Beginner's Guide to OBS Studio Setup

We're gonna 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 mention 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. Now I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 we'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 queue 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 gonna 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. Then we will jump back into this one very shortly. Exit, it's pretty obvious, it's gonna 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 are 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 dialogue box when you're starting a stream or showing one when you're stopping a stream. This is what I'll 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. 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 we're gonna 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 stream key into that box there. Next, we're gonna 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 bit rate. The default here, 2,500 kilobits per second, would be okay for a 720p stream. But with this number, 2,500 kilobits per second, the higher we go with it, if we went to 3,000, 3,500, or 5,000, 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 wanna broadcast live to YouTube at 720p. The video bit rate range should be between 1,500 and 4,000 kilobits per second. If we're doing a 1080p stream, that needs to be 3,000 to 6,000 kilobits per second. Now we can go above, but you really don't wanna be going below these numbers for a decent looking reliable stream. So in this case here, we're gonna be doing a 1080p live stream through to YouTube. So I'm gonna 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 gonna give you pretty good results. 192 right up to 320 will give you higher quality audio. So if you're gonna be broadcasting live with music and those sorts of things and you want to have the highest quality through then you're gonna want to pick a higher quality bitrate 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, then 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 also want to adjust your recording quality. Because in a lot of cases, you 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 can choose a high quality medium file size or one of the other options in here as well. Now this next area here, audio, is where obviously 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 wanna 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 gonna wanna leave this at stereo for most live streams or most recorded videos. But the one that you really wanna 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 wanna 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. But 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 gonna 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, but 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 1920 by 1080, which is 1080p. But the default is saying that we're going to be broadcasting, our 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 1920 by 1080. 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 gonna 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 it 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 to restart your stream with this setting enabled. So we're gonna go ahead now and select okay. And now we're gonna 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. And we're gonna rename this one, right click on it and choose rename, let's call this main camera. Now for this main camera, we're now gonna need to specify which sources we wanna have used, which cameras we wanna have used in this scene of main camera. So we're gonna 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. that I currently don't have connected, but it is installed, and the Cam Link 4K, which is the one that I wanna 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 gonna show up there as well. Over here now. So for this primary camera, our 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 1280 by 720. 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, or one video, or 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 OK. 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 setup, 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 wanna 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 like. 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 remove? 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 OK. And let's find our camera, Logitech Brio. Let's set that to high. Let's go OK. 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 wanna 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 second monitor go okay let's default it 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 to 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 there. I'm going to go OK. 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 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 scene that I'm gonna add in here to show you, and that is for our video intro. So if you're gonna 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 gonna add in our source for that. And you can see we've got the option in here for image. 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 gonna 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. But those are the main ones. Let's go ahead and press okay. 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 Placeit. It is ridiculously easy. There is a link to Placeit 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. And 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 to 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 a 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, then 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 OK. So in here, we can really dial in our shot. And we can adjust the gamma to make it brighter or 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. Now I'm just gonna close out of this and I'm gonna 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 that 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's 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 OK. And then in 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 OK. And 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 gonna leave this really basic and 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 that you wanna 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 OK. And browse to go and find it. And it is this one here, PV Accelerator. And go OK. 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 wanna make sure that you're on your YouTube channel, sign into the right account, come back over to create and choose go live. And then you wanna 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. Now 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 gonna 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 a 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 it 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. It 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 that 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 queued 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 wanna queue up the next shot, which could be the slides, then it's not gonna 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 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.

And all the links to everything I mention 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. Now I'm gonna 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 gonna 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 we'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 queue 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 gonna 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.

Then we will jump back into this one very shortly. Exit, it's pretty obvious, it's gonna 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 are 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 dialogue box when you're starting a stream or showing one when you're stopping a stream. This is what I'll 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.

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 we're gonna 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 stream key into that box there. Next, we're gonna 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 bit rate.

The default here, 2,500 kilobits per second, would be okay for a 720p stream. But with this number, 2,500 kilobits per second, the higher we go with it, if we went to 3,000, 3,500, or 5,000, 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 wanna broadcast live to YouTube at 720p. The video bit rate range should be between 1,500 and 4,000 kilobits per second.

If we're doing a 1080p stream, that needs to be 3,000 to 6,000 kilobits per second. Now we can go above, but you really don't wanna be going below these numbers for a decent looking reliable stream. So in this case here, we're gonna be doing a 1080p live stream through to YouTube.

So I'm gonna 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 gonna give you pretty good results.

192 right up to 320 will give you higher quality audio. So if you're gonna be broadcasting live with music and those sorts of things and you want to have the highest quality through then you're gonna want to pick a higher quality bitrate 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, then 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 also want to adjust your recording quality. Because in a lot of cases, you 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 can choose a high quality medium file size or one of the other options in here as well. Now this next area here, audio, is where obviously 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 wanna 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 gonna wanna leave this at stereo for most live streams or most recorded videos. But the one that you really wanna 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 wanna 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. But 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 gonna 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, but 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 1920 by 1080, which is 1080p. But the default is saying that we're going to be broadcasting, our 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 1920 by 1080. 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 gonna 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 it 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 to restart your stream with this setting enabled.

So we're gonna go ahead now and select okay. And now we're gonna 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. And we're gonna rename this one, right click on it and choose rename, let's call this main camera.

Now for this main camera, we're now gonna need to specify which sources we wanna have used, which cameras we wanna have used in this scene of main camera. So we're gonna 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. that I currently don't have connected, but it is installed, and the Cam Link 4K, which is the one that I wanna 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 gonna show up there as well. Over here now.

So for this primary camera, our 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 1280 by 720. 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, or one video, or 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 OK. 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 setup, 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 wanna 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 like. 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 remove?

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 OK.

And let's find our camera, Logitech Brio. Let's set that to high. Let's go OK.

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 wanna 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 second monitor go okay let's default it 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 to 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 there. I'm going to go OK. 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 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 scene that I'm gonna add in here to show you, and that is for our video intro. So if you're gonna 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 gonna add in our source for that. And you can see we've got the option in here for image. 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 gonna 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. But those are the main ones.

Let's go ahead and press okay. 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 Placeit.

It is ridiculously easy. There is a link to Placeit 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. And 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 to 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 a 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, then 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 OK. So in here, we can really dial in our shot. And we can adjust the gamma to make it brighter or 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.

Now I'm just gonna close out of this and I'm gonna 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 that 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's 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 OK. And then in 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 OK. And 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 gonna leave this really basic and 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 that you wanna 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 OK. And browse to go and find it. And it is this one here, PV Accelerator.

And go OK. 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 wanna make sure that you're on your YouTube channel, sign into the right account, come back over to create and choose go live. And then you wanna 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. Now 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 gonna 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 a 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 it 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.

It 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 that 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 queued 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 wanna queue up the next shot, which could be the slides, then it's not gonna 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 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.

Transcript for:Beginner's Guide to OBS Studio Setup

Transcript for:
Beginner's Guide to OBS Studio Setup