Elgato Stream Deck - Complete Beginner's Guide (2021 Edition)

the elgato stream deck probably the most essential thing to have in your setup especially if you're a streamer a content creator or a uh i guess a normal person because trust me even if you're a normal person this elgato stream deck does come very handy and i do want to get this out there because i know there's going to be that one person or a couple people that do state this but um no i am not sponsored by elgato whatsoever for making this video i just genuinely like the product and so for that reason i want to share with you guys what you can do using the elgato stream deck and guys make sure you listen to ninja because he has some important words to say on his twitter uh to make sure that you guys follow me so um by no means it was that photoshopped um okay maybe maybe it was photoshopped a little bit before this video we're gonna go through everything you need to know especially if you're thinking about getting something like this or if you already have one and you're still not sure about all the capabilities that the elgato stream deck has to offer now remember there are other stream decks out there that you could buy instead of this elgato stream deck i know they have a bunch of different brands on amazon but to be honest with you i've never used one of those products and i just know that the ogata stream deck has a long record of being pretty good in this space so i don't want to stray away and and start testing out things that i'm not sure they're gonna work so i'm gonna be using the elgato stream deck today and i'm going to show you everything you guys need to know so uh yeah without further ado let's get right into it now just to start off there are three different elgato stream decks that are out there currently on the market you do have the six key version the 15 key version and the 32k version spoiler alert though they all operate exactly the same the only difference is that some have more keys than the other ones so just keep that in mind that they are all the same and they also do have a mobile app that you can download and i think you have to pay monthly for that but um yeah i kind of don't recommend doing this method only because for me personally i like using my phone every now and then and if for whatever reason i get a phone call well there goes your stream deck or if your phone dies there goes your stream deck so for that reason i do encourage that if you are getting a stream deck that you get an individual standalone unit not the one that's like an app on your phone but you know you guys can do whatever you want either way this video does pertain to those people that are using the mobile app and also like i said earlier you could get a different stream deck from like amazon i know they have a lot of different models on there and maybe it might work the same way as this but i really don't know because i don't have one but let's head on over to the desktop and figure out how to use this thing okay ladies and gentlemen boys and girls we are currently on the desktop right now and before you can do anything you have to make sure that you have the elgato stream deck software downloaded installed on your system so how do you do that well let's just open up the elgato website right here once again i'm going to have this in the description down below so don't worry just head on over there and then you could um download this software here you just pick which product you're using for us we are using the elgato stream deck but if you're using the mini or the xl you can choose that as well then you click on windows and then you just click on download after you have it download and installed you should end up with a stream deck application on your desktop alright so now that we have the icon we could just double click it open it up and you will see this is the stream deck software normally for you guys you're going to see a welcome message right in the middle i had to delete it a long time ago and most likely you're not going to see this upwards arrow for now just disregard that you guys don't have to worry about that now before you guys can do anything before you start throwing in icons and doing all this fun stuff you need to make sure that you make sure that this right panel is a lot more simpler because it can get a little messy and kind of confusing so what you could do is head on over to the top right you're going to see like three little lines you just click on that and from here you can just uncheck things that you plan well that you do not plan on using so for example i don't use voice mod i don't use spotify i don't use streamlabs obs i use obs so those are things i have checked off um or unchecked yeah because i don't plan on using them so you could just do the same whichever things you don't plan on using uncheck them and then click on done now that we have that done let's try focusing on like probably some of the easier things to do with the stream deck what i mean by that is something like opening up files that is something that everybody can take advantage of and that is something that i use on a daily basis even when i'm not streaming so to do that go over to system and then just click on the drop down and then if you could see there's this little um element here it's called open right just click on it drag it on over and you can drag it anywhere on the stream deck and as you can see your stream deck will update automatically so if i move this over you see and move one tile over to the right another fun fact to know if you guys close the software for the stream deck you will see that everything that you have done to the stream deck has been saved and whenever you reboot your system and you start up your system for the first time you're gonna see that everything is saved and everything works as it should you do not need to open up the software if you do not plan on doing any changes to it so i hope you guys uh learned a thing or two but anyways now that we're back on to the stream deck software let's focus on opening up a certain application so for this let me just