OBS for BEGINNERS 🌼 heyshadylady over-explains || OBS guide for new streamers

hey everybody welcome back to my channel i'm hey shady lady and today i have possibly the most ambitious video that i have ever attempted to create if you're someone who is looking into getting started streaming on twitch.tv then you've probably already learned that you need a program to broadcast your streams and i'm here today to teach you everything i know and more about the most commonly used broadcasting tool for streamers which is obs aka open broadcasting software this is easily going to be the longest video i've ever made so i'm sure that you'll want to digest this in parts i will definitely have time stamps in the description below and i also have a full blog version of this entire video up on my website at heyshadylady.com and the link for that will be in the description box below as well so you can follow along with this video so everybody better sit back buckle up grab a snack grab a whole ass meal and let's learn all about obs so we're going to start at the very beginning what is obs obs stands for open broadcasting software and it's a free open source program that anyone can use to broadcast content on streaming platforms or record video productions right from your computer it's important for you to understand that obs is like the blank canvas for an artist it's a tool that you have to create onto for obs that's adding scenes sources and plugins and then you need to take that canvas that you've just created on and take it to a gallery to be seen which would be like connecting obs to streaming platforms like youtube or twitch when you're first looking up obs you might stumble across something called sl obs and be confused are obs and streamlabs obs the same thing yes and no streamlabs adopted obs source code and added a lot of bells and whistles and highly monetized options to create slobs you could use either one slobs or obs slob's design is a little more beginner friendly but it also bogs your pc down and chews up a lot of memory and ram to run obs is more reliable in my experience it uses far fewer resources to run and it crashes less i generally see people say that obs uses 10 to 15 percent less ram on their computer to run but on the flip side with slobs you can more easily integrate things like stream labels twitch chat and alerts assuming you use streamlabs for those services i will say personally since i've switched to obs i've had a much smoother time with streaming i experienced far fewer crashes and my pc runs a lot faster you can download obs for free at obsproject.com and they also have a wiki on their website that includes an overview of obs a quick start guide and install instructions so we're going to start with all of the really tedious technical stuff at the beginning of this tutorial and we're going to go through everything one by one and break it all down so if you already have experience with obs it may seem like i'm patronizing you a little bit but i'm trying to commit this from a blank slate that you've never seen obs before in your life so when you first download and install obs you're going to be met with a screen that looks somewhat similar to this you may have these windows moved around in a slightly different way but you should generally see this screen pop up for you and let's start up at the top of the toolbar under file it has a quick access to your obs settings and it allows you to remux your recordings which opens up a window where you can convert mkv files into mp4 files we'll talk about that later in edit there's typical editing options like copy and paste undo and transform and it also allows you to gain access to advanced audio properties which we'll talk about later under view you can customize the visibility of toolbars icons status bars and gain access to multi-view mode which lets you see all of your scenes at one click under the docs window you can adjust the ui of obs by adding and removing specific docked windows like the audio mixer the sources and even add some custom docs to really fine tune your experience with this program under profile you can create new profiles for obs which allows you to save separate settings for each profile this makes it very handy if you're someone who either streams on twitch and youtube sometimes you stream on twitch sometimes you stream on youtube but it can also be useful if you are in a household where you and another person share a computer and you're both streaming scene collection allows you to create new scene collections which are just collections of scenes that you can swap back and forth from this is really useful if you run different styles of streams like one night you do a podcast the next night you're back to gaming and you can keep all of those scenes together and reduce the ram usage by your computer if it's trying to load too many things in obs at one time the tool menu bar gives you access to various scripts and extra tools that are integrated into obs and it also lets you open up that auto configuration wizard to either optimize your obs for streaming or recording or using it for virtual camera and then the help bar will give you access to the discord server the help portal the website and things like your log files and crash reports okay so now the actual layout of obs you can see in the center here these are terms that i'm going to be using frequently throughout this entire tutorial so in the center here we have the preview window it's going to be a black screen when you first start up until you start loading your assets on it and then this is going to be the screen where you actually drag and move around and adjust the appearance of your streaming scenes we have our scene stock which shows you all of the different scenes that you have we have the sources dock which will show you all of the corresponding sources that are inside of that scene we have the audio mixer which will allow you to adjust the audio levels of your audio input and audio output devices we have a scene transition doc menu which lets you pick how the scenes fade into each other when you're swapping between scenes and then we have your control panel which allows you to start your stream start your recording your virtual camera your replay buffer enter studio mode access the settings and exit obs in the bottom right corner we have a little status bar which is going to show you how long your stream has been live or how long you've been recording your cp usage your frames and other important information there's one more doc that i don't usually keep open it's called the stats doc and this will let you see a lot of more technical information some of you may be interested in this but you can see your cpu usage how much disk space you have how much memory is being used by your program what your fps is at and frames skipping and things like that so this will help you keep an eye on the performance of your stream and your the performance of your pc so let's go ahead and take a look at the settings menu which you can access one of two ways either in the control panel in the bottom corner by clicking on settings or under the file toolbar and clicking on settings up there and we're going to go through each of these tabs one at a time so let's start with the general settings you can take a scroll through here and get acquainted with all of the different individual assets that are going on here but i'm going to touch on some of the general settings that stand out to me at the top here with theme you can choose different themes that will affect the appearance of your obs so you can see here with acry it's darker blacks and blues light mode for all of you masochists the next settings that i think are worth mentioning there's something here that says automatically record when streaming so if you're someone who likes to live stream and have a recording of your streams available and you don't always remember to hit the button you might want to know about this there's also an option to keep recording when the stream stops this would be useful if you were someone who when your streams finished up you wanted to record a quick 10 minute youtube video of like your reaction to the game or something like that there's another setting here called automatically start replay buffer when streaming and keep replay buffer active when stream stops and we're going to discuss that at a later section of this video this is where you'll find the ability to toggle that on another thing the source alignment snapping whenever you add a source to obs we'll take a look with this image here so you can see i'm just clicking and dragging and when i get so close to the edge this is going to automatically snap itself you see that little quick jump that it does right there that boop that's called automatic snapping and you can enable or disable that here in source alignment snapping you can also adjust the sensitivity this is measured in pixels when i get within 10 pixels of the edge of obs this will automatically snap i could change this for example to 100 pixels and you're gonna see when i get within 100 pixels like how quickly that's gonna pop up there to the top so you can adjust that sensitivity to whatever you need something that's interesting to note this is set on still on 10 pixels right here but you'll see if i hold down the control button while i'm clicking and dragging this will temporarily disable snapping so you can be a little bit more particular with where you're placing your sources without having them auto snap so let's go ahead and take a look at how to connect your twitch account to your obs and that's under the stream tab of settings up here you'll choose your streaming service whether it's twitch or youtube so we're gonna go ahead and connect with twitch you can connect with your stream key if you want to this is kind of the old-fashioned way of connecting with twitch and while you still could do this it's generally recommended to use this connect account button instead where you're actually going to link your twitch account into obs for one major reason and i'll tell you why let me go ahead and get this connected okay so once that's authenticated you can see here that you can adjust your server i like to keep this on auto but if you find that you're having connection issues you could always adjust this a little bit you also have the ability to enable bandwidth test mode which lets you connect to twitch monitor your stream's performance like what bitrate is being sent through your frames being dropped and things like that without actually appearing live on your twitch channel this is very useful because you can combine this with another tool called the twitch inspector tool you can see here these are all of the streams that have happened on my twitch account so this 2.4 hour stream here was the podcast that i did today but this 1.8 minute stream from july 25th was actually a bandwidth test mode i'm able to see my bit rate average max and minimum frames dropping and whether this was stable so here's my two and a half hour stream from today and you can see that my bit rate average i was sending about 5 200 kilobytes a second and this just kind of lets you monitor and keep an eye on how things are working out and so like i can see when there are little dips of the frames i dropped from 30 frames a second to 10 frames a second which means that i had some frames dropping here so if you were someone who's struggling with stuff like that maybe you could get in here and analyze what's kind of causing that and this might help you troubleshoot some of your stream settings i'll leave a link to this in the description box below but it is just inspector.twitch.tv and you link your twitch account to it if you enable bandwidth test mode and you click ok and you start streaming you're going to get a pop-up here that says you have obs configured in bandwidth test mode this mode allows for network texting without your channel going live once you're done testing you will need to disable it in order for viewers to be able to see your stream i'm going to click yes and you can see here that my stream has started we've got the green box down here and it's sending at 54 or 5500 kilobytes a second we're going to come over to my twitch channel just to make sure that i'm not live and you can see here that there's no live stream happening if i look at the twitch inspector tool you can see here that the data is being sent right now at an average of 5300 kilobytes per second so we are connected and you can kind of monitor and test here and if i see you know i'm dropping frames at this bit rate i might come back in and i'll stop this stream and then i'll come into my settings i'll lower or raise the bit rate i'll start another bandwidth test mode stream and just guess and check until you everything feels right to you and you can also enable twitch chat add-ons such as better ttv or frank your face z which are apps that allow you to have custom emotes and with bt tv it has a whole assortment of other