- If you're a streamer or content creator then chances are you've
heard of Elgato Stream Deck. This handy little interface
is used by thousands of content creators across the world to assist them in managing
their live broadcasts. There are tons of videos out
there on how you can set up and use your Stream Deck for
things like switching scenes, muting microphones and moderating chat. But there are very few videos about the really advanced
things that this device can do. So, in this video, I will be
sharing nine advanced tips that you can easily implement
to upgrade your Stream Deck. (upbeat music) Just before we dive into the tips, I want to give a quick thank you to the sponsor of this video Nordpass. Guys it's 2021, you can't
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aspects of your stream, things like OBS Studio, your Twitch chat, your Twitch dashboard,
maybe your music software, your audio software to make sure that they're all being
sent to the right channels, then you probably used to arranging all of these applications
in pixel perfect locations on your second or second
and third monitors, and that can take quite a bit of time. There's a Stream Deck
plugin called Windows Mover that you can add, which allows you to save the specific position and
size of any open applications. So, that the next time whilst
it's open all you have to do, is click the button on your Stream Deck and it'll snap directly into place. Now, I'd recommend actually
setting a multi-action of several different instances
of this Windows Mover action. One for each application that
you use once you're streaming that way it's only one
click on your Stream Deck and all of your applications
nestle their way into position. If we take this one step further, you could actually in the multi-action add the actual launching of
these applications first by using the system open action. Just make sure that you
add a suitable delay after the launch actions as
you don't want them to trigger the move actions before
they finished opening. There's two different plugins for the Stream Deck
that I use for my audio. The first is super simple,
it's called Audio Switcher and it allows you to toggle between two different audio devices. So, I actually use this
button all the time to swap between the
speakers and the headset as my default option on my PC or for swapping between
different microphone inputs, if I'm testing out a new
microphone or audio interface. The second plugin is especially
useful for those of you that use something like a GOXLR or Wave Link software or RODE Connect or even Voicemeeter with
virtual audio cables, but basically if anybody
that's wanting to send certain application audio
to different audio outfits. The plugin is called Sound Deck and it has an action
called Set App Audio Device that allows you to easily
change the audio device used by any application. Previously, I had to
open up sound settings, scroll all the way down to
App volume device preferences, and then manually change
the output device used by each application. Instead, now I have this
set up to allow me to change the output device of
any focused application to use my GoXLR's music channel. That way when I'm getting ready to stream, I can focus Spotify, click
one button on my Stream Deck and I'll start using the music device rather than my speakers which
now gives me full control over the audio levels of
my music using my GoXLR. I have a similar button
which does the exact same but with any chat applications and sending it to the chat channel. So, if I want Discord or Zoom or even a call through my
browser in Google Hangouts to start using my chat
channel on my GoXLR, it's just one button pressed
when the app is focused. Again just to reiterate, this isn't specific to having a GoXLR, this works with Wave
Link software from Elgato or RODE Connect from
RODE or even Voicemeeter and virtual audio cables. It's basically just a way
to set a certain application to use a certain audience device. One that I think is
incredibly important to do before you go live is just to check your internet connection. The last thing you want to do is go live and get your audience
all hyped only for them to have a buffering stream
because you're dropping frames all over the place. And thankfully there are some tools in Stream Deck's plugins store
that can help you test that. The Speed Test plugin will run
a full test on speedtest.net and give you back the results showing your average download
speed but more importantly, your average upload speed
and connection quality. This can be useful just to
see if there's any issues with your upload speed before you go live. Win Tools is a plugin with
various different actions for Windows' users but in
particular, we're going to talk about the ping action that you can set up to ping a certain IP address
to test your latency. So, I have this set up to ping google.com and a couple of different
game servers that I use just to give me a good overview of if there are any latency issues. You can even set custom images to show if the resulting ping is
higher than a set threshold. So, I have that key set to
go red if my ping to Google is ever higher than 25 milliseconds. Unfortunately you can't currently ping Twitch's ingest servers, which are the actual servers
that you're streaming to, to test your connection
before you go live. You have to currently
go through Twitch's API to be able to do that. So, that would be a
really useful function. I've actually spoken to BarRaider, who is the guy that's
made probably over 50% of the plugins that
we're mentioning today, to see if you would be interested in making a plugin to do just that. So, if you see this come out
in a couple of months time, you all know who to thank. Well, don't thank me, thank BarRaider, he's the one that will
have built the plugin but I had the idea. One advanced tip that was
shared with me from Phil, who is the technical
marketing manager at Elgato, is that you can actually set
up this ping tool to also ping your modem and your router
or rowter as American say, and all you need is the IP
addresses of those devices, and then you can again, test
things in your local network before going live. If you want a simple and easy
way to create countdown timers on your stream, for example,
in your starting soon scene, there is a plugin called
Stream Countdown Timer that you can use to
create any length timer and show that on your Stream Deck, which can also update a text file that you can then add into
your streaming software. You can choose exactly what is displayed, if anything, when the countdown ends and you can also pause and resume timers with a single tap on your Stream Deck. If you're ever running a stream marathon where maybe the time left increases when you hit certain
subscriber thresholds, you can also set this plugin
up to increase or decrease the timer by certain amount
each time you press a button. And for those of you who
like to display counters like your win/loss results or how many deaths you've
had on your stream, there's also a plugin
called Stream Counter, which allows you to keep track of how many times a
button has been pressed. And again, output that
result to a text file, which you can add into
