How to Use OBS Studio - 2024 Beginner Tutorial

let me show you exactly how to use OBS Studio from scratch and I'll cover everything you see inside of OBS Studio that you need to know if you're trying to stream online or if you're trying to record a gameplay or your screen and OBS studio if you've never heard of it before it's a free application you could download it for Windows PC it works on Mac and Linux and again it's used for video recording you could record a camera for example like what I'm doing here you could record a webcam you could live stream to any platform it live streams to YouTube twitch Facebook pretty much any platform I'll show you the full list when we jump in and you could basically use OBS Studio's Advanced options too to basically create a virtual studio and you just need this free app to do it there are some more advanced things some other things that I recommend if you're trying to take this to the next level but for beginners you don't need anything but OBS Studio I'll mention some useful things and I'll link everything in the description to make it easy to find let's jump in now to get started with OBS Studio make sure you have the latest version of the official app they've had a lot of changes recently so I'm updating this video because of that and once you do install it this is basically the interface of OBS so I'll briefly explain what you're looking at here but I want to really dive in into how to set it up and then I'll show you exactly what you're looking at as we go along but at a brief glance right here is basically where your stream or your video recording is going to show right over here this is your canvas and down here you have these things called scenes all going more detail on what these are sources are basically different camera angles you could add to it images different video clips all kinds of different sources could be added here I'll explain this as well this is your audio mixer so what you see here is the level from my microphone seeing transitions I'll explain as well and this is your control so if you start streaming this this is where you would click once you set it up there are some settings you need to know about before you do that same with recording same with Studio mode so we'll explain that in the settings but I'll get to that in a second right now the very first thing I typically like to go over is these things called scenes now what scenes are basically you could have many different scenes and they could each be for a specific purpose for a long time I only had one scene that had multiple sources inside of it but I'll show you how to make a second scene in a second but right now by default you will have something called a scene so what you could do is you could rename this scene right so what am I recording here I'm gonna do a screen capture tutorial let's say that's the kind of scene I want to build let's say if it was a gameplay you would just name it whatever this is going to be as you're seeing the Second Step you want to set up is the source so let me go ahead and click on the plus sign here these are all the different sources that you could actually add so you could for example have an in image that's part of your scene you could have a video captured device that's basically your webcam or a camera I'm using here you could record your screen so screen capture I'm on a Mac here so it says Mac OS screen capture on older OBS it was just called display capture so if you have older version of OBS you have display capture and you could set one of these or multiple different layers to it so let me show you exactly how this works I'm gonna go ahead and do a video capture device that's going to be the webcam that's going to kick on and you could name any one of these so this is going to be my iMac screen so I'm going to name it iMac I'll press OK and then you're going to get this window so you want to choose your device so the FaceTime HD camera if you have a built-in webcam or an external webcam or an external camera you'll see that on the list as long as it's connected onto your computer so choose that and I'll switch over here to my webcam to walk you through the rest of it this is just a built-in webcam on my computer for preset you want to choose High here so I'm going to leave it on high but you can actually lower it to some of these other options like 720p I recommend you just leave this the same and press ok so now you basically have a scene that looks like this now it has some black parts to it so if you record our screen it's not going to look right so you want to grab the corner here and basically stretch this out to fill your window do the same thing with your webcam if you're choosing a webcam now if you look down here I haven't added a new scene this is just a scene that was there by default but I do have a video captured device I could always turn this off and on this way okay now let me show you how to add another source so I'm going to press the plus sign and this time I'm going to capture my screen as well so this is a tutorial so I'm going to talk I'm going to capture my screen I record a lot of tutorials this way if I capture the screen this is fine I'm going to press OK it's going to add another source now my method is display capture you could also do individual windows or applications I'm going to just capture the whole screen here and it's going to be the built-in display resolution and you could show the cursor or not I always choose to show it if I'm doing some kind of demonstration and I could press OK right over here now if it doesn't quite fit sometimes it's going to be much much bigger like this you'll need to to kind of drag in the corners here and make sure it fits this canvas so these red lines are going to show you that is going to fit the canvas like this so now I'm behind here so if I turn off the capture on behind it and this is on top of it so if I wanted to put myself on top I could