features to customize your experience on twitch and you also have this option here to ignore streaming service setting recommendations you can enable this if you want to which will allow you to go above twitch's recommendations and we'll talk about this more later when we're discussing bitrate that should have your obs account connected to your twitch account we're going to go ahead and click apply once you've applied that connection you'll see here that a stream information window and a chat window have popped up this is why i would recommend using that connect button instead of your stream key because this will actually integrate your stream information and your twitch chat as portable docs on your obs you could pop these into your obs like so and then they are part of your obs experience and you can adjust your stream title from here and you can interact with your chat as well now we're going to get into probably the most difficult part for new streamers is your bit rate settings this is under the output tab of the obs settings and if you just want to jump ahead really quick and just take a look at my settings and copy my homework here you go i have my audio track set to 1 twitch vod turned on set to 2. my encoder is my hardware encoder i downscale down to 1280x720 i have my rate control set to cbr bitrate i have set at 5400 but i have an upload speed of 20 megabytes per second keyframe interval i have set to 2 preset is on max quality profile is high i have look ahead and psycho visual tuning turned on i have zero set for gpu and i have four set for b frames but you could also go with two if you prefer or if you have a lower end graphics card so this is where things are going to get a little more technical and most new streamers who deal with drop frames and video lag are going to need to adjust their settings here in the output tab so let's go ahead and tackle bit rate and encoder settings i want to start by saying that there is no one size fits all answer to this all of these settings are going to depend on your upload speed what kind of graphics card you have what kind of ram you have what your processor is on your computer it's all very dependent on the actual hardware of your computer and your upload speed so everything is going to need to be adjusted to suit your setup so let's start by defining our terms what is bitrate to put it simply bit rate is the amount of data you're sending per second to twitch it's measured in kilobytes per second a faster internet speed equals faster bit rates so what is the maximum bit rate that twitch allows it's generally agreed upon that twitch only allows up to 6000 kilobytes per second as the maximum bit rate but i actually watched this really interesting video by nutty here on youtube he did a lot of experimentation with both his partnered account and his affiliate account to see if he could override that six thousand kilobytes per second minimum and he was able to push it up to eight thousand so it seems reasonable to me to conclude that twitch allows up to eight thousand kilobytes per second but your audio bitrate and your video bit rate added together cannot exceed that eight thousand kilobyte limit i want to say though just because you can do that doesn't mean you should do that and i would recommend checking out that video from nutty for more information on how to do that if you're interested what happens if you exceed twitch's maximum bit rate at best if you exceed the maximum bit rate of 8 000 kilobytes per second then twitch is only going to show your viewers the transcoded version of your stream which means the maximum quality your viewers are going to be able to see is 720p at worst your stream will receive that dreaded network error number 2000 and no one's going to be able to see your live stream at all so you really want to find that sweet spot you don't want to max your settings out you want to find the sweet spot of the in-between where you're getting good quality graphics but you're not overloading your computer or overloading twitch's servers i also think it's important to keep in mind that not all of your viewers are going to have a good enough internet connection to view the highest quality ever possible on twitch.tv and they may not be able to see your stream at all so it's up to you who you want to market your content towards but think about times when you've been trying to watch a youtube video on mobile data and maybe your connection isn't great and it's really low quality it's lagging and it's buffering every 13 seconds and you have to sit there and wait 10 seconds just to get two seconds of content and then it buffers some more and then eventually you get fed up with it when you go find something else to do this is what will happen to people who don't have super great internet speeds when they're trying to watch your 4k 1080p 8000 kilobytes per second top tier quality so keep that in mind so what are the best video bit rate settings i want to reiterate there's not a one size fits all answer to this there's a lot of tools available to help you figure this out twitch itself has a really awesome encoder bitrate cheat sheet and this is stream.twitch.tv encoding link will be in the description and you can basically find on this little chart and graph what kind of stream quality you're shooting for if you want 720p stream with 60fps or a 1080p with 60fps and it will tell you what kind of bitrate you need what rate control to use the frame rate keyframe intervals quality b frames it gives you everything you need to set up to achieve that quality assuming you have the internet speed to be able to handle that much data transfer so now we need to figure out your upload speed because your upload speed determines what speed you're able to send data twitch recommends an upload speed of at least three megabytes per second but closer to 10 megabytes per second or higher is preferred especially if you're wanting to stream in 1080p with 60fps for those of you who don't know 1000 kilobytes per second equals one megabyte per second so if you're trying to stream with a bit rate of 6000 kilobytes per second which is what twitch recommends is the maximum bit rate that you stream with you're trying to upload that data which means you need an upload speed of 6000 kilobytes per second or six megabytes you can figure out your upload speed by going to speedtest.net and initiating the test and then it's going to send data and receive data so we can see from the test here that i have a 445 megabyte download speed and a 22 megabyte upload speed 22 megabyte upload speed is plenty for me to be able to max out my bit rate settings 10 to 15 megabytes per second should give you the ability to be able to max it out three megabytes is like the bare minimum and you're probably gonna struggle a lot with buffering but around five megabytes to six megabytes you should be all right assuming you're not trying to max out that bit rate when you're sending data to twitch at whatever bit rate you choose keep in mind that you're still going to need additional internet space or bandwidth to be able to connect to your online video games your web browser discord or any other online apps you're running on your pc so if you're barely scraping by with that minimum upload speed you're likely to see a lot of connection issues and dropped frames if you have an upload speed between 6 megabytes and 10 megabytes i would personally recommend starting with a bit rate of around 3 000 to 4 500 kilobytes per second and experiment with that for a stream or two before you try to max these settings out feel free to be a try-hard for your first stream though we all love to see toxic perfectionism i'm just kidding don't yell at me so after determining what bit rate i want i'm going to set mine at about 5400 so that when i combine my audio bitrate with this it doesn't go over the 6000 limit and it gives me a little bit of wiggle room so now we're going to take a look at the encoder settings and you have the choice between software x264 or hardware it's either going to say hardware and or hardware amd depending on what type of graphics card you have nvinc is for people with nvidia graphics cards and we're gonna get into some nitty gritty in here so let's let's go ahead and take a look at this which encoder should i use this depends on which part of your pc you want processing the stream the software x264 means your cpu will be processing the stream and generally speaking this is going to give you the best quality possible all graphics cards and hardware are trying to live up to the standards set by a software encoder however using your software encoder can add a lot of strain to your cpu which is also trying to run everything else on your computer even just your operating system and this could result in dropped frames on your stream so the hardware in vinc or amd means your gpu your graphics card will be processing the stream most newer graphics card made after 2020 so any graphics card that's a 20 series or higher so like an nvidia 2070 or rtx 3080 they've gotten to the point where they measure up and in some cases exceed the software encoding abilities so using your graphics card takes a lot of strain off of your cpu and most experts recommend to go with your graphics card your hardware encoder to process your stream because it's easier on your cpu and results in less dropped frames but to be honest in my research of this i really wasn't able to find a unanimous opinion so i'm gonna link a few videos in the description box below that explore these different opinions and end this section by saying that i prefer to use my hardware encoder because i want my cpu to be free to process other programs while i'm streaming so now we're gonna look at audio bitrate what audio bit rate should you use i started streaming in 2016 and the entire time i've always had my audio bit rate set to 160 kilobytes per second but after the research that i've done for this video it's caused me to change my audio bitrate to the highest setting of kilobytes per second even twitch has conflicting advice on their website depending on the page you look at most people that i've seen talk about audio bitrate say just don't go below 128 kilobytes per second the higher the bit rate the better the sound i have opted to set mine up to the maximum of 320 since i've done this research so again if you don't have a great upload speed you'd probably be fine going with 160. i've used 160 kilobytes per second as my audio bitrate for over six years and i've never had audio issues if you're not wanting to super fine tune these details then you should be good just choosing either your hardware software encoder setting your video and audio bitrate and going from there but if you want a little more control then we're going to drop down and change the output mode from simple to advanced and in fact for the rest of this tutorial i will be referencing these four tabs in the advanced output mode screen under the streaming tab at the top you can see that we have different audio tracks here obs allows you to record up to six audio tracks on a video and we're going to talk about this in detail later i'll put a time stamp up here if you want to jump to that so here you're going to set what audio track your stream is assigned to typically you're going to want to go with audio track one you can also enable a twitch vod track so your live stream and the video that is saved to your channel the vod can have two different audio tracks which will again we'll talk about that a little bit later but you can enable this here and select the track underneath this is where you pick your encoder and we went over whether it's software hardware i'm going to go with the hardware encoder next you can rescale the output of your stream most of you are going to be using 1920x1080 as your resolution and here you can rescale the output i've seen a lot of people recommend to down scale this to 1280x720 for better stream quality in general less drop frames easier for your viewers to see it if they don't have you know fiber internet this is going to be a personal preference i think of what kind of quality snob you're trying to be about your streams a reason you might want to rescale your streams as they're being sent so your output is set to 1920 by 1080 but maybe you don't have a high enough upload speed to send that much data so you could down scale that to 1280 by 720 and simultaneously record a version to your computer that saves at 1920x1080 so your live stream experience for the viewer wouldn't be as high of quality because it's the 1280x720 so 720p stream when you upload that video later to youtube it's going to be at 1080p so this could be a perk to get people to subscribe over on your youtube channel wink and now we're going to get into a little bit more jargon so here we have rate control for rate control the majority of you're going to want to use cbr which means constant bit rate this means that obs is going to prioritize keeping the bit rate being sent to twitch as