How to Use OBS Studio - Complete OBS Studio Tutorial for Beginners (2023!)

here's how to use OBS Studio step by step in our complete and updated OBS Studio tutorial for beginners OBS or open broadcaster software is a powerful free live streaming software that really packs a punch so it can be difficult to jump into but don't worry this OBS tutorial will get you up to speed really fast so here we are in OBS I'm going to take you through this walkthrough using a Mac but the process is exactly the same if you're on a PC as well now this is a brand new fresh install of OBS so this is what you'll see if you've never opened the app before the big black box here in the middle is your preview area this is where you can see what it is you're going to be broadcasting out down the bottom here we've got our controls this is where we can start streaming start recording we can switch between this preview mode and Studio mode so if I press on this now you can see that we have our program monitor which is what we're pushing out this is exactly the same as what you were seeing before but now we've actually got a preview as well now it is a little confusing because the other side is called preview mode and this is the preview here we can cue things things up on this side and then when we press this transition button here then it will actually send it live so if you have to be moving graphics and those sorts of things around and you want to not be doing it while you're live or the viewers aren't watching what you're doing while you're live then you can use this mode Studio mode to have that ability for me personally if I don't need that while I'm live I'm going to go back to the regular mode and you can just do that by clicking Studio mode again and it will take you back to that with just the one big preview window this is something you can switch between while you're live the next one down here is the settings button this will bring up all the settings for OBS we'll jump back into this one very shortly down here in the bottom right hand corner you can actually see your CPU usage so you can see if your computer is under load and you're potentially dropping frames or having a bad live stream if your computer is under too much stress so you can see all that at a glance just right down the bottom just here you can also see easily how long you've been live for or how long your recording has been going for as well the next panel along to your left is the transition panel this is where we can adjust the different types of transitions we have between the different scenes we'll get to scenes in a minute but know that you can adjust your transitions right here or if we're back in that studio mode like I showed you before your transitions are also in the middle here as well let's get back to preview mode the next one across here is your audio mixer this is where you can easily see and adjust your volume levels for each of the different elements you're going to have in your live stream or each of the different sources you're going to have in your live stream and next to that we've actually got our sources this is where we can add in all of our webcams images videos websites or anything we want to actually include and using our live streams and you can see if I just press this plus button here I've got all your options there and the next one across here is your scenes panel now this is essentially where we can have groups of assets or different configurations for different elements or different sections of your live streams so you might have a scene set up for just a full screen image of you on the screen the next scene might be your computer screen that you're sharing and you might have another scene for you with some text on screen and as like almost every program out there you've also got your standard menus and options right up the top here as well so that's the overall interface okay let's jump into getting OBS set up so come down the bottom here to settings now a lot of the settings in here are going to be personal preference and also going to come down to the type of live stream or the type of recording you're actually going to do things like how it looks the theme whether you want dark mode enabled like so or Yami default not sure why they called it that but let's go with the army so you can choose what theme you want likewise with some of these output confirmations here things like being able to show a confirmation dialog box when you're starting stream or showing one when you're stopping a stream this is what I'll normally have on and this one's quite handy too like are you sure you want to stop the stream a little pop-up asks you if you want to confirm that I'll normally have this one on and exactly the same for stopping recording as well just in case it accidentally gets knocked and you don't want to stop streaming you don't want to start recording at least you've got a confirmation box here to maybe save you in that case so for me personally most of the time I have these three boxes ticked automatically record when streaming that just depends on how often you want your streams recorded if you always do then of course it would be great to just tick that box as well but I suggest that you have a scroll through this section just see if there's anything that stands out to you maybe at a later stage once you've gone through and set everything up that you can then add this further level of refinement to customize things up for yourself so that's the general settings the next one down is your stream settings over here now this is where we get to choose our streaming service up here whether it's twitch YouTube Facebook you've got all the different options there these are the primary ones if we actually hit show all it brings up a massive list of all the supported live streaming platforms but today we want to show you how it's done on YouTube select YouTube rtmps The Next Step I would recommend is to connect an account so go ahead and click connect account it will then bring up your accounts and choose the one that's right for you and it's that simple now this is where we get to specify our output settings for our live streams but also for our recording as well so for configuring out our live stream we need to specify a video bitrate the default here is 4 000 kilobits per second but with this number the higher we go with it the higher the quality of the stream we're going to push through to YouTube or whichever platform you'll be broadcasting to but it also means that our internet speed our upload speed needs to be capable of consistently pushing that amount of data through our broadcasting platform now I'll link this page down in the resources below but this