grab myself and put it on the top here so it becomes a top layer like this now the screen is behind me the useful thing when you do that is you could do this thing called picture in picture so you could shrink yourself down you could put yourself right in the corner it has this weird picture and picture effect because of the way I'm capturing the screen but I could just turn this off right over here so you get the idea basically that screen is going to show up in the background right now OBS is open so that's what it's showing and I'm here in the corner so this is a useful double lot of tutorials for example gameplays will utilize an option like this okay so I'm going to go ahead and turn myself off too because I want to show you audio mixer here now with audio mixer you're going to have couple of different options you could go ahead and press the three dots here and go to properties so the device here is the built-in microphone by default this is one thing I recommend if you're doing this for any reason that is beyond just a hobby even if you're doing game plays you could get these USB microphones so the one you hear right now is this one Shure mv7 is the one that you see on my screen capture let me just show you what it looks like it's basically this kind of a USB mic and it's just plugged in it also has XLR and USB so you could go to a sound mixer but this one's going directly to my computer right now so you could have something like that as your audio input that's where you would change it on their properties because the built-in microphone on any computer just doesn't sound that great so I recommend you check that out and I'll link that below you could get it from Amazon so I would set that up next and I'll show you some more audio settings once we get to the setting tab here the scene transition we're going to skip right now because I want to show you scenes towards the end right now we just could handle one scene with multiple different sources and fixing our audio and then we could actually start streaming or start recording to our local computer here okay so that was the basics of setting up multiple sources inside a scene but we do have some settings so I'll cover settings then we'll come back and cover scenes and then I'll show you Studio mode and some really Advanced options that's gonna really take this to the next level okay so let's go to the settings tabs right here now inside of settings the general tab you pretty much don't need to change anything I usually leave everything here on on default the only thing is if you're streaming you could get a confirmation box when you stop streaming so it doesn't happen by accident and you could get a confirmation box when the recording stopped too I usually have just this one if I'm streaming I don't want to accidentally turn that off same with starting a stream too you may want to turn on but under the stream tab here this is very important because if you're streaming you need to decide what platform obviously you're going to stream to typically I would do this to YouTube but twitch Facebook and if you show all you'll see all these other platforms you can stream to as well okay so I'll do YouTube because then I can show you exactly how it works but if you were doing something like a twitch you could just connect your account here and then they all require this thing called The Stream key that I'll show you where to find that is really easy to find I'll show you here on YouTube so we'll do this once we get to the streaming section right now the output is also very important this is related to streaming and recording so you really need to see what's going on here they do have advanced options that I don't recommend with the simple option you should be able to get what you need streaming bit rate is very important by default is 2500 most internet connections are going to be able to handle at 2500 but if you're doing something like a 1080p stream I recommend somewhere between 5 000 to 8 000 and then after your first stream review make sure it's not really having any kind of lag issues and is streaming pretty well then you could stick with that anything over 8 000 you don't really need unless in the future you want to do something like in the 4K streaming but right now 720p or 1080p is where you want your stream to be so I usually leave this around 5000 audio bitrate I leave on defaults but if you go higher it's obviously going to have better quality the encoder I have just this option but if you have a more advanced gaming setup for example you may want to choose something that is not software based and it's Hardware based I don't have anything like that so that's fine and the encoder preset I just have it on very fast and that gets me what I I need but again you do have other options depending on your speed of your computer the recording if you decide to record this is not for streaming I use this for example I'm recording right now I'm using a different setup right now but you would record it would choose you a path here so you can choose a desktop path for example so I could just save it to my desktop the quality here I usually have it on medium but you could do large file sizes here that are the highest quality you could even do lossless but these get really really huge so I just usually do medium and they look fine my videos usually are in medium file size when I use obs this option I do change by default is on MKV but MP4 is probably the most common and the one that's compatible with most devices so I would choose it there everything else is the same here and when you're good with this setup just press apply we do have few more things here under the audio tab everything's fine here I want to change these two but for desktop audio if you want to record that go ahead and choose the default don't leave this on disabled that could record your desktop here and for the mic I showed you how to set it up in the other page but again