constant as it can even if that means sacrificing the quality of the video for a second dropping it down a little bit so that you can maintain the same bit rate keeping it at a constant bit rate means that you're going to be able to have a more stable connection with your twitch stream so most people recommend sticking with that if you need one of the other options like vbr or lossless or something then you're probably a little too smart for me and you might want to check out the mob crush article that i have linked in the description box below next you select your bitrate which we've already deeply discussed how to pick the best one for you now we have keyframe intervals most people recommend leaving this at two if you're wondering why think about cartoons that you've seen where you can tell the background has only been drawn one time and the little character on screen is being animated from each frame so we know that the background would be redundant to draw over and over and over because it never changes from one frame to the next while the character is moving across the screen these keyframes are essentially helping obs and twitch communicate together so that when there's redundant data appearing on the scene that information is not being re-sent to twitch unless it's totally necessary so obs is going to send different keyframes and so this is saying every two seconds a new keyframe is being sent to twitch which is a full capture of the screen and then twitch and obs are communicating in such a way that they're analyzing and saying has enough changed etc something else to know about this keyframe interval you might think to yourself maybe i should set this to the lowest possible zero what that means though is automatic and automatic can sometimes take up to eight seconds to send through and when someone is first tuning into your stream they're not going to see the video load up until a keyframe is being sent through so here this is a two second wait if you set it to auto at zero it can take them up to eight seconds to be able to see your stream right off the bat depending on their connection speed your connection speed etc so two is the most commonly set option here and this is also going to link in with b frames so we're gonna go ahead and jump down here a little bit b frames are like in between of keyframes so b frames are only enabled if you're using a hardware encoder these are kind of like extra keyframes they're letting obs and twitch communicate and jump ahead a little bit of time and kind of analyze before they get to the keyframe mostly i see this kept at two you can go two to four if you have a really good graphics card you're probably fine with four if you're running a lower end graphics card like in a 20 series still might want to go with two there'll be a mob crush article linked below that goes into more detail on this next we have preset if you've chosen a hardware encoder i typically see people say to keep this on maximum quality if you're streaming with a bit rate of at least 3 500 plus but if your bit rate is lower than that or if you're seeing dropped frames you can go ahead and drop this down to quality profile i've only ever seen people recommend keeping this at high but if you notice dropped frames or lag you can try switching this to main look ahead is for nvidia graphics cards only this is telling obs to use the max b frames to look ahead and decide if they need to send keyframes etc if you've got a pretty good graphics card i'd keep this on psycho visual tuning is another thing that's nvidia graphics card only this helps your graphics card deal with fast motion like quick turning and video games and things like overwatch or fortnite or probably games like elden ring and other high action games where there's all of that like motion blur and fast movement nvidia typically recommends just keeping this checked on too this gpu option here should probably always stay set to zero the only reason you would ever need to change this to one is if you're running two graphics cards and you want to use your second graphics card instead and that wraps up the streaming output settings so let's take a look at the recording output settings so going over these together is going to be a lot more straightforward assuming you listen to the streaming output settings section of this video the top section you can either pick standard or custom ffmpeg 99 of you all just keep it on standard the ffmpeg is interesting if you're a video nerd because you can change the container format to basically anything i can export gifs from my obs over here mp3 mp4 mpeg if you are kind of a recording nerd you can have a little bit of fun here i think but the majority of you all are just wanting to save a video for your youtube so keep it on standard next you can choose your recording path which is where you're going to be saving the videos in your computer and you can also opt to generate the file name without a space you can adjust the recording format i would only recommend using mkv mp4 flv or possibly an mov if you're using an apple computer there's a small difference between some of these i was using mp4 for the longest time but i've recently learned that mp4 is really unstable and if your obs crashes or your stream goes down and you're recording you're probably not going to be able to recover the mp4 but an mkv is better at being recovered if your obs crashes so i've actually started recording an mkv instead mkv and flv are more stable if your obs crashes the difference is flv does not support multiple audio tracks on the save file mkv you can have up to six audio tracks and mp4 you can have up to six audio tracks if you're worried about saving an mkv and not being able to open it on anything fret not because there's something called remuxing which if you go to the file toolbar you can do remux recordings and you can open these three little dots here and you can choose your mkv file that you want to turn into an mp4 and you can remux them here this was my two and a half hour stream from earlier and as you can see it really doesn't take that long at all i think that was a total of like 15 to 20 seconds and that was a two and a half hour stream so it's not too bad here in the recording tab there's an audio track section where you can choose which audio track is being saved to the recording we're going to talk about this later in the multiple audio tracks section the time stamp up here if you want to jump to it now here in encoder you can either choose your hardware software encoder or you can opt to use your stream encoder if you choose use stream encoder then you're not going to have to mess with anything else now if you want to adjust how your stream is being recorded versus how your stream is being sent to twitch then create a new profile for your hardware or software encoder and you can see here the major difference i have between my recording and my stream is my stream downscales to 1280 by 720 but my recording i don't have the rescale enabled it stays at 1920 by 1080 so i have higher quality recordings than my stream is you can insert custom muxer settings i tried to search and i couldn't even find anything to put in there so i don't know what you would put in there that's probably for super duper advanced video people only clearly and since we've got a new encoder profile selected there's all of these options down here the major difference between recording and streaming is that this is if you're only recording not if you're recording and streaming at the same time if you're recording and streaming at the same time keep it on cbr for constant bit rate so you're prioritizing the stability of your data transfer over the quality of the video but if you're only recording to your computer i would actually recommend using cqp instead cqp means constant quantization parameter i don't know what that means exactly but the way i've come to understand this is it's constant quality so it prioritizes the quality of the video over everything else and if you're just recording to your computer there's no need to worry about bitrate at all really the cq level is only going to show up if you choose cqp and the lower the cq level the higher quality the video is but the higher the quality of the video the higher the file size as well i tested a seven second recording with a 7 cq level a 15 cq level and a 20 cq level and i found that with the cq of 7 the file was 14.8 megabytes with a cq of 15 it was 4.7 megabytes so almost a third of the file size and the quality looked pretty similar to me but when i did a rough conversion math i came to the conclusion that a 10 minute video recorded with a 15 cq level would be about 400 megabytes and a 10 minute video recorded at a 7 cq level would be 1.2 gigabytes so do with that information what you will i'm going to set mine on 15 and i generally see it recommended to keep this around 15. and then we've already gone over keyframe interval preset profile lookahead psychovisual tuning gpu max b frames in the streaming output settings so jump back to the start of that section if you want to hear more detail on this audio settings is going to be the easiest one we've done in the output settings and we talked about this a little bit earlier but anywhere between 160 and 320 kilobytes per second for your audio bitrate is probably going to be okay for you don't go any lower than 128 kilobytes per second and you can adjust the individual bit rate for each audio track that you have and you can also give it a custom name if you want to now the replay buffer is a pretty cool little tool it's essentially a built-in twitch highlighter but everything saves directly to your computer so if you enable the replay buffer it's going to give you the option to select how long the replays are going to be so however long you think that your clips typically are 20 to 30 seconds is probably a pretty safe bet the longer you set this limit for the larger that video is going to be and these are saved using your computer's ram or memory so if you don't have a lot of memory on your computer this is definitely going to cost some lagging and things like that so be wary of that if you have cbr set as your rate control instead under the replay buffer it's going to be able to estimate to you about how much memory would be used like a 60 second clip would be about 20 megabytes a 20 second clip is 6 megabytes if you have cqp selected instead it isn't able to estimate it so what you can do instead is tell obs what the maximum memory you want obs using to process a replay once you've enabled the replay buffer and you click apply and okay you're gonna see down here in your control dock there's going to be a new button called start replay buffer and you need to start the replay buffer just to turn it on now that the replay buffer is turned on i'm telling obs okay access my computer's memory and start storing every 20 second of my stream just in case i want to clip it right and then there's this little button to the right here which says save replay so if i press this it's going to save the last 20 seconds that it's been storing and put in a folder on my computer the folder it's saving to is the same one you have selected as the recording path in your recording tab so if your replay buffer is not started and you try to save a replay it's not going to work you have to always start the replay buffer before you can click highlight that and you can make that a lot easier on yourself by coming into the general settings tab of obs and under the output general settings automatically start the replay buffer when streaming so this will automatically turn the replay buffer on every time you click go live and you don't have to think about it and then this way like if a great moment happens and you're like oh clip that and then you're like oh my god i didn't have the replay buffer running so it's not going to save it you don't have to worry about that because it will automatically start here and you can keep the replay buffer active when your stream stops too this would help if you lost connection to your stream you wouldn't have to worry about restarting it it could also be useful if you want to continue recording after your stream ends and you still want to be able to clip moments as well now once you have it started you're either going to have to come over here into obs and manually click this button or again you can make this a little easier on yourself in the hotkey section of the settings so if you come to settings and you click on the hotkeys and you look right here in the center there's a start replay buffer and stop replay buffer so if you don't want to automatically start the replay buffer because it does use your memory maybe you only want to enable it at certain points of your stream you could set the start and stop up to its own hotkeys so maybe you want to set it up to like f9 to start it f10 to stop it and then if you look down here just a little bit there's the replay buffer and this is where you do the save replay so