to show my circle pip here so one of the things i want to show you is how else you might use this so if you were doing a demonstration say showing how to do that powerpoint you would use it the other thing you could do is actually add a background and then put yourself as a camera overlay so let's do that let's create a another scene so i'm actually just going to duplicate this and let's uh let's take off the second second camera that's kind of trippy so we are going to on here duplicate oh here it is up here so let's say that i want to give instructions for an activity or people are joining on a call and i'd like to have some written text so i say yes instructions so i am going to get rid of this powerpoint because i don't need that yes i want to remove that and in my overlays pack i'm going to take a look there's a background that has a circle in it so i'm going to drag that and then we just drag that down to the bottom and so now you can have the border or no border and i'm going to just lock that and let's take this group and then move it so what we can do is kind of resize this the way that we like it and so you could do sort of a double border effect or you could actually hide the border and just have the camera and in this case you can even let's drag that up a little bit you can kind of position it the way you want so then the white actually creates its own border and then on this side you would add your instructions tell people what it is that they need to do to get ready maybe you want people to say something in the chat and in this case you would just have it here add the text on the side but the nice thing about this option is let's say i duplicate this again and i can call this countdown and for this one i can have a countdown timer where i actually hide myself and you could just put a countdown timer in this circle here isn't that pretty cool now i'm getting a message about my about my video signal so i'm going to check on that because i'm not sure what's happening here and if anyone is live in the chat if you could let me know if something has happened to this video because i'm getting an error message so this is fun oh live i love i love live let's go back to my main camera for a second and just make sure that uh this is working and what's the best way to do that you know what i'm just gonna keep going if it's cut off it's got off and we'll deal with it later so what i wanted to share is in powerpoint you can actually create a nice circle border really easily and so let's okay so there's a little bit of buffering um thank you for that i don't know if you could just see the panic come over me while i'm doing this live stream but that was what's happening so i do want to do one more demo so that's how you do the image mask that's actually how simple it is how quickly you can make one you want black is going to cover things white is going to show things if you start to use gray the gray will be semi-transparent so you can play around with grayscale a little bit thanks so much for for helping me um letting me know that there was some buffering there wasn't lagging but we're back i don't know what's going on the ongoing modem sega so let's i'm going to open powerpoint and i'm going to show you how you can make a simple border because i know some people say how do you make a border i want to make a border like that so let's go back to my screen here and i'm going to show you in powerpoint how you can create a simple circle border so let's actually just delete this slide because we don't need that right now and we're gonna add a new blank slide so let's and i'm showing powerpoint but you can do this in keynote you can do this in uh well i haven't tried it in canva i'm sure you can so let's take a shape we're gonna take a circle again hold down shift so that you can keep that circle shape and then this is where this will be the color that you want so this is where you can add your effects so for example if i want kind of a nice gradient effect i can pick a gradient where maybe it's monochromatic or it's just blues or like my circle that you can see kind of around me right now i actually have two colors in a gradient but you can see how that works and then what we're going to do is cut a circle out of this circle so let's do that where we have um let's do copy so i'm just going to copy and paste so i have another one but this shape i'm just going to make it a black circle so i can see it hold down shift and just make it a bit smaller you get to choose how much smaller you want it maybe i actually want this just to be a little bit bigger and then you can you can if you put it right in the middle you'll be able to perfectly shape these so it will be a circle then you are going to grab both of these shapes make sure both are selected and you go up here in powerpoint to merge shapes and in powerpoint it's combine in keynote it's subtract whatever works so now i have this shape here and this is my circle border but if you want like right now if you look at mine i have the white around it because typically i'm working on dark backgrounds so i like to have that white border around it you don't have to but you can so what we're going to do i'm going to open the format pane here and the fill we already have it the way we want it so the line right now it's actually a very faint blue line and what i can do is actually bump up the weight so you can see it a little bit better so now you see the border and then i can actually change this to white now you can't see it with this background but actually if i move it up you can actually start to see when i lift it outside that it is coming up you can see the white border around it and that's then if you are using powerpoint all you actually have to do to export this without the background is right click on the shape and say save as picture and so let's save that as a picture and we'll just put it here on my desktop and i'll call this blue circle border and you can get creative it doesn't have to be just this shape any kind of circle border can go over so i've now saved this shape so let's pop back over here and we'll go into let's just do maybe a new one so let's do a new scene and we'll call this border and let's add our camera so we're going to add the existing sony camera which still has the mask applied to it and let's we'll make this a little bigger for this demonstration and let's actually get rid of my double circle let's add this border so on my desktop is where i stored it and let's i think i called it blue so drop that there we go and we can just kind of resize it and fit it right over and then if we want to again remember we can select both of these and we can group these together there you go that's how easy this is is so if you are an obs user are you going to try this are you going to make your camera mask and again you can get creative you can use different shapes um oh the quality has been diminished oh damn it i'm i am directly connected to my internet through an ethernet cable and i upgraded my internet and i got a new modem so even though i'm smiling i am not happy with my cable company right now i am hoping that you got the gist of it and maybe what i can do is put together a short recorded video but that is really what i wanted to teach you today thank you for those of you who stuck it out with me today through the buffering and i i don't actually know aside from calling the cable company which is the thing that i least want to do in the world but think i think enough got through so that you know how to create an image mask so that in obs you can create a circular camera overlay and you now know how to quickly create a custom border you can add your own colors your own borders get creative don't just do what i did start playing around with different things i really hope that you can have some fun with this and this can help you to elevate the quality of your videos so they can be a little bit more professional and engaging thank you so much for those of you who join me and if you are watching the replay let me know did you give this a try did it work i'd love to hear from you bye everyone

Channel: Cat Mulvihill

Views: 6,059

Rating: 4.9708028 out of 5

Keywords: obs studio, obs studio tutorial, circular webcam, how to make circle webcam, obs image mask, circular webcam in obs, obs studio webcam shape, open broadcaster software, obs studio settings, image mask in obs, camera overlay, camera shape

Id: _sqLa0LTloM

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021