by default it's going to be the built-in microphone on your computer so I recommend you change this to something like a USB microphone there are plenty on the market this is just the best I found for the price and quality so it's not too expensive but it's not some of the cheaper ones that don't have the quality that I'm looking for and that's the two I change and nothing else on this page I change so everything's the same under video tab now typically you want to change this to a canvas size based on your screen so a lot of people have this on 1920 by 1080 and same thing as this option 1920 by 1080 and as long as the resolution matches nothing is required but sometimes you could do 1280 by 720 so it's HD the highest quality HD at 1920 that's 1080p that's what you're going to be watching but it's going to basically output this is recording or streaming at a lower okay so that's going to downscale basically I usually try to keep them the same so I'm going to go ahead and keep them the same no down scaling required now your frame rate for the most crisp quality 60 frames is what you want but for regular stuff like a tutorial I'm going to do 30 frames now your hotkeys you may want to use with hotkeys you could assign shortcuts on your keyboard to all kinds of things right starting and stopping stream but this is where you may also want to get a device that has lots of this built in for easier use so they make devices for streaming for this purpose I'll put one on the screen here so this kind of device you could again buy and connect to this setup if you're doing this all the time so I'll link that below as part of the resources as well you could change some of these default colors here so under this tab you could change some of these and under the advanced tab I also don't change anything here there is one useful option here if you get disconnected it automatically reconnects so that's enabled by default so you actually don't even have to worry about changing that so I'm going to press apply that's all the settings that you need to really know about so I'm going to press OK and come back over to my scene okay now let's get to the more advanced stuff here with Studio modes so let me go over here and click Studio mode now this is Studio mode so you get two different windows so on one side you have the preview window this is basically where you could cue things up to then go to the program window which the program window is what the audience would see if you're streaming for example or what gets recorded okay so you could transition from one to another I'll show you that in a second but in order to use Studio mode you need to set up another scene okay so let's go over here the scenes that we skipped we're going to press the plus sign and I'm gonna set up another scene now let's say this is going to be a presentation I'm going to set that up presentation press ok now I have a presentation it's going to be blank right because I don't have any sources all my sources that I set up already are in the other scene so in the presentation mode what I could do is press the plus sign and I could add multiple different things again right so let me go ahead and add an image because I want to show you this really cool thing I'm going to call this background I'm going to press ok now I'm going to go ahead to my desktop here and I have this really useful option that I downloaded I'm going to go ahead and open it I'll explain the sources where I get these kind of presentational assets and all kinds of different overlays that you could use and now I'm going to go ahead and add a video Source again so that's under video capture device then that's going to be my webcam again I'm going to press ok I'm going to save that and my device is going to be the Face Time HD camera again okay now I'm going to press OK this is the same thing we set up before I'm gonna go ahead and kind of bring this down shrink this down and I'll need to change the order so if I bring the video behind that one it has a transparency to it so it fits like this now check this out one more really cool thing I'm going to select the video and there's these things called filters let me click on one with filters you could apply these effect filters okay check this out I'm going to apply for example a crop so if I crop this I could basically fit this a little bit better so I'm going to crop 300 from the left I'm going to crop 300 from the right I'm right in the center makes this more of a square okay I'm going to close this and now if I stretch myself little bits I could fit myself right in this box a lot better right so let's say I was having a conversation with someone else again I could add their feed let's say they had a different camera set up for them and they would be over there okay and this is a Photoshop file so I could open up Photoshop or get a free trial and I could basically change these titles or this is not my name so I would need to change these inside of Photoshop and then this just saw the Photoshop file I didn't have to save it as a specific type of image it has the transparency so I could put myself behind a logo like this but just to give you an idea where I got this this is a platform called envato elements and with envato elements you could basically get all kinds of different overlays and other resources like stock videos I'll show you one that I really like when I show you the Transitions and you could basically download these they come with a bunch of different Photoshop or figma if I go down here you could see Photoshop illustrator Adobe XD figma or sketch you could get all kinds of different templates for those and then you could save them as a JPEG image or you just use the Photoshop file and you put it inside of OBS exactly what I did on mine and I'll go back to the other scene just to show you I could also add these kind of overlays as an image so I got another one here I'll show you I'll choose my file and