Transcription
While OBS Studio is already a powerhouse for streaming and recording, many users haven't yet discovered some of its most valuable capabilities. So, that's why I did. In this video, I'm going to be showing you guys 10 amazing, easy to use built-in features and plugins so that you can get the most out of [Music] OBS.
All right, so jumping into the very first feature, we have MKV Remux to MP4. What is this, you might ask? Well, it's a feature that enables you to convert your videos recorded in MKV format to MP4. The beauty of recording in MKV is that it enables you to record in a format that is higher quality and that will preserve your video in the case of a crash compared to MP4.
Now, to remux videos in OBS, you guys can go to File and then to Remux Recordings. And within here, this is where you can just drag and drop those files right into this window. Once you have your files in, just go ahead and select Remux. And you're going to see that our new target files are going to be MP4. So, within that same folder, if I bring that back up, you're going to see that I now have the MKV versions, but also the MP4s as well, allowing me now to use these gameplay clips in more supported editing software.
Up next, we have the Move Transition. This is a plugin, which a plugin is just additional functionality and software that's added on top of OBS. But this particular plugin, the Move Transition, allows you to be able to have sources dynamically change between your scenes.
So, to install this plugin, as well as all of the rest that will be discussed in this video, you're going to want to head over to the OBS Project forum website. I'll also leave links to all the plugins I'm going to discuss in the description below. But to download any of these plugins, you're going to want to select the download icon. And you're going to want to make sure that you download the correct package depending on your computer. So if you want to do the easy install for Windows, then you're going to want to get the Windows installer zip file. If you're on Mac, make sure you download the ones that say Mac OS or ARM 64.
Once you get the plug-in executable file, go ahead and launch it and just go through the pages. There's nothing special that you need to set up here. It's just installing a directory into your OBS Studio folder on your computer so that the plugin can actually work. Once that's done, you're going to need to restart OBS Studio. And the thing that trips up a ton of people after they install a plugin is how to make it actually show in your OBS Studio. So, depending on the type of plugin that it is, it will vary where it will show up. But if it's something that you just want to appear within your OBS Studio project, then you're typically going to find that in Docs and you're just going to want to check that plugin off so that you can see it.
In this case, we are going to be looking at the Scene Transitions area. And if you installed the plugin correctly, you should be able to select this plus button and then choose the Move option. Select OK from there. And check this out. Now, just with these two simple scenes set up, you're going to see the Move Transition already in action.
Now, some ways I can make this transition look even better is if we go back over here to where you have the Scene Transitions, instead of it being 300 milliseconds, which is really fast, let's just change that to 700. And then we're also going to go to our Properties here. And if we scroll down, we're going to change the transition to Fade for each one of these sections. Same with this one. And then the other thing we're going to want to adjust is the position. So instead of it being Center Right, we're just going to switch these to None. Position again. None. And from there, everything looks pretty good. We can go ahead and select OK. And now look, it's much smoother. It's not as herky-jerky and fast. It's really clean.
Up next, we have Custom Webcam Shapes. For this one, we're going to be turning that basic square webcam shape that you typically see everywhere to a rounded corners, a circle, or even your own unique custom look. Back a while ago, you had to make your own shapes in apps like Photoshop, but luckily it's a lot easier now.
The plugin you guys are going to want to install is the Advanced Mask plugin by Finite Singularity. The other thing we're going to want to download here is the Source Clone plugin by Excalidraw. And the reason we need this plugin for our facecam sources is so they don't look completely screwed up when showing the larger copy of the source with the image mask applied.
And now back in OBS Studio, you're going to want to go to the plus button and you're going to want to find the Source Clone source. So select that. We're going to name this "Emat Clone". OK. We're going to keep the clone type at Source. Clone is going to be the "Emat Webcam". Nothing else needs to be checked off here. Select OK. And if we bring this on in, you're going to see that we basically have another copy of our facecam.