say that you know i want to open up davinci resolve that's my editing software of choice that's what i like to use so for that we want to use it on this specific icon so um here we can just go over to well first you need to click on the icon itself then go over to app slash file click on the three little dots all the way to the right and you just find out wherever the shortcut is saved for me as you guys can see over to the left of my desktop you can see the uh the shortcut is right here on my desktop screen so um we can just go over to our desktop in the folder of course go over to desktop and you can see it's right here we can just click on that and then click on open and you can see simply there is our application so in a nutshell if i were to close this off and click on the button on the stream deck it will open up that editing software now let's say we want to customize this icon we don't like that there's text there simply go over to uh well once again click on the icon and then we just need to delete the title from it just like that and now it looks a lot more simpler and since i already know what the icon looks like and what it entails uh i really don't need any text but let's say you know i hate the davinci resolve icon you know i hate it with a passion and i'd rather have something a lot more fruity i don't know so what you could do is just click on the icon once again and if you go over to the icon right down here you're gonna see a little arrow pointing down click on that and what you could do is you have a you have a couple different options so first thing you could do is just set from file that means that you already have a photo on your pc somewhere that you want to use for this maybe you do maybe you don't but if you do not don't worry just click on create new icon and this is awesome because it actually opens up a website from elgato itself and this is where they have a preset of a bunch of different elements that you could use to uh customize the photo for that specific icon so let's say you know i hate the davinci resolve icon and i want to use the smiley face instead so this smiley face means that uh that's my editing software i don't know don't know i don't judge you you know i like this smiley face so uh i could just use this and then just click on save key and it will save this smiley face as is let's say we want to customize this icon uh we want to make it smaller i don't know i don't have this here and then we could uh have the second one over here i don't know and then we want to save it like this i don't know who would do this but there's probably that one person out there regardless this is how you could customize your icons and you can see over on the left hand side you have layers so you can add more things in if you want to and you know add more elements you can actually also change the color as well more things you can actually do um this doesn't do anything because i don't have a blank uh icon here but if i did i could change the color but yeah this is a nutshell that's what you do and you just click on save key right on over here and then you can exit out or you can minimize this key right here or this website and then when you click back onto the icon you click on the drop down once again click on set from file find out wherever you save that file and then you just click on open and it should update now let's say i do not like any of these photos here and there's a photo on google that i want to use instead don't worry same process all you have to do is download that photo from google or wherever you got it from save it and then you just click on set from file use that specific file or that photo yeah and it will update right here important thing to note if you do that make sure it is a square remember the buttons on the stream deck are a square if you get a rectangle you're going to end up with a squished image it's it's not going to look good so make sure it's a square and uh to be exact a rounded square now let's say besides opening up files i want to open up websites you know whenever i click on a certain button i wanted to redirect me to twitch.tv or facebook or instagram or twitter something like that what you could do once again head over to system the click on the little drop down as we already have the drop down here and then just drag over a website as simple as that now when you have the website highlighted you can just go over to url and you could type in whatever website you want it to open up so in this case i could have twitter.com i don't know you know it really doesn't matter now unfortunately you're gonna be stuck with this ugly icon but if you want to change it of course you can do the same process that i just finished telling you but for now for simplicity's sake we're going to keep this icon just for you know example purposes so if i click on this icon now it should redirect me to twitter it popped up on my other side but yeah here is twitter so yeah and of course if you want you can change the title as we talked about earlier i could put on twitter and as you can see over on the right over here you see that it has updated in real time so that's how to open up files that is how to open up websites now let's say we want to make a hotkey we have photoshop open and instead of clicking on control j in order to i don't know duplicate an image or ctrl d to deselect we want to just be able to click a button on our stream deck and it will do that macro or if you wanted to do like ctrl alt delete but you don't want to press all three buttons you just want to click on a certain button on your stream deck you could do that as well all you have to do is head on over system once again drag the hotkey option and just put it anywhere that you want on your stream deck now here all you have to do under hotkey you just click on it once and then you just click on whatever macro that you want to select so let's say for this case i want to click on control j right just like that that hotkey is set so whenever i click on that specific button it will do that hotkey another useful function that you could utilize