Part 1: How to Create a Webinar Using OBS

hello and welcome my name is Thomas and in this video we're gonna be walking through how to set up a basic webinar using OBS okay so you might notice if you're a regular viewer of this channel a little bit of a change of scenery I'm not in my typical kind of studio setup right now I'm actually just in my office and the reason is because I have in my office when I'm usually doing my work I've got a dual monitor setup so two monitors side-by-side that connect to my MacBook Pro and the reason is because I'm actually going to be using some software today called OBS and it's typically gonna work best if you have two monitors you don't have to I'll be talking a little bit later on about how you can kind of work around not having two monitors but typically you want two monitors when you're using OBS so one of the challenges that a lot of people have is doing webinars webinars are an excellent way to be able to generate income for your business as well as to live interact with your audience you can answer questions you can do seminars you can do coaching there's so many different possibilities with webinars and that's why they continue to be used over and over again now the challenge that most people have with webinars however is figuring out what software to use so so many people out there go out and buy like GoToWebinar or you know zoom or all these other services which most of them work pretty well but the challenge for a lot of people is at least starting out is the price so most webinars software out there is typically going to cost at least a thousand dollars a year OBS on the other hand is completely free and I might add it is actually much more powerful in terms of what you can do with it then literally any other webinar platform on the planet so you might be wondering okay so why then isn't pretty much everyone using OBS and the reason is because it's powerful software but it takes a little bit of a learning curve to get up and running with it is pretty complicated if you're not aware with some of the features and fundamentals built into it so the goal of this first video which by the way is one in a three part series this will be three videos that I'm gonna be coming out with so make sure you subscribe if you're not already but in this first video we're just gonna walk through how to create a really basic webinar setup so that you can get familiar with some of the fundamentals of OBS one of the other powerful features about OBS that goes far beyond any other live broadcasting webinar software out there is that you can broadcast live to a number of different platforms you can live broadcast to Facebook through OBS you can live broadcast to Vimeo to YouTube to twitch to all these other third-party services you can connect and livestream directly to them through OBS okay so without any further delay let's go ahead and dive in and take a look at how to get set up with some of the basics of OBS and before we do that if you'd like to download OBS I will be leaving a link below this video you can download the software and start to experiment with it for yourself okay so let's go ahead and jump in okay so you are air with a basic setup of OBS if you down if you're downloading OBS for the first time it may look a little bit different than what we're looking at here so what I'm gonna do first of all is I'm gonna jump on over here to settings just to make sure we have some of these settings correct so most of the things you're gonna keep pretty much the same there's just a few small ones that I wanted to address as we're going through one of the things you'll notice here is the streaming service you can actually pick from a number of different streaming services in terms of where you actually want this live broadcast to go along with where to actually what information you're actually going to provide to actually connect to that particular stream but the first thing we want to do is pop on over to video and you just want to make sure that it is set to 1920 by 1080 this is gonna be 1080p which is going to be the highest resolution for most streaming platforms one of the things that will warn you about just really quickly is that 720p is the absolute max for something like Facebook's you won't be able you can stream at this high of a resolution however you'll just have to be aware that something like a face isn't going to actually be able to get up to that resolution at least at the time of this video they're only going to be able to get up to a maximum so 720p it's going to make sure that you have the resolutions set to that if you want to save bandwidth the other thing I typically do here is like a lot of gamers use OBS to livestream their gaming obviously we're not going to be doing any gaming so I typically which they're gonna want something high like 60 FPS but since we're just going to be doing a webinar 24 frames per second is actually going to be the same frame frame rate as something like film so and plus the lower frame frame rate you select the better your upload is going to be specifically if you don't have a really fast internet a lower slower frames per second will actually help you save on bandwidth so I typically change that to 24 frames per second there's a number of other really advanced features in here most of these you're not really gonna have to worry about but you are just want to make sure that you're gonna be at the right resolution which is what I typically recommend at 1080p which again is going to be that 1920 by 1080 would you change that you'll see that the shape of your canvas as its