we're going to cover how to use obs studio step by step in this complete tutorial for beginners hey it's justin brown here from primal video where we help you grow an audience and scale your revenue with online video if you're seeing value in this video make sure you're giving it a thumbs up it really makes a huge difference and all the links to everything i mentioned in this video you can find linked in the description box below let's jump into it so obs studio or open broadcaster software is a powerful and very popular live streaming software and screen recording app it runs on mac windows and linux and it can stream to places like facebook live youtube live and pretty much all the major live stream platforms with all its great features though it can be a little overwhelming for new users but don't worry this tutorial is designed to get you up and running fast and walk you through all the key settings and the steps that you need to know to host your next live stream or record your screen using obs all in just a few minutes plus i'll also share with you some low-cost resources or tools that work great with obs along the way like how to get a cool animated title for when you're ready to take things even further okay so here we are in obs i'm going to take you through this walkthrough using a mac but the process is exactly the same if you're on pc as well now this is a brand new fresh install of obs so this is what you'll see if you've never opened the app before this big black box here in the middle is your preview area this is where you can see what it is you're going to be broadcasting out down the bottom here we've got our controls this is where we can start streaming start recording we can switch between this preview mode and studio mode so if i press on this now you can see that we have our program monitor which is what we're pushing out this is exactly the same as what you were seeing before but now i've actually got a preview as well now it's a little confusing because the other one's called preview mode and this is the preview here but essentially we can cue things up on this side and then when we press this transition button then it will actually send it live so if you're going to be moving graphics and those sorts of things around and you want to not be doing it while you're live or the viewers aren't watching what you're doing while you're live then you can use this mode studio mode to have that ability for me personally if i don't need that while i'm live i'm going to go back to the regular mode with just the one big preview window but this is something you can switch between while you're live the next one down here is the settings button this will bring up all of the settings for obs and we will jump back into this one very shortly exit it's pretty obvious it's going to exit the app down the bottom here is pretty cool that you can actually see your cpu usage so you can see if your computer is under load and you're potentially dropping frames or having a bad live stream if your computer is under too much stress so you can see all that at a glance down the bottom here you can also easily see how long you've been live for or how long your recording has been going for as well the next panel along is your transition panel this is where we can adjust the different types of transitions we have between the different scenes we'll get to scenes in a minute but know that you can adjust your transitions here or if we're back on that studio mode your transitions are also in the middle here as well let's get back to preview mode the next one across here is your audio mixer this is where you can easily see and adjust your volume levels for each of the different elements you're going to have in your live stream or each of the different sources you're going to have in your live stream and next to that we've actually got our sources this is where we can add in all of our webcams images videos websites or anything we want to actually include and use in our live streams and the next one across here is your scenes panel now this is essentially we can have groups of assets or different configurations for different elements or different sections of your live streams so you might have a scene set up for just a full screen image of you on screen the next scene might be your computer screen that you're sharing and you might have another scene for you with some text on screen and as like almost every program out there you've also got your standard menus and options and stuff across the top here as well so that's the overall interface let's jump into getting obs set up so come down the bottom here to settings now a lot of the settings in here are going to be personal preference and also going to come down to the type of live stream or the type of recording you're actually going to do things like how it looks the theme whether you want dark mode enabled or you want some other theme in here then obviously that's personal preference likewise with some of these output confirmations here things like being able to show a confirmation dialog box when you're starting a stream or showing one when you're stopping a stream this is what i normally have on like are you sure you want to stop the stream a little pop-up asks you if you want to confirm that i'll normally have this one on and the same for stopping recording as well just in case it accidentally gets knocked and you don't want to stop streaming you don't want to stop recording at least you've got a confirmation box here to maybe save you in that case so for me personally those two are the main ones that i'll add on this window but i would suggest that you have a scroll through this section and just see if there's anything that