How To Use OBS Studio for Beginners 2021 - Stream to Twitch, YouTube, Facebook for FREE!

okay so you just downloaded obs but you're a bit overwhelmed right now with all the features and functions available to you in this free program i understand that i used to be in that same boat so that's why i'm here to help you guys answer questions such as how do i add my gameplay picture what about my face cam how about alerts what about the best settings for if you have a low-end pc to a high-end pc well those are some of the questions that we're going to be answering today in this obs beginners guide tutorial if you guys want to skip around in the video feel free to do so at the section that you're most interested in the timestamps are on screen but without further ado let's get into this video [Music] to get things started i have obs open in front of me with a complete blank profile so it's nothing that's been tampered with it's pretty much the default profile that you'll receive when you open up obs for the first time the first thing we're going to want to take a look at is our scenes the scenes are a collection of sources for example one scene could contain my entire face cam as an overlay and another scene could just be my gameplay or my gameplay with a face cam with different overlays so right now in my current profile i have one scene selected you can rename that whatever you want by right clicking it rename and we'll just call this scene one now if you go over to the right you'll see my sources and this is where we can add our gameplay sources face cam browser overlays all that good stuff and we can do that by just going to the bottom here selecting the plus button and here we can see all the available source options that we can add for those of you guys that are interested in what these sources can do i left some descriptions in the description down below so go check that out now to add our capture card or gameplay screen we want to go to video capture device so select that name it whatever you want so in my case i'm using an elgato capture card so i'll name it elgato keep the source visible select ok and then here are all the devices that i have connected to my computer at the moment and what we're going to want to select is the elgato capture card so my hd 60s plus we select that i have it turned on and plugged in correctly of course if you guys don't know how to put your elgato capture card together i've done a lot of videos on my channel so please check out my tutorials playlist linked above but if you're all good to go you should be able to select that video capture device and you'll see it appear on screen everything else here can really remain the same if you're having problems detecting it you can always deactivate and then activate it again and it should appear and then just select okay you can see that i also have my audio coming through now how about if we want to add our face cam as well what we're going to want to do is go down to the plus button here again select video capture device and then i'll just name mine face cam select ok and then in the device drop down go ahead and select the web camera or your computer camera that you might have as your face game so i have a webcam right here and now i have it as an overlay right just like so if i want to resize it i can just select the corners without pressing any extra buttons just like this maybe i want to crop it in so you want to select the alt key and then you'll be able to crop it in like so without moving the entire frame around if you have a transparent dot png face cam overlay that you would like to add you can go back and select the plus button and then just do an image overlay as your next source and then by selecting the browse button you'll be able to find that image to import into your obs if you have an animated web m face camera border then you're going to want to import this as a media source instead of an image and you'll also want to make sure that the media source is looping so that it doesn't stop you can also group sources together if you want it to be one component you can do that by just holding the control or shift button and then just selecting the sources that you want combined once you have those selected right click it and then select group selected items now i can have my face camera border and my actual face cam as one layer and i can also select the lock option so that way none of these sources can be resized cropped or moved now i realize not everybody is recording their console or using a capture card even to record their gameplay some folks just want to record their desktop so how do you do that well this time you're going to want to add another source and it's going to be a display capture select ok you can name it whatever you'd like and then just select a display or monitor that you would like to have recorded so i can you know record the monitor that i have obs on or it can be another monitor that could have my gameplay potentially whatever you'd like you can even capture the cursor or not capture the cursor which is a pretty cool feature and once you have what you'd like set select ok and you are good to go and then just go ahead and re-size accordingly next up how about adding our stream alerts and chat over our video picture well one tool that i like to use is streamlabs you can also use stream elements but both will allow you to overlay your alerts in chat for your stream so what you have to do here just go ahead to streamlabs.com and then select login and then just log in with your twitch youtube facebook whichever platform you're streaming to and then once you're logged in go ahead to the left hand side and select alert box and then within here you'll see your widget url and this is what you want to pay attention to because you're going to want to copy this link you can do that by just going over to the right hand side select copy and then within your obs you can go ahead and select the plus button and then we're going to want to add a browser source you can name this whatever you want we'll call it alerts select ok and then within here you want to paste in that link which by the way you don't want to share with anybody that is going to be your personal link for your alerts you can keep the width and height 800 by 600 that is fine and then select okay and then you'll have this red box right here which you can reposition put it wherever you'd like and this is where your alerts are going to appear for if you get a new subscriber a donation all that cool stuff because it really helps make the stream more interactive i can actually go ahead and test this so if i get a new subscriber select click test subscriber and then boom there's my name just popped up as i just subscribed to the channel as a little test so within all the tabs you see here you can set different types of alerts like different images which you can get a lot of different gifs off of the site giphy i'll also link that in the description so you guys can check that out and download those and add those into certain types of alerts that you want to have set but just play around with a lot of these different settings and tailor it to your liking as for the chat overlay within streamlabs you want to go to all widgets on the left hand side there and then within here you'll