Now, with the source we just cloned selected, you're going to want to go to Filters and under Effect Filters, select the Advanced Mask option. Here, with the Mask Type set to Shape, you can choose the Shape dropdown to select the shape that you want. Then, using the Alpha Mask properties below, you can position the shape within the webcam how you would like it to look. You can adjust the width and the height to keep it from looking scrunched in. And for the rectangle option to get those nice cornered edges, you can adjust the Corner Radius Length.
If you guys want to apply custom shapes that you might have downloaded online or created in Photoshop, make sure that they're transparent and that they're a PNG file type. Then to add the mask in, you can select the Image Mask type and then select the image using the Browse option.
One additional filter that we can add onto this rounded corners webcam is a drop shadow effect. To do that, we're going to need to install the Strobe Glow Shadow plugin by Finite Singularity. Once you guys have this one installed, you're going to want to select your facecam source. Go to Filters. Go ahead and select the plus button and you should find the Shadow effect. Select OK. Position is going to be an Outer Shadow. Padding, we are going to want to set that. But I'm going to make it manual. Padding Amount. We're just going to shrink it in just a smidge here. So that way when we play with the sizing of that drop shadow that you guys should be able to see behind that webcam border now, you won't get any weird banding effects. We'll put our Shadow Distance about there. And I think I'm feeling pretty good about these settings. Go ahead and copy them if you want. Um, but once you're good with them, go ahead and select Close. And then you'll see that nice drop shadow behind my webcam now, giving it a lot more depth and it just looks higher quality.
All right, the next feature I have to show you guys is multistreaming with a combined chat window. Now, there's a few good options for free multistreaming in OBS. Some of my favorites are the Multi RTMP and ADM Vertical plugins. If you guys need help setting either one of these up, I've made a video in the past that I'll link below.
Now, to get that consolidated view of all of our chat messages, you're going to want to download another application called Social Stream Ninja. In this application, once you get it launched, you're going to want to pay attention to the left-hand side first. This is where you're going to add all of the different sources for where you want your chats to come from. So, if you do YouTube, for example, you're going to want to have the specific YouTube username for your channel. And then I also need to make sure that I'm logged in to YouTube as well through Social Stream Ninja. Twitch username, similar. You can actually put in any Twitch username that you want. TikTok works as well here. But once you have the sources that you want connected, go ahead to the right-hand side. You're going to see "Streaming Chat Doc Overlay". Copy that link and then back into OBS Studio. You're going to want to go to Docs. Go down to Custom Browser Docs. Give it a name. Paste in the URL. Select Apply. And you'll see the chat box pop up. You can close out of the browser docs window. And then just put this chat window wherever you'd like. We'll just put it on the side here. And I'm just putting in XQC here just because he's live right now. But look at that. All of his stream messages are coming through just to prove that it works with, of course, Twitch, but it also worked when I tested it with YouTube and TikTok.
For my Windows users, if you want a really nice alternative to this setup, you guys can check out the SE Live plugin from Stream Elements. It gives you unlimited free multistreaming, a combined chat window, and so many more features.
Since we're speaking of Stream Elements, as an added bonus, you guys can leverage their Overlays and Alerts builder. On Stream Elements website, you can log into your Stream account and choose from their collection of free overlays or even bring in your own custom elements and edit them in their builder. What makes this builder so awesome is that it takes what would typically be a multitude of sources within your OBS project and condenses them down into a single source, which can be added as just a link within a browser source. Just make sure that within this source that you set the dimensions to 1920x1080 and that you save your changes in the Stream Elements builder after you edit your overlays. On top of all of that, you guys can set up combined stream alerts by going to your Stream Elements settings and then linking those other social media accounts under the "Add Channel" section.
Up next, we have separating game chat and application audio. So, right here, you guys see my gameplay and its audio coming through. But what if I wanted to add my Discord chat or my Spotify music to my OBS project and keep all of that audio separate? Well, to do that, we're going to want to go over to our Sources, select the plus button, go up to Application Audio Capture. We can name that "Spotify", select OK, go to Window, select that dropdown, and then choose the application you want to capture audio from. So, in this case, we can go with Spotify Premium. Select OK. And now when we go ahead and play some Spotify music, you'll see that it is coming through loud and clear into our OBS project. For any other apps on your computer, you can follow the same exact process.