this would actually save the replay and i'm going to hit f11 for that so now in order to use this say i'm streaming and i'm like okay i'm about to start playing this match of overwatch so let me turn on i'm gonna press f9 and start my replay buffer and then i'm playing overwatch and then i get a quadruple kill with my diva alt so i'm like cool and i press f11 and that's going to clip the last 20 seconds of my stream and then my overwatch match ends and i'm like okay i don't want my memory being used for this anymore so i press f10 and that turns the replay buffer off so that's kind of like a look at how the process would look of using the replay buffer you also don't have to have these hotkeys up if you have good memory you can just let it run the whole time and then you only have to worry about pressing the button to say like clip that and that takes care of easily the most difficult section of this whole tutorial it's the most technical it's the most my brain goes trying to process this so we're done with the hardest part now we're going to go ahead and click apply down here and save those changes and now we're going to take a look at the audio tab in this global audio devices you can add up to two desktop audio devices most of you are going to pick speakers like high definition audio device there might be one for headphones you can also choose the default which is set in windows but windows is a little um finicky and this has caused me more issues than not so i either pick my speakers in here but more often than not i keep this disabled over here you can add up to four microphone or audio input devices here as well i keep these disabled and i manually add my microphone and desktop audio as sources to each scene individually because i'm a bit of a control freak so let's take a look at sample rate there's the options between 44.1 or 48 kilohertz the vast majority of you are going to go with 48 kilohertz but you want this sample rate to match what your pc sample rate is set to or else it can cause audio syncing issues so if you want to make absolutely certain that this matches what your pc is set to you can check what your pc sample rate is set to go to your start menu bar and search for sound settings open up your sound settings and once this window pops up you're going to want to scroll down on the right side and you're going to see a button called sound control panel under related settings open that up you're going to locate your device in the list mine is my high definition audio speakers we're going to right click on that and select properties and in the properties menu we're going to go into the advanced tab and right here at the top of the advanced tab it's going to show you what it's set to so i have a 16 bit 48 000 hertz so 48 000 hertz is 48 kilohertz so i know that 48 kilohertz is what my sample rate should be channels is likely to just be kept at stereo meaning it's coming out of both speakers mono means it's coming out of one speaker and meters down here is just talking about the actual audio mixer so you can see down here the meters is literally just talking about your audio mixer meter and you can see whenever i stop talking and this starts to fade back down as that drops down that's called the decay rate that's how fast it's decaying so you can set this to fast medium or slow and you can change how it's peak metering whether it's sample peak or true peak this is probably just for super duper audio nerds most of y'all there's no reason to care about this you're able to monitor your audio in obs which means that as you're speaking into the microphone you can hear what your voice sounds like playing back to you at the same time and this just lets you choose which audio output device that monitoring is coming through whether that's your desktop audio or a different speaker device maybe a different headphone source or something like that most people aren't going to need to adjust this and then once you have audio input and output devices added you'll be able to access your audio hotkeys for a push to mute and push to talk right here in this menu now let's take a look at optimizing our video settings in the video tab the base canvas resolution you want to set this to what your screen resolution on your computer is set to and if you don't know that you can right click on your desktop and go to display settings when the settings tab pops up if you scroll down a little bit it's going to say right here display resolution 1920x1080 the vast majority of you are going to have a 1920x1080 resolution on your computer screens but you can adjust this here and then there's an output scaled resolution so the base canvas resolution you're telling obs what the canvas is we're capturing a 1920x1080 screen and i want you to output this as blank so hey obs i'm giving you a canvas that's 1920x1080 and i want you to make a canvas that's 1920x1080 or this is where you can tell it to down scale it to a 1280 by 720 or whatever dimension you want and then this is going to be your streams across the board this is where under the output settings for streaming and recording this is where it's going to be drawing that information from so when it's saying rescale the output it's rescaling what you've set up in the video settings over here downscale filter is generally recommended to keep it at bicubic once i started really digging into this i see people either recommending bicubic or lanxos bicubic is better for gaming from what i understand in length so does a sharper image and it's better for people who are doing mostly webcam related things or like people's faces rather than graphics and games but lynxos does have a higher cpu usage although i see this debated back and forth about which one to use so again the average person just keep it bicubic and then we're going to set our fps value which is frames per second and this is how many frames per second are being sent this is another one that i see debated back and forth and i think it comes down to a personal preference my eye generally does not even pick up a difference between 30fps or 60fps i have to sit there and scrutinize a back and forth of seeing 30fps gameplay and 60fps gameplay of the same game at the same time i have to sit there and hyperanalyze to even be able to notice the differences so i don't think that it's a big enough difference to really stress over using 30 versus 60 and if you don't have a great graphics card just go ahead and go with 30. 60 fps is going to be better for people are doing fast-paced games like overwatch or fortnite or eldon ring even minecraft would look better with 60fps probably but if you're playing like stardew valley and stuff like that 30fps is going to be totally fine for you i will link a youtube video in the description box below that can show you a side-by-side comparison of like 10 different games of what they look like in 30 versus 60 fps and you can kind of make this call for yourself and i'm not going to go over this window in super detail but there is a hotkey screen and you can go over this point by point and adjust and set up hotkeys if you want to for basically every single thing that obs has to offer and there's an advanced tab which i have never really used anything out of although now that i'm looking at it i'm looking in the recording tab and there's an automatically remuxed to mp4 that's a kind of nice little feature right there okay all of the technical jargon is out of the way and now oh gosh this is really gonna be a long video now we're going to move into the second section of this shady lady over explains obs which is actually setting up your scenes and sources this is where we actually get into designing the look of your stream the majority of your work for this is going to be done in your scenes and sources dock and you'll be adjusting things up here in the preview panel so to start with what's the difference between a scene and a source i like to think of the scene as a movie set and the sources are the props that go in the movie set and when you switch from scene to scene you're showing your audience a new collection of sources so even a stage with its curtains closed is a scene in and of itself the original starting soon screen when you first load up obs all you're going to have is an empty scene and you start from scratch you can right click on this scene and rename it to whatever you want to start with i think that it's always good to have a nice little starting soon screen but you can name it whatever you want if you want to start with setting up your gaming scene or your just chatting scene however you want to start so the process to creating your first scene is really quite simple create the scene and then when that scene is selected come into the source menu and start to add all of the different sources that you need in order to create the look that you're going for and you can add sources either by right clicking in the source panel and hovering over add or you can press the plus sign down here and you'll be able to add that way as well and that's literally it we're going to take a look now at some of the most popular scene styles that you might want to consider for your streams and then later in the source section of this video we're going to go over each and every individual source and what you can use it for what kind of scenes you should make depends entirely upon the kind of content that you're going to be producing but there's some pretty standard scenes that i think most streamers should have up their sleeve and of course i'm going to start with the starting soon screen a starting student screen is similar to when you go see a play at a theater and the curtains are closed on the stage while the audience takes their seats and the cast is scrambling behind the curtains for the last minute setup necessary before the show begins somehow this has become a hotly debated topic in the streamer sphere but i am a firm believer that having a starting soon scene up for the first couple of minutes of your stream greatly helps to reduce the stress of the streamer as they're tying up loose ends like sending out live now posts on their twitter or other social media and grabbing a glass of water and just making sure everything's ready to go and it also allows your audience to have the time to see the notification that you've gone live and make their way over to your channel without missing the debut of that night's stream a starting student can be as simple or elaborate as you want but the general purpose of this screen is so the streamer doesn't have to worry about being on camera or microphone so they can wrap up tasks before they officially start their stream while a bit of hype and anticipation can be built as the audience gathers so typically you'll see a graphic of some kind that is the streamer's branding you'll see it may be a countdown until when the stream officially starts a lot of times the twitch chat will be up on this screen the alert box will be there so that if people are following or re-subscribing it'll pop up on screen and then we have the just chatting scene or the full camera scene a just chatting scene is a scene where the streamer's interaction with the chat is the primary focus the difference between a youtube video and a live stream is the interactive nature of the stream so i really recommend creating a space during your streams where connecting with the audience aka the community or the chat the viewers is a priority of yours a just chatting scene or a full camera scene works out really nicely as the first portion of your stream most streamers will have a just chatting segment for as short as 15 minutes but sometimes as long as an hour or two before they swap into the main content that they're going to be doing that day and this can be a full camera it could be an avatar it could be a v tuber it doesn't have to be a face camera if you're not comfortable with that but something where the chat and your interaction with the chat is the primary focus this is also a really good screen to switch over to when you receive a raid or if someone gifts 20 subs and there's a really big hype moment going on with the community just swapping to that scene and having a more intimate moment with your community and then swapping back to the main content the next scene i want to talk about is the actual gaming scene or a content scene a screen share scene this is definitely the most important scene your main content this would be whatever gameplay you're going to be doing or whatever reaction content you're focusing on a second camera capture for your tarot cards or digital art or traditional arts this is going to differ greatly depending on what you plan to do with your content are you focused on an interactive in the moment community space or are you wanting to share epic game pwnage edited up on youtube later how you design and decorate the scene will be based greatly on your long-term intentions with the content some common elements that are included with this scene is the obviously