see this right option in this orangish brownish box that's going to be your chat box that's where you're going to see your chat come up on screen and you're going to do the same thing that you did for the alert now that i have my primary scene set up i can go ahead and actually add a new scene we'll call it scene two and for this scene i'll actually make it my intro scene so what i'm going to do is select the plus button and i'm actually going to add an image i'm going to call it midnight because i'm going to be adding my logo to it and it's added and this canvas is 1920x1080 that's what i created within photoshop and one other thing i'm going to add to this is a countdown timer because i find that that helps keep the viewer excited and engaged for when a stream is about to start so all you have to do to do that is first off by going to new source select text and we'll just call it timer i'm going to select ok you can select whichever font you like i'll keep it as arial and then for the text i'll just say timer again just so i can kind of see what i'm working with here and now i'm going to go up to tools and then select scripts and this is where i can add the countdown script so to do that i'm going to select the plus button and then you may have some countdown scripts already in here but there is one that i added um that i found online which i'll also link in the description below go check that out but it was the obs countdown adaptivetime.lua so this is the one i have selected i'm gonna go ahead and open it and then now i can set the duration so let's say i want it to be 200 seconds that's cool the text source this is going to be the source that i just created the timer text source and if you don't see it in the drop down you can just go ahead and type it in it'll also work but then you can have the start text and then the final text for when the countdown is over and then just go ahead and select close and as long as the source is active you'll see the timer count counting down like so so now i have two scenes set up which is pretty cool and you see that i also have a little transition with that well we can also modify that by going over to the right hand side here you see scene transitions you can select this drop down and you can add these different scenes right here so maybe we want to do a slide instead select ok select ok again and now we'll have a slide transition see just easy as that now let's say you have a few different scenes and you're not sure what is in a particular scene so you want to check it before you actually switch to it while you're live so what you're going to want to do in this scenario is actually go to the right hand side under controls and then you'll see studio mode and this is where you can test out different scene transitions what the scene is going to look like before you even switch to it so that is going to be on your left hand side the preview the program that's what's actually live at the moment like right now so now i can switch to my scene too and if i like what's in my preview and i don't need to go down here and modify anything within my sources then i can just go up here and then select transition and then now that will become my program that's what it's going to be live that is definitely a cool feature especially if you're unsure if you should be switching to a particular scene especially if it's on your desktop or you could be showing some sort of personal information it's just always good to double check where your scenes are being switched to before you do it especially if you're already live so those are the basics that you're going to want to understand especially when you're running a video stream but now for the important part the settings low-end pc high-end pc doesn't matter your internet will matter but what are the settings that you're going to need to have to make sure that you're getting your audio a good video picture to wherever you're streaming to or even if you're recording those are the questions that we're going to have answered right now to access your settings you want to go over to the right hand side of obs and under controls select settings and you'll first be brought up to the general tab and within here there's no settings that really need to be adjusted unless you see something particular that you know you want or you don't want next if we go over to the stream tab this is where you can connect your twitch account or you can also use a stream key for twitch also for youtube facebook restream io depending on what you're using this is where you can input your stream information for those of you guys on youtube you also want to pay attention to the stream latency which is essentially the delay on your stream if you want it to be less you want to have that set to ultra low latency once you've inputted your stream information you can go ahead to output and this is where you can set how the quality of your stream or your recordings are since many of you guys watching this video are new to using obs i would just keep your output mode as simple and then before we set the bit rate that we want for our streams we want to do an internet speed test to do that you can simply go to google and type in speed test but i also left a link description below to the ucla speed test you can use that as well which is linked right literally right here but on google i'm just going to select run speed test and this test is going to find out how fast my download speed and my upload speeds are we're going to be most concerned about upload speed because we're going to be uploading our data to places like youtube twitch facebook so in my case i have a 5.62 megabit per second upload speed which is not too bad for streaming now you need to ask yourself the question what resolution and quality do i want to upload my stream in if that's in 1080p at 30fps then you're going to want to make sure your bitrate is approximately at 4500 kilobits per second which translates to 4.5 megabits per second so i at least need to have five or more megabit per second upload speed right here to consider doing a 4500 kilobit per second upload speed the higher in resolution quality you go the higher bit rate you're going to need to have to keep your quality consistent with your stream output same thing goes for youtube here's a youtube help page going over the encoding speeds that you'll want set and the higher your bit rate the better your quality will be for 1080p 30fps you'll still be good to stream between 3000 and 6000 kilobits per second so i've left these encoding guides for twitch youtube facebook all linked description below so you can go check that out and make sure your settings are right depending on the quality stream that you want to upload so now that i know the bit rate that i need to set i would feel very comfortable changing this bit rate for a 1080p 30fps stream to 4 000 kilobits per second for the encoder i can use x264 which is my processor if that's all i have to work with but i do recommend using a hardware encoder which would be your graphics card if you have one as you can take a lot less stress off of your cpu and your overall computer will run better if you have a graphics card to run your streams off of for those of you guys that have a really good processor you can go and enable