- We're going to cover
how to use OBS studio step-by-step in this complete
tutorial for beginners. Hi, it's Justin Brown from Primal Video, where we help you grow an audience and scale your revenue with online video. If you're seeing value in this video, make sure you're giving it a thumbs up. It really makes a huge difference. And all the links to everything
I mentioned in this video, you can find linked in
the description box below. Let's jump into it. So OBS studio or open broadcaster software is a powerful and very popular
live streaming software and screen recording app. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it can stream to
places like Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and pretty
much all the major live stream platforms. With all its great features though, it can be a little
overwhelming for new users, but don't worry. This tutorial is designed to
get you up and running fast and walk you through all the key settings and the steps that you need to know to host your next live stream or record your screen using OBS, all in just a few minutes. Plus, I'll also share with
you some low cost resources or tools that work great
with OBS along the way, like how to get a cool animated title when you're ready to
take things even further. Okay, so here we are in OBS, I'm going to take you through
this walk through using a Mac, but the process is exactly the same if you're on 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. This 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's a little confusing because the other one's
called preview mode and this is the preview here. But essentially, we can
queue things up on this side. And then when we press
this transition button, 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 with just the one big preview window. But 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
of the settings for OBS. Then we will jump back
into this one very shortly. Exit, it's pretty obvious,
it's going to exit the app. Down the bottom here is pretty cool that you can actually see your CPU usage, so you can see if your
computer is underload 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 of that at
a glance down the bottom here, you can also easily see how
long you've been live for or how long your recording
has been going for as well. The next panel along is
your 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 here. Or if we're back on that studio mode, 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 use in our live streams. And the next one across
here is your scenes panel. Now this is essentially 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 and stuff across the top here as well. So that's the overall interface. 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, or you want some other theme in here, then obviously that's personal preference. Likewise, with some of these
output confirmations here. Things like being able to
show a confirmation dialog box when you're starting a stream or showing one when
you're stopping a stream, this is what I'll normally have on. 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 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, those two are the main ones
that I'll add on this window. But I would suggest that
you have a scroll through this section and 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 you. I guess, that's the general settings. The next one down is your stream settings. Now this is where we get to
choose our streaming service, whether it's Twitch, whether
it's YouTube, Facebook. So these are the primary ones here. If we actually hit on show all, it brings up a massive
list of all the supported live streaming platforms. So then you go ahead and
select to YouTube RTMP, then we need to paste our
stream key into this box, our unique key for our
specific live stream. So I'll go over to our YouTube
channel and grab the key. We'll come down here to stream
key here, we'll hit copy. And then we'll go back over to OBS and paste our string
key into that box there. Next we're going to come across to output. 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 bit rate, the default here 2,500 kilobits per second would be okay for a 720p stream. But with this number
2,500 kilobits per second, the higher we go with
it, if we went to 3,000, 3,500 or 5,000, the higher we go with it, the higher the quality of the stream we're going to push through to YouTube or whichever platform I'm 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 to 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. So this page tells us if we want to broadcast live to YouTube at 720p. The video bit rate range
should be between 1,500 and 4,000 kilobits per second. If we're doing a 1080p stream, that needs to be 3,000 to
6,000 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 live stream through to YouTube. So I'm going to set this to
5,000 kilobits per second, because I know my internet
speed is good enough. So that's the video quality. We can also make changes to
the audio quality here as well. Now I would recommend that
you not going less than 128. The default here was 160. That's going to give
you pretty good results. 192. Right up to 320, will give
you a higher quality audio. So if you want to be broadcasting live with music and those sorts 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 in your live stream, then you'll be able to get away with 160. So those are your live streaming settings. If you do want to also be recording or you just want to use OBS for recording, then that's where your settings down here. You can key all of those in. Now with the main ones
being your recording format, you can see the default here is mkv, You might want to switch
it to an MP4, an mov file. 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 5,000 kilobits
per second, in this case. So we can choose a high
quality, medium file size, or one of the other
options in here as well. Then this next area here
audio is where, obviously, if we get to dive into
some audio settings, now 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 surround sound 2.1, 5.1 surround sound. So for most people, you're gonna want to leave this at stereo, for most live streams