the content is the main focus it's going to take up the majority of the screen the video game or the screen that you're reacting to or whatever there's typically webcam capture on the scene or an avatar or v tuber or ping tuber often you will see branding information like the streamer's name somewhere on this scene stream labels like recent follower an alert box and additional elements like the twitch chat or other interactive elements but keep in mind this is the main content so the more you add to the scene the more cluttered things are going to feel and this is where the question comes in is what is the focus is the focus the content or is it the community and how do you balance those two another scene i really think is important for people to have is a be right back screen or a technical difficulties an afk something like that it isn't super necessary because you could just really use the starting soon screen but i think it's a good idea to have a scene that has no microphone and no webcam added to it so you can swap to this in case of emergencies maybe you need to step away to the bathroom maybe you're having a wardrobe malfunction maybe you need to pick your nose or maybe you need to take a phone call and having this scene can let you swap over to that really quickly and it's very helpful for the average streamer you can add as much or as little to the scene as you like in a lot of ways it can mirror the starting soon screen but the main thing to communicate on this scene is that it's temporary and you'll be back soon i have seen a bit of debate though that having a screen up like this could lose you viewership and there are more creative ways to handle a moment where you need to step away from your computer eposvox discusses this at length on his youtube channel in a video i'll link in the description box below but you could do something more creative like having a clip compilation like your twitch trailer or something set up as a scene in obs so when you need to run to the bathroom really quick you can swap to a scene that's just playing back-to-back clips of your stream that way there's still something engaging and entertaining for the viewer to watch those are the main scenes i want to mention so now we're going to take a look at all of the sources on how to make these scenes so let's come over here to obs come into our source window and click the plus sign up top we have audio input capture and this is your microphone create a new source i would rename it to the name of your microphone just so you know what it is or you can call it microphone mine is my shure sm7b when you add that a window is going to pop up and ask you which device so find your microphone in this i prefer to add my microphone like this just so i have a little more control over where it appears we'll talk a little bit more about this with the nested scene section time stamp up here on the screen if you want to jump to that next we have the audio output capture this is the audio that's coming out of your computer so your speakers your headphones wherever your main audio comes from i'm going to call this speakers and then i'm going to choose my audio output which is my high definition audio and we're going to click ok so now you can see over here in my audio mixer we have my shure sm7b and we have my speakers coming through next up on the list we have a browser source browser sources are typically widgets from third-party sites such as your twitch alerts twitch chat or stream labels so we're going to look at this in more detail later when we talk about how to add follow alerts to your stream a color source is literally just adding a solid color block to your stream there's a lot of design reasons why you might want to have a color block especially when you think about you can like crop and adjust this you can have some fun with design if you want to the main reason i use this is when i'm recording my webcam to green screen onto something later in video editing so i'll have my camera set up with my green skin in the background i'll add my chroma key filter to green screen it out and then i'll set myself on top of a solid green color block background like this so when i put that into my video editing software then i can green screen that green out there because if i just green my green screen myself into obs and it's on a solid black background i'm not going to be able to chroma key that or make it transparent when i'm trying to edit it in adobe premiere later so that's why i use color source but you could use it more for design purposes next is adding a display capture a display capture is for an entire monitor this will capture everything from the top to the bottom including the start bar this would be if you want to share what you're watching in youtube or share your workspace in photoshop or something like that next is a game capture and this is going to capture a specific video game there's a couple of special options too that you can help fine-tune the game play but you can do capturing full screen application or window typically i do specific window and then it's going to let you drop down and pick the actual game out of the list game capture is not how you add a capture card we'll talk about that later with video capture device next you can add an image source so this is just adding something like a dot gif or a dot jpeg then you've got a nice little image on screen next up is an image slideshow and this allows you to add multiple images or you can even just add an entire directory and then you can adjust how quickly they transition the type of transition etc whether it loops randomized playback the main reason i see this used is makeup artists will use this a lot to showcase the different makeup looks that they've done artists will use this to cycle through their portfolio while they're working on other arts but there's a lot of reasons that you might use this next up is a media source and a media source will add a video file like an mp4 or webm so this is how you could add a like a twitch clip that you've taken you could put this up on screen or you could share some kind of video that saved your computer next up is a scene this is called nesting a scene so you can create a scene over here and then you can add that scene as a source to a different scene we're going to go over this in detail later in the nested scenes section there's a time stamp on the screen if you want to jump to that next you can add a text source so you can just add actual text to your screen you can select any font that's saved on your computer there's a lot of customization options and you can actually make this quite pretty you can even do a gradient effect on the text you can add an outline to it as well if you need it to stand out a little bit from the background and if you want to get really creative you can add a scroll filter to this to make it scroll across the screen and we're going to go over filters a lot more in a later portion of this video next is the video capture device which is how you actually add your webcam video capture devices also let you add your capture card as well and finally in this section is the window capture and this is similar to the display capture except it's only capturing one window and it's capturing it in the exact dimensions that you have that window set to so this won't show your start bar or anything like that it's only going to show the window and the final thing i want to show you with sources is a little bit of organization in here but you can add a group maybe you have like 20 different sources added and you're like this is only where my twitch alerts and chat go and then you've got a little group at the top you can drag a couple of sources into that and minimize the folder so it's not taking up as much space and you can also right click on sources and hover over set color and you can change these to different color backgrounds and this will allow you to quickly see in the list and help you find things a little more quickly so there's some organizational tools for your sources as well one more thing i want to mention while we're in the sources section is some keyboard shortcuts so you can see when you have a source up on screen and you hover over the box you can resize it by clicking and dragging but if you hold the shift button while you're clicking and dragging you can actually stretch and skew the dimensions of the picture make sure that you hold shift until you're done resizing it you release the mouse button because otherwise if you're trying to resize this and you release the shift button too soon it's going to auto snap back into the original proportions the other keyboard shortcut is the alt button which will let you crop the source you can do this on webcams game capture anything now if you're new to twitch you've probably seen when people are streaming they will have little pop-ups happen up on screen that say so and so just followed you or so and so just donated those are called twitch alerts or follow alerts and obs can't do that by itself twitch can't do that by itself you need to bring in a third party to do this so i'm going to recommend stream elements for this which is a free website that it gives you dashboard statistics it has a place for you to accept tips it has a merch section and it has a whole bunch of other goodies so when you come into stream elements we're going to look over here in the left-hand toolbar and look at something called my overlays and we're going to create a new overlay up here in the top right corner we'll set our screen resolution to 1080p or match it to whatever you set in your obs video settings and here we can add a widget you click add widget hover over alerts and click the alert box and your alert box is going to get added now we can go ahead and emulate a follow so you can see what will happen this is the standard stream elements design but if you wanted a custom one you can always come to the sponsor of today's video which is placeit.net and i have a link in the description box below for 15 off if you want to use any of their paid options but you can see here there's some free options available as well not only do they have follow alerts and stuff but they also have overlays merch design mock-ups animated logos streaming overlays all kinds of good stuff for streamers who need some graphics for their brand so we've clicked this free option that they have available and we can kind of adjust the look of it we can change the text new friend we can adjust the color palette as well and you can get a free download of this and then to bring that into stream elements or say you purchased a different one from etsy or something like that you'll have to come into each individual follower subscriber tip cheer drop the little cog wheel down from this and then you can click set image up here and it will give you a window pop-up where you can upload your design once you have your alerts designed you'll need to come in and fine tune all of the different ones you want to use follower subscriber tip cheer host raid and adjust all of the settings you can change the font style you can change how long it's been on the screen honestly whenever i really get into messing with my alerts i'll usually spend a couple of hours customizing this so set an afternoon aside where you work on this once you have these set up the way that you want them you're going to want to click the save button in the top right corner and save this something memorable so alert box and then after that's been saved up in the top right corner there's a link icon and it says copy overlay url we're gonna click this we're gonna bring that back to obs we're gonna click the plus button and this is where we need a browser source we're gonna call this our alert box so we know what it is and right here in the url section of this we're going to paste that url we just copied from stream elements and we're going to click ok you can see it goes invisible to figure out if this worked properly keep obs open and have a browser open where you were editing your alert box and stream elements click the emulate button down here and select one of the options i'm going to go with follower event you can see here that the alert box popped up so now we can adjust this around and figure out if we like the placement resize it whatever you want to do stream elements is also how i would recommend adding your twitch chat so a twitch chat plugin that i know that a lot of people are really excited about lately is this very cute bubble chat by someone called zaytree and i'll leave all of their relevant links in the description box below the bubble chat is super cute it does like a zoom in on the emotes if they use them and it's also integrated with the twitch chat pronouns plugin for google chrome which is very cool you can see what pronouns your chat uses so you can refer to them correctly it's a great little combination there so this bubble chat plug-in is by someone called zatri and you can find them at z-a-y-t-r-y.com zatri.com and