advanced encoder settings and then select this drop down and then you can do a fast or even medium speed for your encoding which will have the quality looking really good but your processor has to be good to do that some of you guys that have a poor processor your videos streams will be very choppy it won't look good so in that case you'll still want to be in the advanced encoder settings options and you're going to want to run a super fast or maybe even an ultra fast option so that you don't have choppiness on your stream but the downside to having a very fast encoding speed is that your videos your streams can look a bit blurry now if we go down to recording the recording path this is where we can set where we want our video files to be saved to recording quality will usually keep this same as stream for most computers but if you have a pretty good computer you can also change this to high quality medium file sizes or even go all the way up to lossless quality if your computer is a beast recording format i usually like to change this to mp4 as it's something that i can work with by default it'll be at mkv but i have a lot of programs that really can't even look at this file format so i like to go with mp4 or even mov even though i'm not covering the advanced output settings in this video i figured some of you guys would be curious what settings that i run when i'm streaming and recording so on screen right now you can see my stream settings that i use using my hardware encoder the graphics card as well as my recording settings which i'm also using my graphics card and i have my preset to high quality recording next up we'll go to the audio settings and what we're going to want to be most concerned with are the global audio devices within here we can set our desktop audio to be recorded by literally just selecting our speakers this will pick up all the audio that plays over the operating system for the mic auxiliary audio this is going to be your commentary microphone this is important to understand because you need to have some sort of usb or interface connected with your computer so that way you can record your voice you're not going to get the commentary audio just because you're talking to your chat on your console that is a total separate microphone you need a microphone connected directly to the computer that obs can select so that way you can have your commentary voice recorded so i can easily add my microphone by selecting the drop down and then just finding my microphone which is this one right here malgato wave three the next tab is video and this is where we're going to set our canvas so the base canvas i would always keep that at 1920 by 1080 but the output scaled resolution this is where you're going to want to make sure that it matches up with whatever quality output stream that you're trying to run so i'm trying to do a 1080p 30fps stream for this example i would want to select my output scaled resolution to be 1920 by 1080. downscale filter you can keep this at 16 samples but if your computer is pretty good you can also do 36 samples in the hotkeys section this is where you can tie a key off of your keyboard to an action within obs in the advanced section this can all remain default unless let's say you're a big time streamer you can take a look at the stream delay section here and enable that so that way you can have a certain time difference on your stream in case some people want to stream snipe you and all that messy stuff once you're happy with all your settings you can go ahead and select apply and then okay and then right away i see the audio tracks that i just added within my settings so the desktop audio and even the mic auxiliary which i can actually even rename within my settings here i define that it's my commentary microphone and you also you don't want to make sure that this is blaring and in the red you want to have that audio just peeking into the yellow zone and that way your gameplay audio is balanced with your voice which will put the game audio a little bit lower so that it stays in the green zone to clean up my audio mixer here a little bit i'm going to want to hide this facecam audio track as it's not being used so i'm going to do is select the settings option and then i'm just going to go to hide and now my audio mixer looks a little bit cleaner you guys should also be aware of your advanced audio settings so if you go to your audio mixer and just select the settings icon and just go down to the bottom and select advanced audio properties this is where you can essentially set whether or not your stream is hearing something are you hearing something is it you know monitoring off altogether and that's what you can set here for any of your audio sources if you're having any audio delay issues you can go over here to your sync offset time to make sure that your audio tracks and your video are lined up together at this point you guys should be ready to go and knocking out that amazing stream but since you guys just stayed to the end of the video here i'm gonna give you guys one last tip that's gonna make it even better for your viewers what is that you might ask well it's the overall picture quality that your viewers are seeing so what you can do is go to your let's say your elgato or your capture card source right click that go to filters and then within here we're going to add an effect press that good old plus button and then go to color correction select okay maybe up the saturation make it look a little bit more pretty and colorful you know not too much but a little bit and let's just not stop there let's press that plus button again let's do a sharpen make it a little sharper you don't want to do this too much but just a little bit is nice and it makes a difference guys same thing with the face cam i'm gonna up the brightness a little bit set it to something that looks nice and natural and good quality this is where you can even put in your green screen effects if you have one by adding another effect and doing chroma key if i had a green screen you would see the effect working but that's where you would do it that is pretty cool guys now all we need to do is press the start streaming button to stream to wherever we set to twitch facebook youtube or for just recording select the start recording button and we are set to go that concludes this beginner's guide to obs of course if you guys have any questions whatsoever feel free to hit me up on my socials link below or leave a comment in this video and i will try to get back to you thank you so much for staying to the end of the video i hope you enjoyed it make sure you hit it with a big thumbs up subscribe it to the channel if you're new around here for more awesome videos just like this one and i'll see you guys in my next video take care peace [Music] you

Channel: MidnightMan

Views: 13,788

Keywords: 1080p 60fps, Alerts, Facebook for FREE!, How to Use OBS Studio Beginners Guide 2021 - Stream to Twitch, OBS Beginners Tutorial 2021 - BEST Recording Settings for Any PC, Simple Setup, YouTube, and MORE!, best settings, easy, how to use obs 2021, midnightman, midnightman55, obs, obs beginner guide, obs easy, obs tutorial, playstation, ps5, tutorials

Id: EcDcTJSSiPs

Length: 21min 38sec (1298 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021