stands out to you maybe at a later stage once you've gone through and set everything up that you can then add this further level of refinement to customize things up for you okay so that's the general settings the next one down is your stream settings now this is where we get to choose our streaming service whether it's twitch whether it's youtube facebook so these are the primary ones here if we actually hit on show all it brings up a massive list of all the supported live streaming platforms so when we go ahead and select youtube rtmp then we need to paste our stream key into this box our unique key for our specific live stream so i'll go over to our youtube channel grab the key we'll come down here to stream key here we'll hit copy and then we'll go back over to obs and paste our string key into that box there next we're going to come across to output now this is where we get to specify our output settings for our live streams but also for our recording as well so for configuring up our live stream we need to specify a video bitrate the default here 2 500 kilobits per second would be okay for a 720p stream but with this number 2500 kilobits per second the higher we go with it if we went to 3500 or five thousand the higher we go with it the higher the quality of the stream we're gonna push through to youtube or whichever platform we're broadcasting to but it also means that our internet speed our upload speed needs to be capable of consistently pushing that amount of data through to our broadcasting platform now i'll link this page down in the resources below but this is where youtube suggests which bit rates you should be looking at for the different resolutions so this page tells us if we want to broadcast live to youtube at 720p the video bitrate range should be between 1500 and 4000 kilobits per second if we're doing a 1080p stream that needs to be 3000 to 6000 kilobits per second now we can go above but you really don't want to be going below these numbers for a decent looking reliable stream so in this case here we're going to be doing a 1080p live stream through to youtube so i'm going to set this to 5 000 kilobits per second because i know my internet speed is good enough so that's the video quality we can also make changes to the audio quality here as well now i recommend that you're not going less than 128 the default here was 160. that's going to give you pretty good results 192 right up to 320 will give you higher quality audio so if you're going to be broadcasting live with music and those sorts of things and you want to have the highest quality through then you're going to want to pick a higher quality bit rate for your audio as well personally i think anything from 160 to 256 is going to give you great results but if you're only just speaking in your live stream then you'll be able to get away with 160. so those are your live streaming settings if you do want to also be recording or you just want to use obs for recording and that's where your settings down here you can key all of those in the main ones being your recording format you can see the default here is mkv you might want to switch it to an mp4 or an mov file and you'll also want to adjust your recording quality because in a lot of cases you'll want to actually record a higher quality video than the one that you're streaming out so higher than 5000 kilobits per second in this case so we could choose a high quality medium file size or one of the other options in here as well and this next area here audio is where obviously if we get to dive into some audio settings now there's really only a couple in here that you need to look at the rest are going to be fine by default the first one is your channels by default you want to have this set to stereo unless you specifically need to be broadcasting in mono or surround sound 2.1 5.1 surround sound so for most people you're going to want to leave this at stereo for most live streams or most recorded videos but the one that you really want to check in here is your primary audio source which is your mic auxiliary audio not audio two three or four to the first one here and you want to change this from default to your actual microphone that you've got connected to your computer or to your camera which is connected to your computer so in this case i'm going to set it to the cam link 4k because the microphone i'm using is going to be directly connected to my cam link which is connected to my panasonic gh4 so for audio i want it coming through the cam link now even if the default setting here of default is using your correct microphone because of your system settings i would still strongly recommend that you're manually setting this to your actual microphone just so that you don't have any issues down the track this next one down here video this is where we get to specify all of our video related settings for the quality for the frame rate of the live stream that we're going to be creating both here in obs and also to whatever we're going to be pushing out to youtube in this case or even to be recorded the two of them don't actually need to be the same so you could actually be working from a higher resolution project in obs by broadcasting out to youtube or recording a video file in a lower scaled resolution and that's what we get to specify in here so the default here is that our base canvas resolution our obs resolution is at 1920x1080 which is 1080p but the default is saying that we're going to be broadcasting now output is 720p 1280 by 720. so i'm going to hit this little drop down arrow and i'm going to switch this to 1920 by 1080. now you do have the ability in here to pick other resolutions or you can actually just type in a custom resolution