or most recorded videos. But the one that you really
want to check in here is your primary audio source, which is your mic, auxiliary audio. Not audio two, three or four, just the first one here. And you want to change this from default to your actual microphone
that you've got connected to your computer or to your camera, which is connected to your computer. So in this case, I'm going to set it to the cam link 4K because the microphone
I'm using is going to be directly connected to my cam link, which is connected to my Panasonic GH 4. So for audio, I want it
coming through the cam link. Now, even if the default
setting here of default is using your correct microphone because of your system settings, I would 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. But this next one down here, video, 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 we're
going to be pushing out, to YouTube in this case,
or even to be recorded. The two of them don't
actually need to be the same. So you could actually be working from a higher 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, 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, is 720p. 1280 by 720. So I'm going to hit this
little dropdown arrow, and I'm going to switch
this to 1920 by 1080. Now you do have the ability in here to pick other resolutions. We can actually just type in
a custom resolution as well. So you see that there's nothing that goes above 1920 by 1080, but if you want to broadcast in 4K, then you could actually type
in the resolution numbers for 4K and you will be good to go. So we're going 1920 by 1080. And we're going to leave our frame rate here at 30 frames per second. This next one down hotkeys 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 the 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
while you're actually live. And down here under
advanced, you guessed it, there's a lot more
advanced settings in here. I would say the one that I do check here and make sure is selected is
to automatically reconnect. So if for whatever reason,
your internet drops out, that it is actually going
to automatically attempt to reconnect and to restart your stream with this setting enabled. So we're going to go ahead
now and select, okay. And now we're going to go ahead and set up our scenes
for our live streams. So I've already got one default scene that's added down the bottom here. 'Cause there always has to be
at least one that's created and we're going to rename this one, right click on it and choose rename. Let's call this 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 used in this scene of main camera. So we're going to go ahead
and press the plus button. We're going to choose
video capture device. Now video capture device is any camera, any web cam that you've got
connected to your computer. So we're going to pick
a video capture device. We can give it a name here. Let's choose cam link 4K. And go, okay. And now we're going to specify which camera we're going to
link here to this video source. So you can see, I've got the
choice of my built-in webcam, the Logitech Brio webcam, a GH 5, I currently don't have connected, but it is installed. And the cam like 4K, which is
the one that I want to use. So selecting it, there we are. Works. I'm on camera. But you can see just by
selecting one of the other ones that they're going to
show up there as well. Hey, over here now. So for this primary
camera, our main camera, we want this one as the cam link 4K. And you can see that the preset here, the default setting for it is 1280 by 720. Now we've already told OBS
that we want our canvas size to be larger than that, that 1080p. So in this case, I'm going to make it
bigger by selecting high. Because that's the actual
setting that I've set in the cam link to be at 1080p, knowing that it's going to match here. So for you, you'll either pick high or you'll pick the resolution
that you want to have as your camera resolution. Once that's done, we're going to go, okay. And you can see here that
we have cam link here added on the main camera scene. And we also have the
audio bars here working, so that we can see that the
audio piece is working as well. Now inside of each scene, you're not just limited to
one camera or one video, one audio input. You can actually have multiples. We could come back in here and we can add in our other webcam, if we go to add a video capture device, let's name it, webcam. Go, okay. And let's select the Logitech Brio. And again, make it the high setting. And go, okay. You can see that we actually now have two and we can actually turn them on and off, all within the one scene. So for a really basic setup, you could get away with
just one scene set up. And you're just switching between the different camera angles and things, just by turning the layers
or the inputs on and off. And you can actually change
the hierarchy of them. So you can pick them up, you can move them around. So you could create a
basic stream this way. But where this does
become more complicated is if you've got lots of different layers or lots of different inputs in there that you want to be switching between, a couple of different screen shares, a couple of different cameras. If you're then trying
to switch between things while you're live is 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 go ahead and get set up now. So I'll remove this webcam here. Hit the minus. And let's go. Are you sure you wish to remove? Yes. Let's add a new scene and
let's call this webcam. And let's, again, add in
that video capture device. Logitech Brio. Go, okay. And let's find our camera, Logitech Brio. Let's set that to high. Let's go, okay. So we now have two scenes set up. Our main camera, which is the main camera. And we have our webcam as well. Now with all of these inputs, we can dive in and we can
customize them up as well. These video sources, we can just select on the screen and pick them up and move them around. We can resize them if we want to make them bigger or smaller. So you can actually dial
these things in as well. And I'll show you more