known the kind of screen area is gonna look something like this okay now the next two pieces we're gonna take a look at in terms of OBS is you've got something called scenes and then you've got something called sources you can think of scenes just as you would in a movie if you're gonna change scenes you're gonna have a whole new collection of sources now sources can be a wide variety of things from your webcam to your desktop and we'll be going through that here shortly the mixer is just going to be any audio input and some of these things in here aren't really going to apply to this particular video okay so let's go ahead and now that we've got kind of familiar with some of the basics of the interface let's go ahead and just start building what could be kind of a mock webinar setup because I think that's going to be the best way to actually start learning the process so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna rename this scene right here to starting and this is what people are going to see when we are actually starting our live broadcast because we don't want to just go live and show our webcam we want to give people a time to actually you know find their digital seat so to speak so that they can file in and that sort of thing so the first thing I want to do is we create that scene which is going to be a container of things and in this case it's just gonna be one thing and it is going to be an image so we're gonna go ahead and say starting image I'm gonna click OK we're gonna browse our computer for an image so in this case I have actually already created an image I'm just gonna go ahead and upload you can create this in something like canva you just want to make sure that it's the same resolution as whatever you are your actual canvas or video sizes then you're going to notice here a couple of little options that show up next to it you can click the I if you want to hide it or if you want to lock it so it can't be moved around and just click the lock so as you can see I can actually move this around if it is not locked and there you go so that's pretty basic that's pretty simple we've already created a single scene so this is what's gonna show up once we go live so let's go ahead and create another scene here and let's go ahead and create one specifically for our webcam so let's go ahead and jump on over to video capture device create new click okay I guess I'm all ready oh I see we'll just call this webcam - I think I've got that name used in another project or something like that so then what you're gonna see here is this nice device drop-down so if you've got a webcam installed you can just click on that hello everyone you can see me now through my webcam okay so now we're just going to go ahead and click OK then you'll see here it's gonna be just like the image and now what I can do is I can actually go through here and I can resize it so there you go you see that now up and running I just see over here as well one of the things that I can do is I can actually click on this to switch between scenes so if I click on that you'll see this and if I go back over here you'll see me on the webcam okay so I can click that lock button and as you can see I can no longer move this around now one of the things that would not be broadcasting right now however is my voice the only reason you can hear me is because it's post-production and I'm talking through the microphone so what we're going to need to do to get this to work properly is we're going to now need to add my microphone so that once I start talking then we'll be able to see that displayed on the screen as well okay so we're going to do is we're going to jump up to audio input capture okay once we've done that we just want to change the name to our microphone and we're gonna click OK that's the ninna give us a nice little drop down we can select from all of our input devices so again if you're any type of microphone that you're using if you're using a fancy one like mine or if you're just using something even like a USB headset or something you can select that here okay so we're gonna go ahead and select there we go now what you'll see here is that you're gonna have just like another item here you're gonna have mic listed and you're gonna see over here on the right a nice little audio mixer so that's gonna start to show our audio levels so this is what's actually going to be output to the stream from an audio perspective so I can mute this I can also turn it down so if you're a little bit too loud for your audience or something like that you can easily change that here okay then what we're also going to want to be able to do is let's say you also want to be able to talk to your audience while you're on the starting screen what you can do is you can pop on down here hit + audio input capture and then you can see you can actually select something that's already existing in this case it's the mic and then you can see here that you can go ahead and add that in so what you can do is is mute it you could actually start streaming and go through the process of streaming and then say you're like getting ready to start you can then unmute this say to the people watching hey I'm here we're gonna be getting started here shortly thanks so much for joining us and then you can mute your microphone so that people can no longer hear any background noise so again really easy way to set up both pieces and you can see that's pretty easy to get up and running okay so now we've got a starting screen we've got a webinar or the webcam view and again you're not limited to what I'm doing here you can