as well so you see that there's nothing that goes above 1920x1080 but if you want to broadcast in 4k then you could actually type in the resolution numbers for 4k and you would be good to go so we're gonna go 1920 by 1080 and we're going to leave our frame rate here at 30 frames per second this next one down hotkeys is where we can set up shortcut keys to be able to control obs so we can create our own keyboard shortcuts to do things like start or stop streaming start or stop recording or a heap of the other functions that you've got inside of obs as well so this is something that's not necessary but it can really streamline the way that you're able to control and configure everything up and run your live stream while you're actually live and down here under advanced you guessed it there's a lot more advanced settings in here i would say the one that i do check here and make sure is selected is to automatically reconnect so if for whatever reason your internet drops out that it is actually going to automatically attempt to reconnect and uh to restart your stream with this setting enabled so i'm going to go ahead now and select ok and now we're going to go ahead and set up our scenes for our live streams so i've already got one default scene that's added down the bottom here because there always has to be at least one that's created i'm going to rename this one right click on it and choose rename let's call this main camera now for this main camera we now need to specify which sources we want to have used which cameras we want to have used in this scene of main camera so we're going to go ahead and press the plus button we're going to choose video capture device now video capture device is any camera any webcam that you've got connected to your computer so we're going to pick video capture device we can give it a name here let's choose cam link 4k and go okay and now we're going to specify which camera we're going to link here to this video source so you can see i've got the choice of my built-in webcam the logitech brio webcam a gh5 i currently don't have connected but it is installed and the cam link 4k which is the one that i want to use so selecting it there we are works i'm on camera but you can see just by selecting one of the other ones that they're going to show up there as well over here now so for this primary camera main camera we want this one as the cam link 4k and you can see that the preset here the default setting for it is 1280x720 now we've already told obs that we want our canvas size to be larger than that at 1080p so in this case i'm going to make it bigger by selecting high because that's the actual setting that i've set in the cam link to be at 1080p knowing that it's going to match here so for you you'll either pick high or you'll pick the resolution that you want to have as your camera resolution once that's done we're going to go okay and you can see here that we have cam link here added under main camera scene and we also have the audio bars here working so that we can see that the audio piece is working as well now inside of each scene you're not just limited to one camera one video one audio input you can actually have multiples we could come back in here and we can add in our other webcam if we go to add a video capture device let's name it webcam go okay now let's select the logitech brio and again make it the high setting and go okay you can see that we actually now have two and we can actually turn them on and off all within the one scene so for a really basic setup you could get away with just one scene set up and you're just switching between the different camera angles and things just by turning the layers or the inputs on and off and you can actually change the hierarchy of them so you can pick them up you can move them around so you could create a basic stream this way but where this does become more complicated is if you've got lots of different layers or lots of different inputs in there that you want to be switching between a couple of different screen shares a couple of different cameras if you're then trying to switch between things while you're live it's likely you could be clicking the wrong ones and getting frustrated and overwhelmed with all the settings that's where scenes become really powerful so we can have one scene just for our main camera then we might have a scene for a screen share we might have a scene that we cut to for playing a video animation or something like that so that's what we're going to go ahead and get set up now so i'll remove this webcam here hit the minus and let's go are you sure you just removed yes let's add a new scene and let's call this webcam and let's again add in that video capture device logitech brio go okay and let's find our camera logitech brio let's set that to high let's go okay so we now have two scenes set up our main camera which is the main camera and we have our webcam as well now with all of these inputs we can dive in and we can customize them up as well these video sources we can just select on the screen and pick them up and move them around we can resize them if we want to make them bigger or smaller so you can actually dial these things in as well and i'll show you more about that very soon let's get this back to the correct size and place this back up here okay so we have main camera we now have webcam for the secondary camera let's create a new scene as well for screen share and so over here we're going to hit the plus and we're going to bring in either a window capture if you just want to bring in a specific application window or if you want to bring in a whole computer screen then you can choose display capture and this is where if you've got a second