YOUTUBE : Create a Successful Gaming Channel

OBS is incredibly power screen capture software and is used by many YouTube creators. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines. If you want to create high quality videos for your YouTube channel, then I highly recommend you add this piece of software to your tool kit. Visit https://obsproject.com/ to get it.

If you want to compete with other YouTube creators, you need to make sure you have professional looking video. This video is part 1 in the settings, we go through all the necessary steps to make sure you get the right settings for your recordings. Don't worry, once it is set, you don't have to keep changing them !

It is important to maintain high standards when recording video if you want to compete with all the other YouTube content creators. Encoding is one of the key settings that needs to be understood and set properly in order to get the best quality video. This video runs through what the various options are, and I give some advice and show you what settings I use to record my gameplay. These are also the actual settings I used for recording this course!

OBS can also allow you to stream your monitor to services like Twitch, and this is briefly discussed. However, for our YouTube content that we are making, we want to stick with recording to our Hard Drives so that we can edit in the highest possible quality. We are competing with thousands of other YouTube creators.

OBS allows you to even select which graphics card and which monitor you want to record from. This area allows you to select your base resolution and even allows for on the fly downscaling of your resolution. We want our YouTube videos to ideally be in HD (1080p). This video quickly runs you through the explanation of these options.

While we are going to be using Audacity for our recordings, OBS is still decent at recording your microphone. There are settings which allow you to boost your desktop sound or mic sound when recording, as well as how to play around with your push-to-talk settings to get the best out of it. If you want your YouTube videos to be clear and audible, then don't skip over this step.

Hotkeys allows you to control the basic functions of OBS without having to alt+tab out and click on it everytime. You can set your start and stop recording, streaming, replay buffer and quite a few other options here. I only use the start and stop recording along with the push-to-talk feature, but perhaps you'd like to use more.

This video is a little more technical and covers some of the harder to understand options. Each of the important settings is discussed and I show you my settings which should work on most machines. Everything is setup for higher quality to make sure your YouTube videos stand out from the competition.

OBS also uses Quick Sync Encoder which is possibly the best encoding algorithm for Intel Chipset Graphics. This is more for people who are using onboard graphics cards and don't have one that offers NVENC. They are unfortunately often under powered GPU (graphics processing units) when compared to dedicated graphics cards, so it is important to spend some time here to get the best possible blend of quality and performance to ensure highest possible YouTube video quality.

As important as getting the right settings are, they mean nothing without knowing how to use the the actual software itself. Once setup correctly, it is quite easy to use. We discuss sources and how to play around with super imposing images on top.

This will give you the raw video you will need in order to start creating your YouTube videos.

Some of the most popular YouTube videos are of people playing games, and using a webcam. Having a face on the screen helps people connect to your channel and often more likely to subscribe to your YouTube channel. This video takes you through a quick run through of how to do this in OBS.

I use MineCraft as the game, because it is so incredibly popular. Over 47 billion views on YouTube back in 2014, so by now that number would most likely be closer to 60 billion. 

Use the knowledge you learnt from the OBS videos and integrate a video capture device. In this case, a webcam.

Audacity is a lot simpler to use than professional recording software like CuBase and ProTools. However, the recording quality is absolutely fantastic and it is still feature rich. To make things even better, it is free and opensource! So keeping your budget as low as possible you can still create amazing quality YouTube videos.

Please excuse the lower quality audio recording. Because I was using Audacity in this video as the example, I could not record with it at the same time.

In this video, I show you the most important tools in Audacity to clean up your audio and give you a more professional sound. This will work even for less than expensive microphones, although, if possible it is a good idea to get a good microphone. I personally use the Rode NT-USB.

YouTube offers their content creators quite a few tools to help them along the way. One of the most useful ones (in my humble opinion) is the library of free to use music. This video walks you through how to find free to use music through YouTube.