about that very soon. Let's get this back to the correct size and place this back up here. Okay, so we have main camera. We now have webcam for
the secondary camera. Let's create a new scene
as well for screen share. And so over here, we're going to hit the plus
and we're going to bring in, either a window capture, if you just want to bring in
a specific application window, or if you want to bring in
a whole computer screen, then you can choose display capture. And this is where if you've
got a second screen connected to your computer, this
is a great way to do it. So that's what I've got in
this case, display capture. And then let's call this second monitor. Go, okay. It was defaulted to the
primary one, here the main one. But we can just change
display to be the other input, number one. We also get the specify, if you want to have the mouse cursor shown on that screen as well. So we go over to that screen now. You might be able to see it. My mouse cursor is moving around on there. So we get to turn that on and off with this little checkbox. So I'm going to turn it
off because in this case, if we were setting it up with PowerPoint slides or something, I'm not going to want the cursor on them. I'm going to go, okay. And this is come in huge. So again, we want to shrink this down so that it fits into our canvas area. And we now have a scene
here for my computer screen, my second computer screen, which has a PowerPoint or
Keynote presentation on it. I can click and go through the slides and all those sorts of things. So very, very easy to
add these screen shares and things in here as well. Now I can even take this one step further. If we go back to our screen share here, let's duplicate this. So we've got a copy of it and we can go screen share with video. So another scene that
we might want to cut to would be our screen share
here, our computer screen, but with me on screen as well. So we can add in here our webcam again. So if we choose video capture device. And let's choose, add an existing one, because we've already added it once. We're going to choose the cam link 4K. And so I'm now full screen over the top. We want to scale me down. Scale this camera down. So it could be that we have a little picture in picture effect. on top of our screen share there. So these are our scenes now. If we go back to main camera... Hey, there's me. I'm on the main camera. Full screen. Then we want to cut to
our secondary angle. Maybe this is a top-down
angle or something, if we're going to be doing
any writing on the desk. Then we've got our screen share and we've got screen
share with video as well that we can switch to. All of these, we can just switch between just by selecting them
down the bottom here while you're actually live. Now, there's one last scene that I'm going to add in here to show you that is for our video intro. So if you're going to be
using videos or even photos and things in your live
streams or graphic overlays, then you can add them into
their own scene as well. So let's create a new scene. Let's call it intro video. Go, okay. Now we're going to add
in our source for that. And you can see we've got
the option here for image. We've also got media source as well. So we go media source. This will be our video intro and let's select a local file. Let's go through browse
and you'll find it. So it's on my desktop video intro. Now we have some options
in here for our video when we select it, we can have it loop, so it just plays continuously. We can have it restart the playback when the source becomes active. So when we switch to this scene, then it's going to actually start from the start of the video. So we'll want that one selected. We can have it set to show
nothing when the playback ends. So it just goes to a blank screen. We can control the playback speed and some other advanced
stuff in here as well. But those are the main ones. Let's go ahead and press okay. And you can see, now that
this scene is active, it's playing our intro video. Now this is something we
really quickly knocked up just using Placeit, it
is ridiculously easy. There is a link to Placeit and a tutorial on how you can create your
own amazing video animations and graphics and things to
use in your live streams. You can find the link down
below this video as well. And with each of these inputs, whether they're audio, whether they're video inputs that you've added onto your scene here, you can actually
customize them up further. So I've shown you the properties area, which we can, again, access to make those changes by either
clicking properties to bring up this configuration menu, or we can double click on it to bring up the same one. Or if we come across to filters, this is where we can get
further advanced controls and change up the look
and feel all of our shots and all of our audio for
each of those elements. So at the top here, we've
got our audio filters. It says audio video filters, but it's really looking at the audio side of our audio inputs or our video inputs. So if we hit the plus on this, we can add in audio adjustment tools, things like compress or expand, like gain to adjust the
volume, and video delay. So if your audio is out
of sync with the video, then you can come in here and you can adjust the
delay of that as well. Likewise, down the bottom here, we've got some video filter
effects in here as well. So if we press the plus here, then this is where we can apply a LUT, or a lookup table, color grade. We can do chroma key. So your green screens. If you're sitting in
front of a green screen, you want to remove that green or blue, then you can apply the chroma key effect. And you've also got color
correction in here as well. I'll just click on this one. And please specify a name for the filter. Let's go, okay. So in here we can really dial in our shot and we can adjust the gamma,
to make it brighter or darker. And we can adjust the contrast. So a lot of these things in here really give you some granular
control over your shot. So if we go back across
here now and press the plus, we've got cropping, so we can crop down our shots. We can mask out areas of our shots as well with an image mask. And you've got other filters