this came with that bundle as well so I could select this one and you could see it shows up with the transparency right so I could also edit this in Photoshop but my name put my title really simple to use I didn't have to design anything fancy and this takes the production to the next level and I could add another scene let me show you this other scene here this is going to be my intro so I'll go ahead and add that and this time I'm going to press the plus sign here and I'm going to add a media Source okay this could be a pre-made video so I'm going to choose that media Source I'm going to save that and this time I also downloaded this from in vital elements this is my mp4 file let me go ahead and press open on it and this one let me press play to show you what it looks like this could basically start before I stream something right so this could be playing and if I double click on this I could actually Loop this so it just keeps playing and everything else I could leave the same but there are some useful option here to take a look at I'm going to press ok so this is going to be my scene my intro scene I have my presentation scene and I have my screen capture scene right different scenes all with different sources but now look if I go to Studio mode this is my preview and this is what I'm streaming once I press stream I'll show you that in a second the record but what I could do is I could queue up as long as this is selected I could queue up my screen capture tutorial now this is queued up right it's not live yet this is what's live but if I press transition here it's going to cut from one to another or transition from one to another and then transition back cut could be just a straight cut without that kind of a nice fade a fade is exactly what it sounds like now these are where all your transitions in the scene are right so you could see that was based on a fade but I could change it to a cut I could change the duration and I could add other ones right so if I wanted to add for example a swipe I could add a swipe okay so you could see swipe left to right I'm going to press ok so now if I change the transition here to swipe and I press transition you can see let's change the transition so when I'm live actually right I could actually queue things up and then have other things playing live and then when I'm ready I could put myself with a quick transition now I would be live right okay let's look at the final two things the recording option and the start streaming option so for the recording option it's really simple if I press start recording it's going to basically capture the program window if you're in studio mode if you're not it's still going to capture the window that you see over here okay now if I switch to a different one here I'm going to transition to this one then it's going to show me okay now I'm going to stop recording to show you where it goes if I go to my desktop right here because I set my desktop as the destination it's going to record here so it has that and then it should cut to me at some point if I go over here so that's the clip right I just muted the audio so I could talk over it but it's that simple and that's the file and it's MP4 so those are the settings I changed in order to record that way now let me go back to OBS now you also have star streaming right if you press start streaming nothing's going to happen because I didn't set this up yet so if I open that setting and go to the stream tab this is just under the settings tab I skipped over this in the beginning so what you need to do is choose your service if I'm going to YouTube I'll choose YouTube connect your account to make this easier if not you could just add the stream key okay more advanced so in this case let me go to YouTube and all I have to do is press the create option here and press go live and I want to stream right now I'm going to press start and I don't want to use the built-in webcam right this makes it really simple but I'm using a streaming software OBS right I could have those overlays from in bottle I could have those intro videos all kinds of stuff to make this more advanced I'm going to press go there and make sure here is set to unlisted if you're doing this for the first time just to test it out so if you go over here make sure it's set to unlisted you could change it to public if you are comfortable and you do want to really go live publicly but your stream key is over here right here stream key right it's hidden but you just press copy and then if you go back to OBS here this is where you would paste in that stream key right so I could just go ahead and click and paste it and then you're all set you can start streaming and on the bottom here when your live is going to show you when you're live when you're recording to your desktop it's going to show you the record how long you've been recording and your CPU usage and your frames per second are going to show here obviously your CPU usage is really shooting up it's probably this is maybe too much for your computer but again make sure you keep an eye on that so it doesn't really shoot up too high typically mine stays around somewhere like this if I'm doing some kind of a recording like this so I'm going to go ahead and stop that now everything I mentioned throughout the video I organized in the description of this video so from the microphone to envato for your overlays are all linked below and I hope you found this video useful I hope to catch you next time

Channel: Howfinity

Views: 630,867

Keywords: How to Use OBS Studio, howfinity, how to, tutorial, Youtube, obs studio, how to use obs, obs tutorial, obs studio for beginners, obs studio tutorial, how to use obs studio for beginners, how to use obs studio, obs tutorial for beginners, open broadcaster software tutorial, how to record with obs, obs streaming tutorial

Id: nWbJJ4RnPx8

Length: 23min 8sec (1388 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 03 2023