screen connected to your computer this is a great way to do it so that's what i've got in this case display capture and let's call this a second monitor okay it's defaulted to the primary one here the main one but we can just change display to be the other input number one we also get to specify if you want to have the mouse cursor shown on that screen as well so if we go over that screen now you might be able to see it my mouse cursor is moving around on there so we get to turn that on and off with this little checkbox i'm going to turn it off because in this case if we were setting it up with powerpoint slides or something i'm not going to want the cursor on them i'm going to go okay and this has come in huge so again we want to shrink this down so that it fits into our canvas area and we now have a scene here for my computer screen my second computer screen which has a powerpoint or a keynote presentation on it i can click and go through the slides and all those sorts of things so very very easy to add these screen shares and things in here as well now we can even take this one step further if we go back to our screen share here let's duplicate this so we've got a copy of it and we can go screen share with video so another scene that we might want to cut to would be our screen share here our computer screen but with me on screen as well so we can add in here our webcam again so if we choose video capture device and let's choose add an existing one because we've already added it once we're going to choose the cam link 4k and so i'm now full screen over the top we want to scale me down scale this camera down so it could be that we have a little picture in picture effect on top of our screen share there so these are our scenes now if we go back to main camera hey there's me on the main camera full screen then if we want to cut to our secondary angle maybe this is a top down angle or something if we're going to be doing any writing on the desk then we've got our screen share and we've got a screen share with video as well that we can switch to all of these we can just switch between just by selecting them down the bottom here while you're actually live now there's one last thing that i'm going to add in here to show you that is for our video intro so if you're going to be using videos or even photos and things in your live streams or graphic overlays then you can add them into their own scene as well so let's create a new scene let's call it intro video go okay now we're going to add in our source for that and you can see we've got the option in here for image but we've also got media source as well so if we go media source this will be our video intro and let's select a local file let's go through browse and go and find it so it's on my desktop video intro now we have some options in here for our video when we select it we can have a loop so it just plays continuously we can have it restart the playback when the source becomes active so when we switch to this scene then it's going to actually start from the start of the video so we'll want that one selected we can have it set to show nothing when the playback ends so it just goes to a blank screen we can control the playback speed and some other advanced stuff in here as well those are the main ones let's go ahead and press ok and you can see now that this scene is active it's playing our intro video now this is something we really quickly knocked up just using place it it is ridiculously easy there is a link to place it and a tutorial on how you can create your own amazing video animations and graphics and things to use in your live streams you can find the link down below this video as well now with each of these inputs whether they're audio whether they're video inputs that you've added onto your scene here you can actually customize them up further so i've shown you the properties area which we can again access to make those changes by either clicking properties to bring up this configuration menu or we can double click on it to bring up the same one or if we come across two filters this is where we can get further advanced controls and change up the look and feel of our shots and of our audio for each of those elements so at the top here we've got our audio filters it says audio video filters but it's really looking at the audio side of our audio inputs or our video inputs so if we hit the plus on this we can add in audio adjustment tools things like compressor expander gain to adjust the volume and video delay so if your audio is out of sync with the video then you can come in here and you can adjust the delay of that as well likewise down the bottom here we've got some video filter effects in here as well so if we press the plus here and this is where we can apply a lut or a lookup table color grade we can do chroma key so your green screen so if you're sitting in front of a green screen you want to remove that green or blue then you can apply the chroma key effect and you've also got color correction in here as well i'll just click on this one and please specify a name for the filter let's go okay so in here we can really dial in our shot and we can adjust the gamma to make it brighter more darker we can adjust the contrast so a lot of these things in here really give you some granular control over your shot so if we go back across here now and press the plus we've got cropping so we can crop down our shots we can mask out areas of our shots as well with an image mask and you've got other filters and things in here as well i'm just going to close out of this i'm going to show you an example of where we would use one of these effects so back on our screen share with video scene if we select here the