then it's just the top link here for chat bubbles and it will auto import that into your stream elements account and then you can come in here and edit the settings of that and then you'll add that as a browser source to your overlay the next one i want to talk about is adding stream labels in obs stream labels are things that people have up on their screens that say like most recent follower is this person's name highest donator of the day or person who sent the most gift subs or various labels of people who have engaged and interacted with your stream those are called stream labels and that's something you're also going to need stream elements to do so again you'll navigate to stream elements.com and in your sidebar drop down streaming tools and click my overlays we're going to create a new overlay in the upper right corner we're going to choose our resolution and we're going to rename this in the top left to stream labels there's one of two ways you can go about doing this you can either make a separate overlay for every individual label you want to do so maybe a recent subscriber one save that overlay add it as a browser source recent donation save that overlay add it as a browser source that is the way that i would personally do it because i like to have a lot of control over what shows up where and i can fine tune like maybe i only want one stream label on this scene but i want three on that scene so that is how i would personally do it but an easier way is you can add them all at the same time and just add the one browser source over here after we've created this overlay we're gonna click add widget and you can see the third option is labels when you hover over that you have subscribers followers bits tips hosts raids and others and then when you hover over each one you can choose like bits the most recent cheers so this is going to show the last several people who have most recently sent bits to your channel there's raids so you can get the latest raid subscribers your latest subscribers during the last segment there's all kinds of different options and you can totally customize what you are celebrating in your community so i'm going to choose most recent follower the person that's followed me the most recently you can see that pops up here in the upper corner and it looks hard to read but it's going to show up as white text on our overlay you can come in here and adjust all of the stuff we can change the text to be bigger if we wanted to make this like 50px you can change the font color and then you can add as many of these labels as you want to right here and then you're going to click save in the upper right corner set a name for this if you haven't already copy the overlay url with this little link button in the top right corner bring it into obs as a browser source name it stream label i would call it label follower if you're only doing one or you could just call it stream labels change out that url click ok and you can see it pops right up so we're going to be able to move this around anywhere we want to on the screen we'll put this like up here in the left corner or down here in the bottom corner and something cool with stream elements you can either add a scroll filter here in obs but stream elements also allows you to do this so let's select that source come back into text settings and if you scroll at the bottom there's text scrolling and i'm going to set this up to scrolling speed like 10 and there you go we'll click save if you're adjusting things in real time as you're adding them to obs you can right click on this browser source go into properties scroll down a little bit and there's a button that says refresh cache of current page click refresh and now you can see it's scrolling that's how we get our little scrolling most recent follower and the reason you might want to add stream labels is it works i don't know people love to see their their name up on your screen and so it can encourage people to follow you or donate or gift a subscription or subscribe whatever it is you're trying to encourage people to do to engage with your content so it's worth adding too many of these and the screen gets a little busy so find the right balance for you there's one more interesting thing from stream elements if you like the idea of stream labels but you don't love that specifically we're gonna make a new source called event list we're gonna add a widget and we're going to hover over labels go down to other and you'll see one called event list this is your most recent activity displayed in real time i love event lists these are so useful to me they show all of the recent activity and you can actually tell it what you want it to show so i don't want to show when people follow me i only want to show when people subscribe or tip or cheer i only want to show when people are monetarily supporting my channel in other words or you can turn it on so it's followers and subscribers only it doesn't include tips you know whatever you want to you can set maximum events up to 10 total adjust the background color the position size and style the text settings and there's animation settings as well you can fully adjust and customize how this looks we're going to click save grab that overlay url and add it over here in obs as a browser source we'll call this the event list paste that url right there click ok and now our little event list is here i wouldn't recommend 10 i think three or four is usually pretty good you just pop that in the little upper corner of your stream you can see the most recent interactions with your channel no matter what they are and you don't have to worry about labels i prefer this personally but up to you now we're going to talk about adding filters in obs so if you right click on a source there's an option near the bottom called filters this is going to open up a new menu for images or other things like that you're only going to be able to mess with the effect filters but if you have a video capture such as your game capture your webcam or other things like that if you right click on this and go into filters you have audio filters and effect filters you can also use audio filters for your microphone as well so we're going to start first with just an image you can either right click and add or you can click the plus sign in the bottom there's something called an lut stands for lookup table this is most commonly used on webcams and camera captures it essentially acts like a photo filter does in instagram it replaces the source colors with different colors you can find a lot of free luts just by googling that but i can also recommend gaming careers here on youtube i'll put a link to them in the description box below they have a video for 30 free luts for your obs which is actually what i'm going to be using here you can see what they look like they basically just change the appearance of they're literally like instagram filters they can add a nice little look the next one is a chroma key chroma key is how you green screen a camera out so we're going to click this source go into filters we're going to add a chroma key usually that will be just enough when the green automatically fills in sometimes my lighting on the green screen isn't good enough so i need to drop this down and choose custom but before i go into selecting the color i need to bring the color of my green screen back so i'm going to drop the similarity bar down to one i'm gonna click select color it says pick screen color here and then i'm gonna hover over and i want to find like a middle color of the green i don't want the deeply shadowed or the deeply highlighted parts and i'm gonna click that and then i'll click ok that usually works a little bit better for me you can see i don't have to have the similarity quite as high and then you just kind of adjust this until you see the green is gone you can also up the smoothness so it kind of smooths the corners out a little bit better i don't like to mess with the opacity contrast or brightness or gamma i like to use a color correction filter for this instead and so that's how you green screen a camera capture out next is color correction which lets you adjust the gamma contrast of the image the brightness of the image the saturation levels and it lets you add a hue shift if you want to and change the opacity of the source overall i always use a color correction filter on my webcams that's how i get my webcams to look as crisp as they do next is a color key which is really similar to a chroma key chroma key is usually used for green screening because it's a little better with removing uneven shading and lighting next is a crop or pad it's exactly like it sounds you can either crop sides of the images or you can add a padding to the image and buff it over a little bit i usually just use the holding the alt button and dragging the sides to crop my stuff i don't typically use a crop filter next is an image mask blend which is one of my personal favorites i use the image mask blend all the time but this is essentially to me like a cookie cutter of the image or the webcam capture or whatever image masks typically look like this they're either a combination of white and black or they're transparent black image or transparent white image most of my masks that i make are solid black and where the solid black shows up is what i want to be cropped out so i need to change this to alpha mask alpha channel and you can see here now it's cut out to the shape that that image was and if i swap it to like this one here you can see how it crops out this is how i get really cool effects with my webcam when i don't want to use a green screen next is a luma key which is very similar to a chroma key except it's removing the brightest sections next is a render delay i typically see it used on webcams to address if there's a delay between your webcam and the microphone coming through but you can also use it for some fun visual effects like i'm showing on screen and i'll link to this video in the description box below if you want to learn how to do this next is a scaling aspect ratio which lets you adjust whether it's bicubic or lynxos and adjust the resolution next is a scroll filter which just lets you make the source scroll either horizontally or vertically and finally is one called sharpen which literally just sharpens the image but you can see if i turn this up too much it starts to like distort the image a little bit so if you add for your webcam if you added just like a slight sharpening it can help out the overall quality of your webcam now in the audio filters i'm not that much of an audio person so i'm going to quickly go through these but what i would recommend how i've always fine-tuned my microphone is i searched the model of my microphone in google so mine is a sure sm7b i would google sure sm7b obs best quality settings and i would go from there i'm admittedly not the best but you have access to audio filters in obs a compressor expander you can do a gain boost invert the polarity limiter noise gate noise suppression and a vs2 plug-in so you can definitely adjust and make your microphone sound a lot better okay now we're going to talk about the importance of nested scenes but in order to do this i'm going to swap over to my regular obs scene collections so i can show you them in action nested scenes are basically the inception of scenes it's scenes within scenes and you could do scenes within scenes within scenes within scenes you create one scene which is then added as a source into another scene and there's a huge variety of reasons you might want to do this but here's a few that i can think of maybe you want to keep all of your various alert box sources in one scene so you don't have to add them all individually to every single scene from here on forth maybe you want to keep all of your desktop audio sources in one scene together maybe for better filtering purposes so you don't have to add microphone and desktop audio to every source you could add your webcam source to its own scene so i have one here that has a lut added but no green screen i have one that's specifically set up for when i need to green screen my camera and i have one set up here when i want a webcam mask so if i'm not using green screen that day but i need a smaller webcam added onto my gameplay i've used nested scenes to up my organization game within obs so all of these down here you can see in the bottom left corner i have a specific background that i like to use i have my sparkly leaves background this is a background i've created but maybe i want this to look a little bit different so i'm going to rename this red leaves instead if i come in here and i go into this source and i add a filter into the source itself and i add a color correction filter and i adjust the hue so that it's more red so we come in here and we do all this adjustment to this and we're like oh this is perfect this really psychedelic funky totally different feeling than the than the original one and i'm super excited now let's go back to