The next feature I have to show you guys is how to separate the music track from your Twitch VODs. So, as you saw, we already have our Spotify audio source set up here. But what we can do is if we right-click within the Audio Mixer, go to Advanced Audio Properties, you're going to see all of your audio sources coming through here. So, you'll see your game audio, whatever apps audio you included, and even microphone audio, which should be included in here as well. But for this case, we're going to be looking at the Spotify track, and that's one that I do not want to have included in our VOD. So, we're going to go all the way over to the right-hand side here where you see Tracks, and then we're just going to uncheck one of these. So, we can just go with Track 2, which basically means here that the Spotify audio will not be picked up in Track 2. Everything else that's checked off within the Track 2 column will be recorded. So once that's done, we can go ahead and select Close and then we can go over to our Settings. And then from here, we're going to want to go to Output. And whether you're in Simple or the Advanced output, you will be able to see the Twitch VOD Track option. So in this case, we're going to check that off. And then we're going to choose the second option here because that's the track that will not be playing copyrighted music to where we could get DMCA takedowns, all the bad things we don't want to happen as a content creator. Once you do that, go ahead and select Apply and OK. Stream and your VODs will be all peachy.
Next, I have another plugin to show you guys here and this is for Source Recording. Head over to the OBS Project forum and download this plugin by Excalidraw. Once you have it installed, I'll be able to go to any one of my sources. Let's go with the "Emat Clone" for the facecam I have here. Go to Filters. In the Effect Filters area, we're going to want to go ahead and select that plus button. And you're going to find an option called Source Record. If you installed the plugin correctly, go ahead and select OK. From there, in the Record Mode, this is where you can set how you want this source to be recorded. So, you can set it to Always be recording, Recording while you're streaming, Recording when you're recording, which I think makes the most sense. You can also have it recording when you're streaming and recording at the same time. You can set the File Path for where you want it to save. File Naming Convention, the Recording Format here. There are some additional settings below if you need some more finite control with how you're trying to record. But once you're good with your settings, go ahead and select Close. And then in my case, when I select the Start Recording button, it's going to record what you see on this canvas, of course, but then it's also going to record a separate file of all of the sources that I have a Source Record effect filter set for.
Now, I imagine not everyone watching this video wants to take the additional effort to edit down these individually source recorded files. So, that's where our sponsor, Nexus Clips, comes in to help. They offer a very affordable service that allows you to leverage the power of AI to find the most highlight-worthy moments from your live streams. Using their tool, you can select the moment that you like the most. Go to Create Clip, and this will give you the option to modify the start and end times. Then with their easy-to-use video editor, you can adjust your clip's gameplay and face cam framing positions, add subtitles, text, and once you're all set, you can easily download or publish your short directly to YouTube or TikTok. So go try it out using my link in the description below and let me know how you like it.
The next feature I have to show you guys is the Replay Buffer. What is this, you might ask? Because the name definitely doesn't give it away right away. Well, for those of you guys that might be familiar with Elgato's Flashback Recording feature, well, this is pretty similar to that to where if a moment happens and you want to be able to capture it, but you weren't necessarily recording, well, this feature was already recording, so you're able to capture that insane gameplay moment that you might have missed otherwise.
So, to enable this, you're going to want to go to your Settings, go to I'm sorry, I brain farted. Go to Output and then you're going to find a tab called Replay Buffer. Select that and this is where you can enable the replay buffer and set the amount of time you want for this flashback recording. So let's say instead of 20 seconds, let's go with 30 seconds. I think that's pretty good. It'll also tell you the approximate amount of memory usage that will be utilized so that this footage can be recorded while you're just kind of playing along. So go ahead and select Apply and OK. Start the replay buffer. Now, while you are a gamer, you can just select this button on the right-hand side of the "Stop Replay Buffer" button. So, that way you save the last 30 seconds of gameplay moment that occurred.