is where YouTube suggests which bit rates you should be looking at for the different resolutions this page is really handy so this page tells us if we want to broadcast live to YouTube at 720p the video bitrate should be between 1 500 and 4 000 kilobits per second if we're doing a 1080p stream that needs to be three thousand to six thousand kilobits per second now we can go above but you really don't want to be going below these numbers for a decent looking reliable Stream So in this case here we're going to be doing a 1080p P live stream through to YouTube I'm going to set this to 5000 kilobits per second because I know my internet will be able to handle that kind of quality so that's the video quality we can also make changes to the audio quality here as well now I would recommend that you're not going any less than one two eight the default here is 160 that's going to give you pretty good results 192 right up to 320 will give you a high quality audio so if you want to be broadcasting live with music and those sort of things and you want to have the highest quality through then you're going to want to pick a higher quality bit rate for your audio as well personally I think anything from 160 to 256 is going to give you great results but if you're only just speaking to your live stream then you'll be able to get away with 160. so I'm going to leave it at that so those are your live streaming settings if you do want to also be a recording recording settings can be found just below and you can key all of your details in there now with the main ones being your recording format you can see the default here is MKV matroska video that means apparently you might want to switch it to to an mp4 very universally recognized format that one and you'll also want to adjust your recording quality because in a lot of cases you want to actually record a higher quality video than the one that you're streaming out so higher than 5000 kilobits per second and I love the default sort of wording they've got here they've got high quality medium file size indistinguishable quality large file size lossless quality tremendous large file size so that's going to be highest quality there but I think it's pretty safe to go high quality medium file size in most instances the next area we want to work on is audio so we click down to audio there we dive into some of the audio settings there's really only a couple in here that you need to look at the rest are going to be fine by the default the first one is your channels by default you want to have this set to stereo unless you specifically need to be broadcasting in mono or 2.1 5.1 surround sound for most people you're going to want to leave this at stereo the one that you really want to check in here is your primary audio source which is your mic you your auxiliary audio so this one here not audio two three or four don't worry about those just the first one here and you want to change this from default to your actual microphone that you've got connected so for me it's this rode NT USB mini make sure that is indeed the microphone that you've got connected to your computer now even if the default setting here is using your correct microphone because of your system settings I'd still strongly recommend that you're manually setting this to your actual microphone just so that you don't have any issues down the track alright so we move on to video video resolution settings on OBS this is where we get to specify all of our video related settings for the quality for the frame rate of the live stream that we're going to be creating both here in OBS and also to whatever you're going to be pushing out to YouTube in this case or even to be recorded the two of them actually don't need to be the same so you could actually be working from a high resolution project in OBS but broadcasting out to YouTube or recording a video file in a lower scaled resolution and that's what we get to specify in here so the default here is that our basic canvas resolution or our OBS resolution is at 1920 by 1080 which is 1080p but the default is saying that we're going to be broadcasting our output at 720p 1280x720 so I'm going to hit this little drop down arrow and I'm going to switch this to 1920 by 1080. let's make it the same so that both our OBS settings and our output through YouTube is going to be the same at a nice HD quality you can see here you've also got some high resolutions 5120 by 2880 or 3360 by 2 100 on the output it doesn't go any higher than 1920x1080 but you can actually manually just change them in here if you would like so you could go to 160 by 3840 to make it 4K so you could change up the output resolution too if you'd like I'm going to leave that at 1920. by 1080. you can also change your frame rate here it's got it at 60 by default I'm going to make that 30. next one down is hotkeys hotkeys on OBS is where we can set up shortcut keys to be able to control OBS so we can create our own keyboard shortcuts to do things like start or stop streaming start or stop recording or a heap of other functions that you've got inside of OBS as well so this is something that's not necessary but it can really streamline the way that you're able to control and configure everything up and run your live stream or where you're actually live the next tab here in settings is accessibility which is one of the newer features which is pretty cool because it helps people who may have a disability or may have some eyesight issues to select colors throughout the interface that better suit them so there's colors here by default with their color codes or you can use different colors and select your own color that suits you which is really cool for those who need it and down here under Advanced you guessed it there's a lot more advanced settings in here I would say that one that I do check here quite often and make sure is selected is to automatically reconnect connect so this one here make sure that's enabled so if for whatever reason your internet drops out it's actually going to automatically attempt to reconnect and to restart your stream with this setting enabled so we're going to hit OK because we're happy with all our settings and now we're going to go ahead and set up our scenes for our live streams so you can see down the bottom left I've already got one default scene so it always has to be at least one that's created but we're going to rename this one just to make it nice and clear so right click and then hit rename and let's just call this one main camera now for this main camera we now need to specify which sources we want to have used which cameras we want to have use in this scene of the main camera so we're going to go ahead and press the