your streaming software. That whole process makes it so much easier than going into OBS Studio and updating these numbers
manually each time you die. If you make use of an Elgato capture card to capture something like a camera or a second PC or a games console, then you can use something
called Flashback Recording to retroactively save the
previous up to 30 minutes as a high quality video file. Now, you can set this up to be anything from the past 15 seconds all the way up to the past 30 minutes. And I'd recommend having
a few different buttons so that you can quickly click it. If it's only a short moment ago, you can click a shorter time and then you don't have to
scrub through 30 minutes of video footage. This becomes particularly useful, if you want to repurpose
any of your live content for other mediums, where
having a full quality version of something like your camera
feed would be super helpful. An advanced tip that I would share would be to set up a multi-action to save both the Flashback
Recording of say your camera and OBS Studio's replay
buffer simultaneously. This way you'll have both the
full quality stream recording and the full quality camera
recording that you can use however you want in your editing software without having to do any weird reframing or cropping around your tiny camera. If you like to end your streams by raiding one of your
friends over on Twitch and sending all of your
viewers across to them, then there's an action in
the Twitch Tools plugin that makes it super simple to do. The action is called Live Streamers, and it shows you the number of streamers that you follow on Twitch
that are currently live. Clicking on that button
opens up a folder showing you a preview of all those creators streams, how many viewers they have and then if you press on that button, you will then raid that channel
with all of your viewers. You can also set this action
up to host the channel rather than raid them, but this whole process of finding
a channel that you follow, that's live and then
typing in the raid command just became so much easier. And the little preview that
you get on your Stream Deck can be used to ensure that the streamer isn't on their BRB scene
or their Ending scene, so, you hopefully know the kind of content that you're going to be
sending your viewers to. If you use one of the 25 different webcams that frustratingly for whatever
reason, seems to forget all of the settings every
single time you restart your PC, this next plugin is going
to be a game changer. The plugin is called Cam Control, and it allows you to manually set with one press all of
the different settings like brightness, contrast, gain, exposure, saturation, white
balance, the list goes on. To make this really useful, I definitely recommend
making a multi-action to change several of these
settings all at the same time. Now, whenever you're
setting up your stream, you can just click one single button to have all of your webcam
settings set exactly as you like them, without having to go into the camera properties
and change each option every single time. If your lighting conditions
aren't consistent day-to-day, you can even set this up to
have plus and minus buttons for each setting, so you
can adjust your settings on the fly to suit your needs. So, newer webcams are kind of built to hopefully not suffer from this so much, but if you're using
something like the C920, and I know a lot of you are, this has been an ongoing
problem for years now. And hopefully this button
that you can now add to your Stream Deck to
set all of your settings with one click should hopefully help. Now, what do you do when
there's an application that you use all the time
that supports hotkeys, but hasn't yet had a Stream
Deck integration built for it? Well, here's a cool tip. Stream Deck has an option
to add a hotkey action that allows you to set the
button to map to a hotkey. If you come down to F-keys here, you'll see that there's an
option to map function keys that you most probably don't
even have on your keyboard, F13 through F24. If you assign one of these F-keys to your Stream Deck button, and then head over to the
applications hot key settings, you can then press that
button on your Stream Deck, and you'll have the exact
functionality you want. Also, if you have a tenkeyless
keyboard or even smaller, then you can also assign
all of the numpad keys to any hotkeys that you
want in any application. And you'll know that you'll
never accidentally trigger them from your keyboard cause your keyboard doesn't
even have those keys. Now, throughout this video,
I've mentioned a few examples of some good multi-actions, but there are three more examples
that I want to highlight. Hate Raids are obviously a big
problem on Twitch right now and I think it's definitely
worth taking the time to set up a panic button that you can hit, as soon as you see this
happening on your channel. The multi action could
include changing your chat to follower only mode,
clearing your chat entirely, muting and hiding alerts to
make sure that text-to-speech doesn't get abused,
slowing your chat down, sending a chat message to
exactly what's going on to your regular viewers, you could optionally even play an ad if you wanted to capitalize
on these new viewers and of course creating a stream
marker and creating a clip if you wanted to then
look into reporting them. The second multi-action
that I use all the time is to be able to turn on
and off all of the lights in my studio with one single key press. And now, Stream Deck supports many different types of products,
many different companies. You can obviously use
anything from Elgato, like their key lights or light strips, Phillips Hue, CORSAIR iCUE, Nanoleaf, LIFX, Colorlight, there's a whole variety of different brands
that are support it now, and you can add all of
these into one multi-action. And the last multi-action
that I use all the time and I see many members of the community have already set up themselves is a Start Stream multi-action
which can do things like open up OBS and all of
your different applications, change to your starting soon scene, muting your microphone and
starting music from a DMCA safe, in that music playlist and
setting the volume of that, positioning your Windows properly like we covered at the start of the video and starting a countdown
timer, start your stream, changing your Twitter name,
really the list goes on and on, and you can customize this to
be whatever you normally do whenever you start streaming. So, those were my nine advanced
tips for the Stream Deck, but I would absolutely
love to see what you guys in the community are using
your Stream Decks for. So, let me know down in the comments, I'm definitely going to be
continually going back there to check out what you guys are creating and maybe implement some of them myself. If you've enjoyed this video,
please do give it a thumbs up it's the best way to let me know you enjoy this kind of content so
that I can make more of it. And if you're new to the
Gaming Careers channel, have a look around and
consider subscribing. I'll catch you the next one. Peace. (upbeat music) If you're a streamer or content creator then chances are you've
heard of Elgato Stream Deck. It would help if I held it
upside down, wouldn't it? I mean the right way up.