create unlimited scenes okay but now let's say we wanted to show the audience my desktop right so I wanted to go ahead and create a another scene here so let's go ahead and do that we'll go ahead and say this is gonna be my desktop let's go ahead and add then and here a nice display capture if you're using two monitors this is where you're going to want to pick which monitor that you're using zero is going to be the default monitor one is going to be the secondary we're going to put under crop we're gonna put none I'm gonna click OK now I'm gonna be able to go up here and actually resize this to fit the size of the actual video window or the canvas let's go ahead and do that perfect then we can jump back over here and click lock so then you'll be able to see here my nice little mouse cursor just as though it is my full desktop view then from there let's say we also want to go ahead and add back in our webcam so I'll go ahead and select add existing since we've already set that up webcam there we go click okay and then Here I am hello and let's say we want that to show up maybe a little bit smaller here in the corner so that you can kind of see me as I'm broadcasting we'll go ahead and lock that down and then there you go when I'm over here you'll be able to see my whole desktop so I can display any number of apps or demonstrations or things that I wanted to do for example one of the things that you could do is you could pop open something like keynote and you could start your slide presentation so you could go fullscreen with this you could hide the sidebar and you could go through and start doing a nice normal slide presentation but then let's say that you didn't necessarily want to have your your webcam showing while you are doing your keynote presentation so here's something you can do just pop over here click duplicate let's say desktop no cam then all you have to do is delete the webcam out of that particular view and then there you go you can just pop between each of these you can see hello everyone Here I am and then you could go to the desktop view and then you could click on down to the no cam view if you wanted people to be able to focus just on this broadcast okay so being able to record a desktop is great but what about the whole idea of being able to screen record or broadcast a particular window so maybe there are some software or maybe you just want to be able to do something in your web browser so let's go ahead and do that so we're going to do we're going to go ahead and we're going to take the desktop view and we are going to duplicate it and this time we're going to call it browser go ahead and we'll keep that actually we'll go ahead and pop this one above the desktop and then for our desktop view we're gonna go ahead and we're going to double click it so that we can edit it we're gonna keep it the same here except for we're gonna change crop to window then we're gonna be able to do is actually pick a browser window which I should probably open one so I'll go ahead and open up a quick browser window and stick it on over on this particular screen there we go so now I should be able to find under Safari I think let's see you know I need to since I just opened up the window I think I need to close this out so I've opened up the window so now first we'll reopen this go down to crop go to window there we go Safari favorites and sometimes you have to change this like just to for whatever reason sometimes it doesn't stick but there we go so now we'll go ahead and click OK and as you can see here we've cropped it just to that particular window and keep in mind you can do this too literally in a window so we're gonna pop this to be nice and resized and then we'll go ahead and close it and then what you can see is I can go on over here and I can even right now you can't really see it that well but I'm actually moving this around and it's staying cropped to that particular window so that I can show up on over to a nice web browser and there you go you've got a nice view of your web browser so to pop back over to OBS you can see here that I can jump from scene to scene really easily I can go to just my webcam hello everyone then I can jump on over to just this browser view and then I can jump on over to my desktop view now one of the things you'll see here is that I actually went through and I accidentally cropped the desktop view so what I should have done beforehand is actually duplicate the this piece before doing that it's not a big deal you can actually change that pretty easily so what I'm going to do so we're a browser I'm gonna go ahead and rename this - browser whew court a desktop duplicate which I don't think I can actually duplicate let's see looking through here can't duplicate it that's okay so we're gonna do is we're just go ahead and re add it pretty easily we can just go to display capture call this one desktop view hit okay and there we go so pretty easy then we just make sure we drag that below the the webcam and then lock it and then there we go now we can do the same here pretty easily okay so to kind of recap as you can see we can go ahead and see our nice starting soon view we can jump on over to our webcam view and then we can jump on it over to a browser and the desktop and then no camera desktop as well so let's go ahead and add in one more that I like to add in and that is a nice little ending screen because it's a good idea to be able to leave a little bit of a tail in on your broadcast so so you have time to wrap things up to make sure that sure there's a nice little buffer of time at the end of your broadcast