my sparkly leaves my nice like desaturated purple right wrong what has happened is i've actually added that filter now we're in the sparkly leaves where it should still be that soft purple but if we click on this source over here and go into filters you can see this color correction filter it's been added to the source overall so everywhere that this leaf background has been used in all of my scenes it's going to have this filter added to it now so i'm going to delete this because that's not what i wanted this is why i create multiple scenes of the same thing then i will come into the scene itself we've got my sparkly leaves which are purple we've got my red leaves i'm going to click on the seam i'm going to add that color correction filter to make this super funky and psychedelic and pinky greeny red and now when i click on sparkly leaves it's purple i'm going to click on red leaves it's red because i've added the filter to the scene itself so i have all of these different versions they're using the same source but i've made multiple scenes of it so that i can add a different filter so that's one way to apply this is to like a background image or something like that but a more practical use is going to be having your webcam added in one spot with filters on top of the scene itself to add outlets or adjust the camera quality i could come in here with a filter and maybe i add a color correction and i desaturate this entirely so i have a black and white version of my camera so i have my black and white version of my camera it's using the same it's using my same video capture device but then i click on this scene and it's now the full color version of the camera still using the same video this is why i like to use nested scenes another really practical use of this is i have a source here called all alerts and because i use alerts from so many different sources like i have my coffee account where people can follow or subscribe over there and that will pop up an alert on my screen by pali.gigi which is where i accept tipping from my audience my alert box from stream elements and there's other sites like fan house and throne allows you to add an alert box that could be up to five different sources that you would have to add to your starting soon screen your just chatting scene your gaming scene every single scene that you have and instead now i only have to add this one source right here called all alerts that is the scene over here that has all of those different elements added so it can help you save a little bit of time and make things feel a little more painless when you're doing this process next as i've been jumping around over here you've probably noticed that there are cute little transitions happening when i'm jumping from scene to scene that little bear that pops down these are custom scene transitions and that is in if you don't have the window click up on your docs in the toolbar it will be the one called scene transitions and make sure that's checked on and you'll find that down here you can drop this down and there's there's various transitions so there's a cut which is just going to instant jump from one to the other there's fade you can see gradually shifts from one to the other and you can adjust the duration over here so you could make it take two thousand milliseconds which is two seconds if you wanted to so it's a much more gentle transition there's also ones that are built in is called swipe and this is set to two second delay too so it just swaps these back and forth and there's also a slide one which is very similar to swipe but just a little different you could change that down to 500 milliseconds if you want it to happen a lot quicker and then the one that is my favorite to use is the stinger transition which is something that you will have to either create yourself or buy from etsy or if there's plenty for free online too so these are just called stinger transitions for obs and that is what i have that's this cute little bear that pops in now say you are jumping from one scene to the other like when i'm going from like my starting soon screen over into my main scene i want the transition to happen but maybe i've got a super zoom in on my face and i want like a dramatic effect of that but i don't want it to have the stinger transition you can do an override of that on any of these scenes so if you right click you can do transition override and i would just set this to a cut instead say we're back in our gaming scene over here and i want to quickly uh zoom in on my face for funny effect it will just quickly cut to it so you can do a transition override scene transitions just add a little bit of umph to your branding and they make the viewing experience a little more exciting next we're going to take a look at something called studio mode and you can find that in the control dock called studio mode if you click on that you'll see it pops up two screens so there's going to be the preview on the left side which is clearly labeled thank you obs and the program which is what stream is actively seeing and then say i'm getting ready to swap over to my gaming scene but i need to make some last minute adjustments my stream is not able to see this while i'm doing it they won't see it until i click this transition right here i can also adjust what transition is going to happen by dropping the box down just don't click on top of it because it will automatically cut over to it but i can adjust and i say i want this to be my leafy shroom stinger transition and then i will click on that here and it's going to use the leafy shroom one so you can kind of custom which transition happens when you're sitting there and then you can pick your next scene that you're getting ready to switch to you can make your little adjustments and then you can transition the scene on over so that everyone can see it live i think that studio mode is super useful if like you're a podcaster or something and you're putting on more of a proper production and you need to make sure that everything is adjusted and set up before you send the scene live now we're going to talk about using multiple audio tracks in obs i've really learned to love using multiple audio tracks over the years obs allows you to record up to six audio tracks and this is incredibly useful for streamers who might plan on using their live stream footage in a variety of ways after the stream is over you could set up your live stream to output its own audio track as track number one the twitch vod that gets saved from that live stream could have a second audio track track two and the recording you're saving to your computer would have a third audio track track three and then there are three additional tracks tracks four five and six that you could utilize in the recorded version for various audio sources so you have more control equalizing in your post production process here's the practical why of how i've applied this i have an ongoing stream series called midnight study sesh where i deep dive esoteric subjects in an asmr study with me environment while i'm studying i like to have music playing specifically a dark academia style classical music so i'm sitting here i'm studying my little esoterica i've got my nice little piano playing and i'm streaming this my audience gets to hear this music i'm hearing the music but sometimes that classical music is not copyright free and when i try to upload that video to youtube it gets flagged for copyright so my entire stream is no longer usable for me on youtube also during the streaming experience i have alerts popping up that are making sound effects that might be disruptive for a youtube audience that is looking for an asmr experience so my solution to this is having three audio tracks so my first track is my stream audio track number one is for my stream audio and that is broadcasting live over the stream and that has my microphone all of my alerts and my desktop audio so that would be capturing the music playing the alerts popping up and my microphone my second track is for the vod it's what's getting recorded to twitch and so i want that to have the alerts because it's still the twitch experience it's being saved to my twitch account and i wanted to have my microphone but i don't want it to save the desktop audio the music because that's getting picked up in the twitch copyright thing and then the third track that i'm saving is just for the recorded video only and i don't want that have the alerts i don't want it to have the music i only want my voice that's coming through that is track number three and the way you set up multiple audio tracks is by this cog wheel and your audio mixer you click that and go into advanced audio properties you're going to want to have an idea going into this of what track is for what and then you assign all of the different assets of each scene which track you want them saving to additionally you're going to need to come into your settings and we've talked about this at the very start of this video but you'll go into your output settings and under streaming you're going to tell it what audio track needs to come out on the stream and you can only pick one of the six audio tracks here you can enable or disable having a vod track and you're going to tell it which track is for the vod to save to and then under the recording tab you pick which audio track you want to save and you can pick up to all six of them you can mix and match whichever ones because the audio track they save them as separate audio sources in the track when you bring that into your video editing application so you could select all three here if you wanted to for me i only need the microphone saving so i'm only gonna pick track number three that is how you apply this and use this and there's a lot of different ways that you could utilize this for your own content next we're going to talk about adding custom docs so you can see with my setup here we've got the scenes sources audio mixer scene transitions controls and if you linked your twitch account properly then you should also have stream information and chat available to you but you can add custom docs to your obs and super customize your experience on obs you can even just add flat out websites to this so i'm going to swap to my other profile that i use for streaming regularly and show you what my setup looks like while i'm streaming so you can see here i have a lot of docs added i have my twitch chat really large i've got my twitch activity feed so i can see in the moment what the alert was that just sounded off i have my request queue over here if people use their channel point redemptions and i have my quick action toolbar so i can quickly swap to sub only or clip a moment in my stream or start a poll or add a marker or other things like that i have my stream information down here in the bottom corner so i can update the going live from here i don't have to open my twitch dashboard at all i have one more dock right here which is my pali.gigi dash when the alert pops up i can see what the tip was for every single dock that you add is going to use a little bit more memory it can lag out a little bit if you don't have good memory so keep that in mind when you're setting this up but you could just flat out have twitter like just literally have twitter added as a doc in your obs i don't use that i literally was just playing around with that to see if it was possible and you you couldn't tweet straight from obs you don't even have to open your browser at all now how do you add these you click on the docs button in the toolbar and you'll see custom browser docs open this up and you're gonna have this little list come down to a blank one name it and then you'll post the url here so you can see i just put twitter.com home but if you're wondering about some of the twitch dashboard ones come to your twitch dashboard and say you were wanting to add your activity feed you'll see up here in the upper left there's three little dots if you click that and choose pop out it's going to pop this window out and then you want to copy this url all of it at the top bring it over to obs paste it in this url section click apply and then it's going to pop it up for you now you can see it's called what you called it called it shrek there's one more at the top here it's literally just my twitch dashboard you don't have to use this one i like the look of this better than i like the twitch stats one that comes with obs you could just use this one it's probably easier on your memory and stuff too i like the format better of how the twitch dashboard looks and i can also see if someone's whispered me which is something that i often miss when i'm live streaming so i like having that visible to me as well but this is literally just my twitch dashboard you come to your twitch dashboard you can see in the upper left corner here there's drop downs where you can create a new layout so i just made one called top only unrelatable this was i couldn't get rid of the quick actions i couldn't get