Camtasia (and some other recording software) cannot read all formats and sometimes struggles with OBS files. Handbrake is a fantastic tool to use to convert these files. The compression ratio is also fantastic and is often used to squash your final file so it is easier and quicker to upload to YouTube.

Movie Maker is very limited with regards to its functionality, but it does speed up video very well. I often speed up sections of my YouTube videos, especially for less interesting content that does not need to be played at normal speed. With this particular video, it is the main feature.

In this video, I walk you through the steps on how to make a time-lapse video for your YouTube channel, might be something you would also want to do.

Now that you have recorded fantastic quality video, fantastic audio and you've cleaned up the audio, we need to stick it together for the final product. This video shows you how I use that clicking sound to quickly synchronise your audio and video files for your final YouTube video.

We all make mistakes, we all sometimes say "ummmm" too often, but people don't want to hear that. In this video I show you my mistakes and how I remove them to give my videos more of a flow. Once you know what to look for, you'll see that most of the top YouTube content creators do it.

If you have a section of gameplay with no music or talking, or perhaps you know that you are going to be cutting a lot of clips and want consistant music instead of your in game music getting chopped up, then you may want to add music later.

In this clip, I show you how I added ALL the music to the YouTube video that I uploaded and talk you through all my decisions on how to fit it in.

In this video, you will learn the steps on how to create your YouTube channel so we can start getting ready to earn

In order to show videos longer than 15 minutes and to allow Google Adsense (to earn money!) you need to verify your account. It's not a difficult process, just follow the steps and you ought to be fine.

If you are wanting to keep backups of all your videos, or if you don't have lightning fast upload speeds then you might want to first compress your produced file. This will allow you to save HD space as well as reduce the amount of time it takes to upload to YouTube. On an average day,

In this video I use our completed 2GB file to compress down to under 1GB with very little loss to quality.

One of the easiest parts of the course, and yet the most important. Here we get to upload our completed and compressed file to YouTube and release it to the world!

The next step in branding your new YouTube channel is setting your art. This video walks you through how and where you can set up your YouTube channel art.

Annotations is what we use to add popups to your videos, they can be used in a number of ways. I set 3 annotations in this YouTube video, and talk you through the process. Before you start linking to various websites, make sure you have read through YouTube's T&C's as well as their community guidelines to make sure that your links are fine.

So now you have your YouTube video up and running! But as a new channel with 1 video and 0 subscribers, you're not going to see a lot of traffic even with the perfect keywords. So you need to look outside of YouTube to bring in your first set of interested people.

The old school approach of just stuffing certain keywords in to your videos are gone. YouTube have become a lot better at picking out this spammy sort of behaviour and with the revision of how your videos are ranked with regards to SEO has changed the entire approach.

One thing that remains, is that you need to be consistent. Repeating certain keywords will definitely help, but they need to be structured correctly otherwise they will get flagged. Watch the video to see how I decided on the YouTube keywords that I will use for this video.

You have watched the entire YouTube video in all its nitty gritty pieces, here is the final product. I understand if you don't watch the entire thing, it is only interesting to people who play that particular game. But now you can see how the completed product looks.

We smashed my target of a couple hundred views on a brand spanking new channel.

I have been asked a few times as to why I don't just use Camtasia for the entire process instead of using OBS for my YouTube videos. I find that OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) works much better than Camtasia for screen recording.

I recorded the same clip from a popular game called Warframe, using both Camtasia and OBS. I made a split screen so you can see the difference. Camtasia used up far more CPU usage and the file size was significantly higher. Both raw videos were close to 1 minute 30, Camtasia took up over 2 gigs and OBS used 440mb.

Camtasia also suffered from a buffering issue which causes the video to pause every now and then.

According to Google, as of late 2015 there are 1.4 billion active Android devices out there. The Android games are becoming more popular on YouTube and many famous YouTube creators are now focusing on this platform.

This lecture shows you a piece of software called BlueStacks which allows you to easily run Android on your PC and how to record it. Giving you the power of your PC to play most of the popular Android Games.