so that you can trim it down for a replay and that sort of thing so I'm gonna go ahead and call this ending image and again if you're using something like canva or Photoshop or or Pixelmator or something like that you can do this pretty easily so I've just created a nice little ending image so I'll go ahead and select that click OK click OK go ahead and lock that and there we go so we've got this nice little webinar ending so really basic really simple as you can see you can just go ahead and click through each of these so just throughout your broadcast you'll be able to switch to these different scenes now the next thing that we're gonna want to take a look at kind of the last piece to the puzzle is actually going live right so the first thing that we want to make sure that we've done is we've gone to settings and then we go to our output or I'm sorry to our stream and this is where you gotta want to make sure that you go through each one's gonna be different so I'm gonna highly recommend that you do is for whichever one you're going to stream to you just go through the instructions whether it's gonna be YouTube they've got a live streaming dashboard same thing goes for something like Facebook but it's really simple all you got to do like for example if you're gonna stream to something like a Facebook live is you can just keep this as default and you're gonna be able to on the live view for Facebook just go and copy and paste the stream key click OK and then you're set up same thing goes for something like YouTube you can just copy and paste the stream key that they give you on your live account page and then click ok once you've set up your account what I'm gonna highly recommend this you do at least one test stream so you want to make sure that you go through the process of going live to make sure that this is all going to work properly then once you're ready all you got to do is just click on start streaming and it's gonna start the process of strange streaming to that particular place another thing that you can do is instead of streaming live you can actually click start recording so that if you want to record this as a video file to your computer you can do that as well so if you wanted to do something that isn't live and you want it to be able to do it just as a video you could do that another thing that you can do as well if we go on over to settings is that you can also let's see here check this box right here this is automatically record when streaming so that if you want a video backup saved to your computer as your streaming or of what your stream you can check this box just know that this is gonna basically do double recording so it's it's streaming at the same time it's recording so if you don't have a really fast computer that can be pretty taxing on your computer so you want to make sure that that's gonna work properly for you as you are streaming another thing to take note of down here is this is gonna tell you how long you've been live for this is gonna tell you how long you've been recording for and this is going to tell you how much of your CPU you're utilizing as you're going live so if you're seeing that get up to like 90% you know that you're taxing your computer pretty hard you just want to be aware of that and then this is the number of frames per second 23.9 eight is going to essentially be 24 frames per second which is what our preset was but if you see that dipping down to like 10 PS or something like that you know that you're essentially uploading choppy footage to your streams do you want to be aware of that there's a number of reasons why that could be if you see that one of it could be that your computer is just having a hard time keeping up it could also be your upload speed so if your computer internet speed isn't particularly fast it may not be able to put a full number of FPS up to the stream so there's just things to be aware of but that's it those are all the steps that you need for a basic webinar and how to set it up with complete with scenes and everything in between ok so I know we covered a lot in this video and these were just the basics so what I would highly recommend is is it is that you download OBS set up something that you think is going to work for you and then just kind of test and experiment with it now in the next video what I'm gonna do is we're gonna take what we've talked about in this video and use it as kind of a foundation to create something even better we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna incorporate things like scene transitions and animations and videos and things to just take it to the next level what we've looked at up to this point is gonna be about the equivalent of what most webinars look like but I kind of have the opinion that people have the ability to create things that are way more interactive and interesting to look at all within OBS and all that it enables you to do now as you may have noticed I'm working within a Mac so most of the things that I've been covering up to this point are specific to that to a Mac however OBS is available on Windows and I think it's even available on Linux just know that it's not going to look the exact same as what I'm doing since I am working on a Mac so as always if you found this video useful hit that like button subscribe if you're not already I look forward to seeing you in video 2 of this video series [Music] you [Music]

Channel: ThomasMcGeeTV

Views: 76,678

Rating: 4.9445844 out of 5

Keywords: OBS, Webinar

Id: 5pJrHsBLKc8

Length: 22min 16sec (1336 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 16 2019