The Complete Open Broadcaster (obs) Almanac

in the power obs sessions i want to drill down on each topic, in this one, let's add a camera and a microphone scene and why i package my scenes together like this from my sources and how you can re-use this everywhere else you need when rapidly making up fresh scenes.

do you want audio absolutely everywhere at all times? maybe not, i personally have mine as a dedicated scene as a source and include that in on every scene where i want my microphone to work.  you might want to have it on all the time however and the ability to mute it with a hotkey. i show you both in this video.

really simple example, how to picture in picture two sources, in this part i show you two video source but those picture in picture sources could be anything really.

this is for people who want to be super productive with their content creation. maybe you only have a small amount of time at the end of the day, that's ok, using this method you can rapidly make your content and get it recorded fast, as easy as 1, 2 and 3! :)

you don't need to spend lots of money to have awesome audio you can probably squeeze out some great sound from the kit you already have with some EQ and filtering and you can get free VST plugins from around the web if you dig deep enough! some are complex but also others are 1 click to improve! no brainer!

this is very inception like i realise that, like a dream inside a dream inside a reality! -- yep, it's true, you can create a scene and use that also as a source! WILD! -- why would you need to do this? well, i try to explain how i use it on my 4:3 social media making obs setup -- it allows me to rapidly make videos for social media this way.  scenes as sources is VERY powerful and speed up your deployment of scenes.

ok, so 'cool' is subjective but i tried to make an animated webcam backer for my webcam shot (you might have seen these a lot for gamers/streamers) while i did not go into the building of the keynote animation movie i did break down how it looks and how converting it to .webm makes it smaller compared to .mp4 -- i hope this helps you setup a cool webcam backer!

as it says on the tin, there is a subtle but powerful difference between duplicate and reference, make sure you know which is which as it will save you a lot of headaches when you are working with sources. Also not to be confused with copying filters. i briefly touched on that -- copying filters, copying reference and copying duplicate are all covered!

so save your precious time, once you find the sweet spot with audio and video filters you can actually copy those effects and apply them to any other scene and source, especially useful for greenscreen, audio vst plugins or just to use the same hue colour that you loved on another scene.

kinda obvious this one but some pointers to make sure that it's as smooth and flawless as i know you want it to be, let's get that video file looping!

at some point you might want to have universal chat on your life streams, either for IRL stuff or for your gaming stream, one of the best ones for pulling together all the chat boxes is the one that restream.io makes and it's easy to plug in using a browser source, just copy the url and you are good to go!

trust me, eventually you'll want to get used to the EYE and the LOCK symbols, you'll get fed up of accidentally moving something and having to mess midstream with the position of it -- learn these simple things right here.

ok so setting up the greenscreen and getting the perfect shot can feel a little bit like the 'dark arts' (harry potter reference) but with a bit of practice and some basic knowledge it's a easy no brainer, knock it out of the park kinda thing -- hopefully this help you get yours done.

the filters inside of obs are actually amazing, you can end up doing some hella cool creative stuff with it if you play enough with all the things. i heartily suggest you do, you can have a lot of fun and make ACTUAL art with this stuff.

REEEEEeeemix.  It's so easy to do and i want you to start doing it, use .mkv as a file format, trust me with this, it will save you a lot of pain later on, if you must have .mp4 files then do the REDUX after you have finished.  I talk about it later why it's a no-brainer to use this file container mode in obs.

.webm = small files. nuff said. also, less overheads in obs, at least, that's the way i see it ;)

so the transition stuff is pretty cool right, but what if you could have custom transitions per scenes. well guess what you can and it's pretty damn lit fam, you could end up doing some legit animations and effects actually if you think about your setup.

obs does this scaling thing where everything is like SQUARE, it can be annoying to not be able to adjust your object in the way you want, but trust me, a quick ALT key and some playing around and you can be back in control! :)

if you are updating your text element sources regularly you might find it more useful to actually have text files outside of OBS for rapid updating. It also means you don't have to play around inside OBS (accidentally moving something or unhidden/etc) it has a few quirks but i try and go over those.

after recently building a new side project called ultimate profile video i noticed that groups was a lot more powerful that i imagined but it's got some weird quirks in it that you need to know about.

in this lecture i wanted to go over my social media dapp layout.  instead of boring you with timelapse or every micro detail of the build out of the assets i go into how i used scenes as sources and how the structure works. i hope this helps you make your own rapid social media video toolset too! -- i've included my link to the gumroad pack if you want to buy it.

so i went ahead and made a theme layout video switching from 4:3 to 16:9 perspective (not square, long) which is the standard for most things on the web -- i made the square one for twitter/instagram but you can use 16:9 too, i just liked the way it sizes up in the feed, these are some tips to how to step through and convert your layouts to suit.

stepping through the sources that you can add to obs, audio input and outputs are fairly straight forward for most people to understand, bring in audio and also outputs inside of obs for recording or streaming -- also virtual inputs are catered for here.

one of the great sources inside of obs is the browser source -- the ability to bring in a local file or remote url from the internet and display that in your stream, you might have an audio browser source or a chat browser source like you see on restream.io -- or maybe something like a donations plugin source from streamlabs, this is how you add this in easily.

very simple source here, just add in a coloured block, useful for making areas coloured, great for stacking up backgrounds or background areas for chat boxes and such like.

capture any of your system displays - main screen or secondary screen, bring in anything on those screens, could be a game but you'd probably be better bringing in video from an elgato capture card.

share an image or a folder full of them, quickly going over image display and image slideshow which has a lot more features, great for sponsor graphics.

you can extend OBS with lua/python scripts if you are a coder and want to make elements that you can embed into your OBS, super cool for making programs that monitor websites and such like, very fast -- you can find it in tools/scripts in the menu bar.