plus button over here on our sources and here I'm going to choose video capture device we've chosen video capture device and we get to rename it here if we like I'm going to rename this to MacBook webcam I've just got the webcam today and now we get to specify which camera we're going to link here to this video source so if we click here you can see I'm pretty limited with my choices because I've only got the one camera hooked up which is just the FaceTime HD camera the built-in camera on my MacBook and most Monday computers will have the same they'll have a built-in camera so you should at least have that if you do have other cameras connected to your computer then they will show up here and you'll be able to choose those but today we're going to choose this camera hello it works here I am you can see the preset here is set to high that's great that's what we want you can see there are other options there but we're set at 1920 by 1080 which is high and these are all lesser quality so we want to stay on high and then once you're happy click OK and here we are on our main canvas screen there and you can see in the sources it's added MacBook webcam which is the camera that we're seeing right now which is all great now it is important to know that you aren't just limited to the one camera I do have just the one hooked up to my laptop but if you click here and it went video capture device you'd actually have the option to add more if there were more you could add more there the other options are that you can add all sorts of things so today I'm going to give you the example of let's say a a presentation that we could add in so I've gone image you can go browse and then you can select your presentation and there we go and if you've got multiple pages to your presentation you you can simply go image again and find the next page of your presentation and hit OK and you can see down here you can just simply turn those off and on you can also change the hierarchy of them you can move them above each other and choose which one is most important just by clicking and dragging like so so you could create a really basic stream this way but where it does become a little bit more complicated is if you've got lots of different layers and lots of different inputs around your sources here a couple of different screen shares a couple of cameras whatever it might be if you're trying to switch between things while you're live it's likely you could be clicking the wrong ones and getting frustrated and overwhelmed with all the settings that's where scenes become really powerful so we can have one scene just for our main camera then we might have a scene for a screen share we might have a scene that we cut to for playing a video animation or something like that so that's what we're going to set up now so you can see what that looks like so we'll get rid of these images here and we'll hit rubbish bin yes let's add a new scene over here and let's call this presentation if I could Spell correctly presentation okay Okay cool so now we have two sims set up our main camera hello and our presentation which has nothing in it at the moment so let's set that up quickly if you hit plus you go image we find our first image of our presentation our cover Happy Days let's add a couple more just so it can look like a real presentation Okay so we've got a few there now it's brought it in um sort of back to front to how I'd like it so I'm going to put my cover image there and my second image there just so it's nice and orderly so one two three I'm gonna go down that way okay so now you can see we've got our main camera here and we've got our presentation here which we can click between in our scenes nice and easily there's one other scene which I think you might find useful and that is creating a screen share quite often people might want to do that if they're live streaming so let's go ahead and do that hit plus to add another scene I'm going to call it you guessed it screen share I'm gonna go okay and then over here in our sources add source display capture I'm happy with display capture you actually can't call it the same as your scene as you'll see if I try if I said name is already in you so it's going to be something different so even if there's a gap between there that might work okay so it's automatically hooked up to the screen which I've got running at the moment now I actually have two screens going at the moment uh lucky so let's go ahead and see if it works if I turn it onto the other screen cool it does so let's hit OK I'm really happy with that now I can switch between all my different scenes now as you can see here my second display screen is actually really large so it doesn't quite fit into the screen we have but you can easily just resize like so and bring into line so it fits our screen perfect and over here I can move around easily on my screen and easily navigate like so another really cool tool you can use through scenes is picture in picture let me show you what I mean first you go to your screen share you want to duplicate that screen share video and then you can see it's duplicated it and created screen share with video over here in our source now we want to change our source to the capture device again choose your camera there I am hit OK and as you can see it's put me on top of that screen share now you can resize your camera there you can bring it down move it around to wherever you like and then you can move between your scenes like so you might want to go full screen you might want to go back to the screen share video in the corner or you might get sick of looking at yourself and show the audience the full screen that you are sharing now there's one last scene I'm going to add in here which I want to show you and that is video it may be an intro video or just a Show reel or something like that which you may want to add into your live stream so let's just call it video and over here in your sources select source and then you're going to want to select media Source let's call uh you know highlight and you can just search on your local files here browse mine's located on the desktop and then you've got some settings down here you can Loop the video you can restart playback when Source becomes active you can use Hardware decoding when available show nothing when playback ends so a few different options but I'm happy for it to restart playback when Source becomes active and then show nothing when playback ends I'm happy with all of that and there's my video and how cool is that that's playing along and I can switch back between and then when I click on it it goes back to the start to show the video again now there are ways to customize your video and