under the system tab is maybe playing music playing and pausing music i know everybody listens to music so drag over the multimedia button and put it anywhere you want and here under action we could change it from maybe previous track to play and pause music that's pretty simple so whenever you have music playing you just click on that button it will pause it you can click on it again to play music very very simple now there are a couple other things on here hotkey switch that's another thing you can use i was actually thinking about what you can use that for but what that is in a nutshell is that it has two commands of two hotkeys so you can click on it it will do one hotkey and you click on it again it will do another hotkey and it'll be swapping back and forth what you can use that for i have no idea and uh for now just disregard that the only one you should be using is in terms of hotkeys are the hotkey um command right here other than that we do have the text field this one here uh it's not too useful i mean i don't know once again what you could use that for but what it does is that if you drag this over you could uh enter in a specific text and so whenever you click on that button it will basically lay out a text what do i mean by that well let's say um let's say i put hello my name is matthew is oh my god i can't spell all right so now whenever i click on this button it should spell out hello my name is matthew so let's just put this here and we click on this button and just like that it will keep on entering hello my name is matthew i don't know what you could use this for but um i don't know you guys be creative with this now before we move on to obs which is probably what a lot of you guys are here for um another useful thing that you guys should utilize especially for the advanced users is instead of just having open application like we have done here earlier for davinci resolve what you could actually do is create a folder for it now what does that do well i can just right click here create folder and if i change this icon i can use this davinci resolve icon and whenever i click on this folder for davinci resolve it'll open up another folder so in here i could have maybe um open up the application here and then i could have my shortcuts all listed right here so basically this folder will have everything that has to do with davinci resolve itself very useful and actually that is what i use currently for my uh my obs over here see over here it might just look like an obs open file command but actually when you click on it i have a bunch of different options here i have the open file here i have my stream record stop buttons and so forth so just very useful fun fact that's what i use and i do recommend doing that going into the future but if you just have you know you just want to open up something then you could just keep it as is where it just opens up the file and it doesn't open up a folder now for the fun stuff i know a lot of people are here for the obs side of things so let's just create a new folder and enter that and if you're using obs or if you're using streamlab obs they both work exactly the same seriously they really do work exactly the same so let's just close those out so here with obs we could have it so that it selects a certain screen if we drag this over so we have this over we could have it titled um i don't know starting soon let's do starting soon and if you have it linked with your obs you could see that it will show all the scenes that are currently on your obs and just to reiterate this point if you see these options here match these options that are over here on the scene over here so yeah so whenever i do click on this specific button it should cut over to the starting soon scene so let's just uh click on it and now you see it is doing the starting soon and you can do this for a bunch of other scenes as well really what you could do is just have uh each scene all listed here so that you could just swap between each scene and as always you could always change the icon you could change the text for it you could create a collection but i wouldn't even worry about that right now but yeah that's how to do scenes in a nutshell now let's say you're in a situation you're playing games on your pc and you're streaming you have a bunch of people talking in the chat but you can't hear yourself things so you need to mute everything on your desktop alright just an example so what you could do is just drag on over mixer audio and here on mixer audio you just select the source this remember this is for the audio now this is audio not the video portion so here you can just find wherever you have the desktop audio which this case is right here now remember um this differs from stream to stream i have a lot of different uh audio inputs because i have a lot of different scenes so for me it will be this desktop audio so now let's say i want to mute the audio all i have to do is just click on this button and the audio is muted if i click on it again the audio is unmuted and you can do the same thing if you want to mute like let's say uh you want to meet your mic you want to mute this uh blue yeti right over here you can do the same thing go over here click on mic and aux and now if i click on that and just like that other than that you do also have the record and stream options of course record once you click on it it will start recording once you click on it again it will stop recording so uh yeah it's pretty self-explanatory same with stream you could just drag this on over and then once you click on it it will start streaming you click on it again it will stop streaming very very simple and then source source is like if uh you know how you have you have scenes and then you have sources within the scene so here you could actually toggle on and off a source within a scene so um here if you click on it you will see you have a scene that you have to select so for here maybe i have uh i don't know uh one of the desktop scenes you know and then here i want to i want to make the webcam disappear right so if i were to click on this you