and things in here as well. Now I'm just gonna close out of this. And I'm gonna show you an example of where we would use
one of these effects. So back on our screen
share with video scene, if we select here the cam link 4K, I would actually add
a filter on this to... Select the down the bottom here and choose crop pad and I would crop the side off this, so that is actually smaller. So if I move this to the side here, we can crop off the right side. So this side of our shot,
just by using the arrows here. Increase the numbers. Now we can actually just type it in. Let's just go, say, I don't know, 200. I'm just guessing, maybe more. 400? Maybe let's go 600. And we'll also crop the left, maybe 400. Just to see what looks good, maybe 350 and go close. So you can see that we're able
to reframe our shot as well and crop it using those filters. So that's a practical example. And that's a tool that I would use quite often inside of OBS. So now our shot looks like this. So we're able to remove
all that extra stuff. And you can also easily add text into your live streams as well. So let's go back to the main camera and let's hit the plus
down here on the sources and let's go to text. And let's just call this, Justin title. And go, okay. And then in here, we can type in our text. Let's go Justin Brown. We can go and select our font. Let's pick Oswald. And let's go bold. And go, okay. If we scroll down, you've got some more settings in here around the colors and
those sorts of things. So you can customize this
up to match your brand. You have an outline, you have
a drop shadow if you wanted. I was going to leave this really basic and go, okay. And we've then got this text that we can pick up and we can move around to bring up while we're
actually live as well, while we're recording as well. And then that title is
something that you can easily turn on and off inside of that scene, just by clicking on that
little eyeball there to turn it on and off. And it works exactly the same
for any logos or anything or images that you want
to bring in as well. If we want to bring in our
primal video accelerator logo, we can choose an image. Let's call it PVA logo. And go, okay. And browse to go and find it. And it is this one here, PVA accelerator. And go, okay. And this is our accelerator logo that we can then position in this scene. Maybe scale it up a little bit. If we want to customize it up further, again, we've got access to those filters. So we select PVA logo. Let's go filters. And inside of here, we can change it out or crop it down or whatever we need to do with it. So let's close out of this. So now that you've got all
of your settings dialed in, your cameras are set up,
your audio is set up. Your scenes are set up, then you're ready to
push that go live button. So what I'd like to do here, is normally if I'm going live to YouTube is I'll jump across to YouTube and I'll open up the
live studio control area. So to access that, you want to make sure that you're on your YouTube channel, sign into the right account. Come back over to create
and choose, go live. And then you want to pick
stream, over here on the left. Or if you've already
scheduled up your live stream, then you can go down here to manage and your live stream
will be listed in there. So we've already gone ahead
and we've configured up a live stream ready to go. I've already copied and pasted
our stream key into OBS, quick little sanity
check with the titles in. Our privacy here is set to unlisted, which is what we'd like for this one. Then what we need to do is go back to OBS and hit that start streaming button. So if we press start streaming, it's going to tell us that we are live, down the bottom here. It's got a countdown timer saying how long we actually
have been live for. It'll also tell us if we've
got any dropped frames. So if our computer or a
camera isn't keeping up. And it also tells us,
again, our CPU usage. So we can see how much
strain our computer is under. And it also tells us our
bandwidth usage as well. So how much data we're pushing out. Based on what it is that we
specified in our settings. So if we go across to
the YouTube side now, let's switch back to that, we can see here that we are
actually live on YouTube. So it's automatically
started our live stream. It says that the stream
is in excellent condition. It's also giving us our
live chat here as well. So that's why I like to have this open when I'm live on YouTube, so that I can still interact
and talk to everyone while we're live in here as well. Now, for those of you that are interested in that studio mode and
what that looks like. If I enable that here now, I'll just maximize this screen again, then we can see we've
got a preview window here and we've got our actual live
window on the other side here. So if I want to say switch to this scene, it's queued it up, but it hasn't actually pushed it live until I come over here and
press this transition button. The moment I press this, you'll see that the video will come across to this screen and play. So it's now playing. And likewise, if we then want to queue up the next shot, which could be the slides, then there's not going to go into this until I press the transition. So if I press transition, now we're sending that scene live. So for those of you that
want more control over it it's not just one tap and you're you're live with stuff. This is traditionally the
setup that you would have in professional live streaming software, where you're able to set everything, customize things up,
and then push it live, instead of just switching
between scenes while you're live. So that is a complete walkthrough on OBS. Getting everything set up
for your live streaming or even for recording videos directly to your computer as well. Now, earlier in the video, I said, I would also share with you how you can create amazing
custom animations and graphics and things to use for your live
streams or for your videos. Check out the video, linked onscreen now with a step-by-step tutorial
on exactly how to do it. And it's much easier than
you're probably thinking. I'll see you in there.