your audio even further if you select your scene in this instance it's the main camera and you've got our MacBook webcam selected we can go into properties here and you can see that there's obviously those areas there that we can customize but we can also add filters so if you click on filters here there's a whole range of audio and video filters this first one up here says audio and video filters it is actually mainly audio filters you can see here we've got different things we can do to work with our audio we've got gain expander compressors everything to sort of improve the audio quality we've also got video delay down here which if your video and audio is out of sync this will help you to sync it all back up we've got effect filters down here which will change the video side of things you've got Luts if you want to put on a Lut that's like a filter you've got chroma key if you're filming on a green screen or a blue screen you can chroma key out the background and you've also got color correction letter let's see what color correction does this is something that you might want to use and you can see that you can change the contrast saturation you make yourself really orange if you want if you like into that sort of thing so you can really get really granular with some of those controls there close happy with that now one of the things I probably would use would be the picture in picture and I'd probably adjust that so again we can click on our screen share with video there so we want to make sure we click on our video capture device which is this one here we go to filters and now I might want to crop my video a little bit let's hit OK and you can see that I can crop it there and it will give us a little bit more let's make this box a little bit smaller so we can see what we're doing and see what it is doing so you can see here there's a little bit of extra dead space What I Call on the sides which is just blocking that background there so let's see if we can crop so we want to crop the left let's say we can use the arrows to crop as you can see that's going quite slow so let's just choose a number 300. awesome and then we want to crop the right side too let's go to 60. great awesome and you can see now it's made that a bit smaller and that fits into that corner nicely so you might want to try that for your picture and pictures you can also add text to our live streams as well let me show you how you do that so we've selected our main camera here and that's where we want our text today we hit plus we go to text let's call this Tom title okay and then here is where we write our text just going to put my name in Tom Rollins and you've got a few different settings down here which you can do an outline drop shadow whatever you like I'm gonna just keep it pretty plain and simple you can select your font let's go with impact because I like to make a big impact and hit OK and then you can just bring it down and resize accordingly down here same goes for Logos if you want to put a logo in you go Plus you go image Primal Video logo find one of those locate your logo here it is on the desktop and there we go that easy you put it on and you can relocate it to wherever you please just put it right there so yeah it's really easy to add text and logos to your live streams and you can obviously turn it off and on as you please down here okay we've done all the hard work we've set our scenes up we've got our sources logos webcams screen shares we've got it all set up now it's time to go live let me show you how you do that you simply come down here to start streaming you can click that and it'll come up with this pop-up box it says you need to set up broadcast before you can start streaming so go to manage broadcast and then go to select existing broadcast we select this one because we've already previously connected our YouTube channel and so it's all ready to go so click that select broadcast and start streaming and then select that okay it says we've gone live down here you can see the minutes clicking along you can see our CPU usage down here and you can also see the data we're using up over in the right hand corner there it'll also tell us if we've dropped any frames and if we've got any issues down there as well so let's go over to our YouTube Studio to see how we're going over there and you can see on live over here we've got our chat so we can chat to our people out there hello everyone out there hit that which is cool that's really cool looks like we've got an excellent connection and that's all working really well let's go back to our OBS another thing we can do is go to our studio mode which we spoke about earlier so this is where you know the live stream experts and Pros would would normally traditionally go in their software over in my preview area on the left over here we can put our presentation and get that queued up ready to go and then when we want that to go live we simply go transition and that will come on like so and let's say that we want to put our video on next again we hit video and it's queued up over here on our preview screen and then when we hit transition when we're ready to go and hit that and it's moved on in and the video is playing and then at any time of course if you want to head back to that main camera you can select over here there I am and then you can transition back onto the live screen and you can click off Studio mode just by going down to the bottom right hand side here click on Studio mode and we're back up to full screen so there you have it guys that is a complete walkthrough of OBS Studio I hope I've taught you something hope you've learned something today and you feel more confident going into your live streaming now if you want to see how OBS Stacks up to the other top options out there check out the videos linked on screen where we compared the best live streaming software for Mac and PC and don't forget to check out all the resources we have for you linked in the description below including a link to my channel too if you want to check that out thanks for watching I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Primal Video

Views: 253,539

Keywords: #PrimalVideoTV, best recording settings for obs, how to set up obs, how to stream with obs, how to use obs, how to use obs studio, justin brown, live streaming, obs, obs live stream tutorial, obs mic settings, obs recording, obs recording settings, obs screen recorder, obs settings for streaming, obs streaming, obs studio, obs studio screen recording, obs studio settings, obs studio tutorial, obs tutorial, obs virtual camera, open broadcaster software, primal video10:

Id: yCMdj7B8WiA

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023