will see i disappear and then if i click on it again i reappear voila you know so definitely a lot of things you could do a lot of things you could play around with so uh like i could keep on going here over the amount of things you could do but yeah it's just it takes some time you just go in you just have fun you just look and see what you want to do and um that's that's basically what it comes down to now let's say somebody entered into your chat but you do not want to call them out you know you don't want to make them embarrassed and then scare them away and then they leave and then you're back at zero viewers no you want to talk to them but you don't want to say anything to them you know so what you could do i don't know this is an example once again yeah you can just drag on over chat message and you can put it anywhere you want and of course you have to make sure that you enable twitch on your stream deck i think by doing that you can just go over to settings and then you go to accounts and here you can just add a twitch account or twitter youtube whatever it may be you could add them over to your accounts so uh yeah yeah i should have said that first but after you do that you just drag on over the chat message click on it and here you can enter in i don't know um do you like ponies you know because that's that's an interesting question you know how can you not respond to that so that's a easy way to get like the chat talking if uh you see it's kind of stale and you got people on your stream but they're not saying anything that's a way to get people talking without maybe talking to them which i don't know i don't know this is just an example now that we got the gist of it done let's say we wanted to create a multi-action now you might be wondering what the heck is a multi-action but basically it's a list of commands that it does in an order and uh you could have that all set in a specific button so how to do that you could just click on any icon on your stream deck right click it and then click on create multi-action right then you're gonna see under here content you're gonna have zero actions that's by default you have to add some things you want so what we could do we could add uh let's say we go over to system we wanted to add maybe open function right so now we have an open function and we wanted to open up let's say uh let's say we wanted to open up discord right we wanted to open up discord right right after that we wanted to play some music right so it will start playing music right now let's say we wanted to do that but we want to um add a delay in between both of them so what you can do is go over to stream deck on the drop down you're gonna see it has delay right click and drag this on over and you can place it right in between both commands so now you can alter the delay to i don't know right now it's at 1000 milliseconds which in i think that's 10 seconds if i'm correct so what actually happens is that if you click on that specific button it will open up uh discord wait 10 seconds and then it will start playing music now you might be wondering what can i use this for well let's say you wanted to start streaming right but once you start streaming you want it to go to the uh scene that shows the starting soon scene and once it goes to the starting student scene you want it to start playing a specific song so that's actually something i have currently on my setup even though i don't really use the starting tune scene too much but i actually have this command um already listed here so let's say we just click on this one this is actually a full action command right here so what happens is that i have it set so that once i click the button it will start streaming after that it will click on the starting zoom scene and it will also mute this mic that way if i'm talking to somebody on the phone they can't hear anything uh my audience can't hear anything i should say and then at the same time it also plays music now notice there is no delay i didn't add any delay into any of these so what actually happens is that the minute i click on that button for this specific command right here it will play all four at the same time so it's kind of useful and this is once again something you can play around with and i might make a video that goes more in depth for this subject because the amount of things you can do with it is really kind of nuts really it literally constitutes a whole video about the opportunities you can do with it so i know we only scratched the surface so far but i wanted to keep it as basic as possible i didn't want to go too in depth and start confusing you guys i just wanted to get the gist down that way you guys know what the stream deck can do and how to use the stream deck to start off with well guys that concludes today's video let me know if you guys have any questions regarding the stream deck maybe about something that i talked about today or if there's an advanced feature that you've been thinking about doing but you're just not sure how it might work ask away in the comment section down below and i will be happy to help you out and there have been thousands and thousands of you that have been asking me matthew when do you stream on twitch guys i stream every wednesday at 8pm so if you guys have any questions you could also ask me on twitch as well and you could also watch me pulling the noobs as i do on a daily basis and if you guys enjoyed today's video make sure to like and subscribe for more content just like this once again though my name is matthew and thank you so much for watching guys i'll see you on the next one peace out you

Channel: MathewTheBest

Views: 77,261

Keywords: elgato stream deck, stream deck, stream deck tutorial, beginners guide, advanced, beginners, elgato stream deck tutorial, obs studio, mixer, 6 key, 15 key, 32 key, stream labs obs, tips and tricks, beginner guide, guide, elgato deck, elgato stream deck guide, multi action guide, complete guide, 2021 guide, streamers, for noobs, mathewthebest

Id: KOQFhdVNuAE

Length: 25min 23sec (1523 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021