OBS can play pretty much anything which is cool if you want to play a video files back or demo something.

my absolutely favorite source on OBS, it's a scene itself (very meta, very inception) but yes, you can use a source as a scene, it really helps you make scenes so much faster when you group together regularly used items -- once you understand them, you'll love em!

really cool source that allows you to inject/hijack certain playing video applications (like games) and use them in obs.  might not always work thou when macOS has an update (so not reliable probably) best to bring in a video feed using a piece of hardware (via hdmi) feed from another PC or console.

text inside of OBS is kinda weird and clunky but i've shown you how to get the best out of your fonts and how to make it play nice. it's not perfect, but these tips will help you get a bit more mileage out of it before you decide to make them as vector sharp graphic versions! (bottle line, anti aliasing is rubbish!)

i had this crazy idea that maybe you could watch vlc live streams inside of obs. i could not get it working but instead you can add video files and a folder of them in here or a url, but i could not get streamlink going. i could have cut this up but i think it adds value! :)

video capture is normally anything that can output video, webcams, capture cards, things like that, quite simple really -- i go over the features of adding one in.

really simple this one, window capturing, capture from any window that's outputting video, dead simple, but be aware, no audio, you'll be able to capture all sound easily on OBS on PC but it's a little different on the MAC, in another lecture i'll show you how.

using OBS is better when things are tidy, it's easier to find things and it makes more sense when you are working on a project to put things in places where you can find them.  groups are great inside of scenes.

pretty much all sources can have filters, regardless if it's audio or video. you can improve all the features of your source with additional filtering on the top of them. i go into them a little bit (if you want me to go deeper, let me know!)

ordering layers can be done in two ways, moving layers up or down with the arrows or on the right click, you can move direct to the top and bottom on the right click. i feel this additional place really is not needed but i wanted you to know what they are!

i had a few issues with transforming functions, you'll probably not use them much because you'll probably drag and drop and use the ALT key to make custom sizings.  i think i found some bugs too. transform is just like in other graphical apps similar like photoshop etc.

you can do so many transitions inside of OBS that work really well, swipes, slides, fades and wonderful stingers that are just videos with a fast effects to transition to the next scene, it looks really cool on a live stream.

so i had a few problems with my version of OBS while doing this -- since macOS catalina things have been a little weird, i expect when you play with this you'll have no issues, especially if you are on PC, i left in all the problems i had but i think you get what i'm doing here. i made my video in keynote, which is free! works well, when the background is transparent! :) (i could'nt get it working today!) will update when newer version.

OBS has a really good recording mode if you set it up properly that will allow you to PAUSE the video recording, what's cool about it is that you can restart the recording as you wish, great for doing long recordings. stop and pause, explain, carry on. it's great!

when it comes to recording and streaming, you wanna use the fastest components that you have, if you bolt in an SSD drive you are good to go! i have one as a 'scratch' drive for writing too, makes for faster and more reliable recordings.  always write to your fastest drive ideally not your operating system drive also.

quick overview of the settings that you need to get streaming on vimm.tv -- a decentralised platform (think crypto) using the steem blockchain, it's like twitch but a lot smaller and you can get incentivised with upvotes and downvotes from the blockchain as well as post blog post style streaming now posts when you go live.

periscope has some very specific video and audio settings that you need to stick too to be able to use the service. you can setup the producer encoding settings from desktop or ipad i've found, it's quite easy to do.

one of my favorite platforms just because of how good the interface is and how well thought out the streaming platform is, formerly beam, this platform now called mixer was bought by microsoft and has managed to capture ninja to their service.

facebook is relatively straight forward to setup, a streaming key lasts for about 7 days so you'll need to jump in every week to get a new streaming key but once you have it set you'll be able to go live with ease! obs already has a profile in the dropdown for facebook live.

youtube have recently done a lot of work on their live streaming offering and even picked up the top e-sports gaming streamer courageJD to their platform for their projects in 2020 -- i can see youtube still very much in this fight for audience and probably has one of the biggest concurrent streamer capacity than any of the others -- somewhere in the millions!

twitch.tv is one of the most popular live streaming platforms on the web, formerly known as justin.tv this platform is so easy to setup and i show you how to test your live stream without going live by using the testing string in the dashboard.

using a simple plugin for chrome/brave you can pull in interactive chat messages from youtube chat into your obs as a browser source and display them on stream, really handy to cherry pick questions you want to answer.

tony asked me how to do lower thirds, i ended up showing three ways in 30 minutes here!

if you have the windows version of obs 25 then you'll be able to do custom docks like i mentioned for the third way

https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/animated-lower-thirds-with-control-panel.922/

i know a lot of people are looking to have the chat from their live stream in the output of their video stream. i'm trying to find a really concrete solution but i do know that "hear to record" are going to be intergrating youtube chat into their program soon.  Maybe after that they will start integrating other chat apps.  The alternative right now if you are on PC is to use streamlabs OBS which is still OBS but a "forked" version with additional features that might be better for a brand new non computer user.

simple video for john paul to show two webcam inputs, two different webcams, put together on the same screen at the same time, i broke this down into "hardware" and "views" to make the process simple i hope!

in this requested video we take a look at using the same piece of hardware but in different ways, we can resize/add filters but we much have a unique scene name regardless if the source is the same.

it used to be an additional step for students to learn (and often fall over at) but now obs has a stream event manager for youtube built in (this is huge) -- now, once you have connected a youtube account, you don't have to mess around with stream keys ever again, massive massive timesaver!