cam link 4k i would actually add a filter on this to select down the bottom here and choose crop pad and i would crop the side off this so it was actually smaller so if i move this to the side here we can crop off the right side so this side of our shot just by using the arrows here increase the numbers now we can actually just type it in let's just go say i don't know 200 i'm just guessing maybe more 400 let me just go 600 and we'll also crop the left maybe 400 just to see what looks good maybe 350 and go close so you can see that we're able to reframe our shot as well and crop it using those filters so that's a practical example and it's a tool that i would use quite often inside of obs so now our shot looks like this so we're able to remove all that extra stuff they can also easily add text into your live streams as well so let's go back to the main camera and let's hit the plus down here under sources and let's go to text and let's just call this justin title and go okay and then here we can type in our text let's go justin brown we can go and select our font let's pick oswald let's go bold and go okay if we scroll down you've got some more settings in here around the colors and those sorts of things so you can customize this up to match your brand you got an outline you got a drop shadow if you wanted i'm just going to leave this really basic then go okay and we've then got this text that we can pick up and we can move around to bring up while we're actually live as well while we're recording as well and then that title is something that you can easily turn on and off inside of that scene just by clicking on that little eyeball there to turn it on and off and it works exactly the same for any logos or anything or images you want to bring in as well if we want to bring in our primal video accelerator logo we can choose an image let's call it pva logo and go okay and browse to go and find it and it is this one here pv accelerator and go okay and this is our accelerator logo that we can then position in this scene maybe scale it up a little bit if we want to customize it up further again we've got access to those filters so we select pva logo let's go filters and inside of here we could change it up or crop it down or whatever we need to do with it so let's close out of this so now that you've got all of your settings dialed in your cameras are set up your audio is set up your scenes are set up then you're ready to push that go live button so what i'd like to do here is normally if i'm going live to youtube is i'll jump across to youtube and i'll open up the live studio control area so to access that you want to make sure that you're on your youtube channel sign in to the right account come back over to create and choose go live and then you want to pick stream over here on the left or if you've already scheduled up your live stream then you can go down here to manage and your live stream will be listed in there so we've already gone ahead and we've configured up a live stream ready to go we've already copied and pasted our stream key into obs quick little sanity check with the titles in our privacy here is set to unlisted which is what we'd like for this one then what we need to do is go back to obs and hit that start streaming button so if we press start streaming it's going to tell us that we are live down the bottom here it's got a count up timer saying how long we actually have been live for it'll also tell us if we've got any dropped frames so if our computer or camera isn't keeping up and it also tells us again our cpu usage so we can see how much strain our computer is under and also tells us our bandwidth usage as well so how much data we're pushing out based on what it is that we specified in our settings so if we go across to the youtube side now let's switch back to that we can see here that we are actually live on youtube so it's automatically started our live stream says that the stream is in excellent condition it's also giving us our live chat here as well so that's why i like to have this open when i'm live on youtube so i can still interact and talk to everyone while we're live in here as well now for those of you that are interested in that studio mode and what that looks like if i enable that here now i'll just maximize this screen again then we can see we've got a preview window here and we've got our actual live window on the other side here so if i want to say switch to this scene it's cued it up but it hasn't actually pushed it live until i come over here and press this transition button the moment i press this you'll see that the video will come across to this screen and play so it's now playing and likewise if we then want to queue up the next shot which could be the slides then there's not going to go into this until i press the transition so if i press transition now we're sending that scene live so for those of you that want more control over it it's not just one tap and you're you're live with stuff this is traditionally the setup you would have in professional live streaming software where you're able to set everything customize things up and then push it live instead of just switching between scenes while you're live so that is a complete walkthrough on obs getting everything set up for your live streaming or even for recording videos directly to your computer as well now earlier in the video i said i would also share with you how you can create amazing custom animations and graphics and things to use for your live streams or for your videos check out the video linked on screen now with a step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to do it and it's much easier than you're probably thinking i'll see you in there