everything to go away so this was the closest to empty that i could get this and then i copied this url my twitch dashboard and i brought it over to obs i added it as a doc and then when it got pulled in it went to my normal dashboard so i had to just drop down here and swap it to my top only so i can see my bit rate up here and all of my other stats and that's how i've added all my custom docs and some of the docs that i've added is it overkill maybe you tell me i don't know one more thing i want to mention is when i first started trying to use docs in obs when i would close obs and reopen it all of my docs reset and the custom ones that i added deleted they didn't save so if you notice that's happening to you you're going to need to make sure that obs is installed with administrative permissions you might need to uninstall and reinstall obs like that but another thing you could do without uninstalling and whatnot is searching for obs in your start menu bar right clicking on it when you find it you could right click and run as administrator and just try that see if it fixes it but you'll have to do it every time you run obs but you could right click this open file location right click on the obs file click properties and then when this opens up go into the compatibility and down here in the bottom settings section make sure that run program is administrator is checked on click ok and then it should be okay i have not had any problems with my docs since i checked that box so maybe that'll help you now you've probably noticed as i've been doing this tutorial that i've been jumping back and forth like right now we're in my shady lady obs but while i've been doing the tutorial mostly it's been very clean there hasn't been all these extra dogs and this is because i have separate profiles set up so in the upper toolbar you can see one called profile where you can add a new or remove or whatever you can create new profiles what's really cool about these is not only do they save your docs when you're swapping from one profile to the other but they also save all of everything that's in your settings so that means that you could have a different stream key different output settings bitrate audio input devices selected a different canvas resolution output resolution everything could be totally different depending on the profile you're using this would be really useful if you have more than one person that's using the same computer as maybe you're a couple and you're both streamers and you share the same pc this would be really useful for that the thing that profile doesn't save is your scenes and sources they have access to any scene collections that you have created so i could be on my shady lady profile and i could access all of my scene sources and maybe shady lady profile is optimized for my twitch stream and i can still access all the scenes i've made but maybe i want to swap to my other profile called tutorial and that's what i use to record youtube videos and all of my settings are fine-tuned so that my recordings are perfect for uploading onto youtube and i still have access to all of the scenes that i've created and now we're going to talk about scene collections i'm obsessed with organization so i love scene collections this function of obs allows you to create different sets of scenes and swap back and forth between them scene collections are like having separate closets for separate occasions one closet is full of business clothes for your office job another closet is full of comfy clothes for when you stay at home and clean and study or binge netflix and another closet is full of your socialite clothes for when you hang out and go out with friends or you're going to events and parties or dates think about how useful it would be to have everything tidied away and organized so you don't have to sort through half a dozen pairs of sweatpants just to find your white button-up shirt that you need for that business meeting this is similar to scene collections a more practical benefit to scene collections is it reduces your ram usage by removing unnecessary information from being loaded by your pc it can help you more quickly find what you're looking for when you need it so you can see up here in my steam collections i have celestial cafe which is my podcast that i run the reason why this one is so beneficial is that we use four webcams there's four of us on here so i have all of this stuff i have to have different spaces for all four of the webcams to come in and several different versions of the overlays so we've racked up a good 12 to 15 scenes that i need to have and if this was added on to my normal stream which you can look over here with my normal streams that i have called normie i have a ton of scenes set up for this one so it starts to add up and it gets a little overwhelming trying to find what you're looking for i also have one set up specifically for midnight study sesh and that lets me have different scene transitions between the two i've been able to optimize my alert boxes to be a different color palette to match the scenes so i really love having my different scene collections and then the last part of this video is i just want to talk about a few bonus tips and tricks for obs you know just for fun the first one that i just learned how to do which i'm really excited about is how to take a screenshot in obs normally i've been doing the window snipping tool then having to take it knit mess paint or photoshop and save it or something but i learned how to do a screenshot and i'm really excited so if you go into the settings and click on hotkeys over here and you scroll down just a little bit right here you can see screenshot output and you can set that to a hotkey you can also do a screenshot selected source so it's only what you have picked that will screenshot you can have a hotkey for that as well and these are going to save to what you have set up in the output section under recording tab the recording path you have saved here is where your screenshots get saved to and then if i press f12 you'll see a little pop-up like right down here at the bottom it says screenshot saved right here and i could also come up here to file show recordings it's going to open up the folder and you can see my little screenshots that are saved right here there's our screenshot beautiful crisp and clear now i can drag that into twitter and say we're going live right now or whatever right i love this that's one of my favorite new things that i've learned another thing that i've really benefited from lately is using an output projector so if you right click on your preview pane you can either do a full screen projector and you can turn one of your entire monitors where it will just output what your obs looks like i prefer to use the windowed projector and it just pops this little window up so i can have my obs minimized i can keep this up here and i can have my gameplay in the main part of the screen and i can keep an eye on make sure that my webcam hasn't stopped working and make sure that nothing's acting weird don't ever talk to me or my son ever again so i love the output projectors the next one that i want to tell you about is how to use your cell phone as a webcam and i think this is super powerful because maybe you can't afford to buy yourself a webcam and honestly our cell phones have really nice cameras in them what i use is an app called irreune cam i r i u n webcam and i'll make sure to leave a link in the description box below of course it's a free application it works with pc mac and linux by the way you'll need to download the app onto your computer and install it and you're also going to need to download the app onto your phone and install it and then every time you want to use it you're going to want to boot up iriun cam on your computer and then you'll have to come to your phone and boot up the app as well and once this loads in you'll see it pop up on my screen here in a second there we go so now you can see we're coming through loud and clear so you're obviously going to want a selfie stick or something like that i have a broken arm right now so i'm having a hard time holding this you can see that it works pretty well i could even take you around my room oh look at toasty anyway and then the last thing i want to mention about irion cam is it's battery hungry normally my cell phone will last between 24 and 48 hours on a battery if i'm not using it to watch videos too much but when i'm using irion cam my phone dies within three or four hours so you want to make sure that you have it plugged into the wall and i set mine up on a selfie stick or some kind of mount and it makes an excellent webcam it's also really good because i have a webcam already i could use it as a second camera when i'm doing tarot streams or art streams or some kind of craft stream or something like that and the final thing i want to say is really just for nerds like me probably so you can see here that i have my obs up that i've been teaching y'all on but i'm using another instance of obs to actually record this video right now two hours and 51 minutes yay it's gonna be so much fun to edit you know i prefer to have it like this because we don't want to see this to infinity and beyond seeing the six dimension we want to be able to just see this nice screen without being distracted by all the different layers i'm running two instances of obs you can see them up here so typically when you double click on obs it's going to direct you to the window that's already open so the way that i've worked myself around that i go into the search bar and i type in obs i right click on obs when it pops up i open the file location i'm going to right click on obs and i'm going to do create a shortcut it's going to tell me it can't make it in this folder probably so i'm going to say yes put it on the desktop instead you'll see it's here and then i would rename this something to like obs like maybe this is for recording instead of for streaming you could rename the first one streaming whatever whatever you want to do rename it so you remember it's the second one though this should itself work you should be able to open two but if it doesn't and it didn't work for me right click on this shortcut and go into properties and then here in this target window you're going to need to add a line of text at the very end of the quotation mark you're going to want to do a space and then a hyphen hyphen two hyphens and then type out multi-space warning i'll make sure that's typed out in the description box below and i'll link the website where i learned this and then click ok and then this will now pop up this is going to give me a third instance of obs actually so now i have three obs running so you can do this just to infinity and beyond why you would need more than two i don't know i i've definitely benefited from too personally as someone who records myself using obs for tutorials i can't imagine why i would need three but to each their own maybe you got some big ambitious dreams holy guacamole if you made it to this part of the video you better leave me some kind of cute emoji leave me a strawberry emoji in the comments i'm on three hours of recording this i've been working on this blog for two weeks straight i'm so sick of obs you have no idea i'm so sick of learning about obs and trying to understand it and trying to explain it but i wanted to do this and get it done so this could just be a giant mega video on my channel that i could reference people to whenever they had specific questions about obs so i hope this has been helpful to those who need it and probably beginners and some advanced users alike because i know while i was researching this stuff i've been using obs for um six years and i learned a lot of stuff while i was researching for this video so thank you all so much for watching i'm going to go eat some chocolate and get ready for bed and i will see you all in the next video oh i would love it if y'all could like and subscribe and do all that fun stuff follow me on twitter instagram at heyshadylady come say hi to me at twitch hey shadylady feel free to join my discord server discord dot gg shady lady if you want to continue the conversation and check the blog out of this uh over at my website on heyshadylady.com and i guess i will talk to you all later thank you again so much for watching and i'll see you next time bye everybody

Channel: HeyShadyLady

Views: 42,992

Keywords: obs, obs tutorial, slobs, slobs tutorial, obs for beginners, beginner obs, twitch tutorial, streamer tutorial, twitch tips for beginners, obs tips, how to use obs, what bitrate should i use, bitrate, replay buffer, obs advanced settings, obs settings, what obs settings, new streamer obs, twitch obs, getting started on twitch, getting started with obs, obs project, obs studio, how to add a browser source, obs video settings, advanced obs, obs guide, obs help, how to obs

Id: UqKDM6FbttE

Length: 86min 33sec (5193 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022