Next, we have blurring and removing the background to your webcam. So, there's a couple ways you guys can accomplish this. I'll cover the first method here, and this is for those of you who have an Nvidia graphics card. So, if you have one that meets the minimum requirements, go ahead and install the Nvidia Broadcast software. And when you have it pulled up, it should look something like this here. There are some audio features that this tool has, which is awesome, but you know, we care about the video features here. So, here we're going to want to select our camera. And then the next thing is the Virtual Background. And this is the big thing that allows you to be able to blur or remove it altogether. So, make sure that that is checked on. And you you'll see that blurriness already start. I can actually adjust that blur if I'm in the blur mode by just adjusting the strength here to make it stronger or, you know, weaker to give it more of a natural bokeh. The other thing I can do is replace but also remove the background altogether. And as you can see it's like I have a green screen without a green screen. And the Nvidia tool here does a really good job of knowing where your gaming chair is as well as your head.
To pull this into OBS all we would need to do is in our Sources go ahead and select the plus button. Another Video Capture Device source. I'm gonna call it "Nvidia Cam". OK. Select that dropdown and we're going to find the Nvidia Broadcast source. Once you select that, you're going to see it come through just like so. No other settings need to be changed. Select OK. And there you have it. Really good, really clean, and really awesome.
Now, I know not everyone has access to the Nvidia Broadcast tool. There's another tool that works very similarly, and that's the Prism Lens application. Once you have it pulled up, you're going to need to log in with an account. I went with Google here. When you get into the app, you're going to see these three different Prism Lens setup. Just go ahead into one of them. I'm in Prism Lens 1 here. And on the right-hand side, you're going to see your virtual background options here. So, if you stay within the original, you can actually set the blur amount behind you, like so.
Pulling this virtual camera into OBS is really easy. In one of your Video Capture Device sources, just select the corresponding Prism Lens. One thing with this app is that the remove background doesn't work as you'd expect. If you put this into OBS, it's going to actually be a black screen on the background. So, you'd want to actually keep this removed, but then add your own green screen behind it. So, you can go online, find a green screen, put that in here, and back in OBS Studio here, we're going to need to keep this source selected, go to Filters, select the Effect Filters plus button, and then go all the way up to Chroma Key. Select OK. And when you do that, you'll have a completely transparent background. You can close out of that and you get the same similar effect as you would have gotten in the Nvidia Broadcast.
The next awesome plugin I have to show you guys here is the Advanced Scene Switcher plugin by Warm-up Till. With this plugin, you'll be able to set certain parameters so that you can automatically switch scenes without you having to press a button. Hands for you, baby. That's the way we like it. For this, I've added in a second scene which contains its own separate webcam so that we can switch between the two.
Now, if you guys installed the plugin correctly, you should be able to go to your Docs and then see the Advanced Scene Switcher plugin. Go ahead and select that and you're going to want to make sure that the scene switcher plugin is active. So, if it's not and you see this red flashing thing, go ahead and make sure that it's active. Now, we're going to want to head over to this settings icon to access the properties of this plugin. You're going to want to be within the Macros tab here. And then, as you see this green flashing plus button. It's obviously important. So, we're going to want to select that. And I figured here for the sake of time, instead of showing you step-by-step how to make a macro, which are just conditions to cause an action, it would be better to show you guys some examples that I already put together that you can just copy and play around with.
So, the first one here is setting the amount of time I want to be on a scene before switching to another one of my scenes along with the specific transition. To go along with this macro, I created a second one which is identical but switches the scene so that they create a loop between them. Facecam 1. And after 5 seconds, we'll switch over to Facecam 2. And after 3 seconds, it should switch back to Facecam 1. And the cycle repeats. A couple other great conditions that can be used is the Audio option for multi-angle or multi-point of view streaming where if the audio becomes loud enough, the action will be used to switch to a specific scene. This can actually be really handy to show the gameplay scene that is most active. Another condition you guys can try out is Idle. This can be great to use if you're not touching your keyboard or mouse for a set amount of time and you want to trigger a scene such as "Be Right Back".
But there is a very powerful tool that gives you the ability to go even more above and beyond with your stream and that's Streamerbot. You guys can head over to their website, also linked below. Download the current version that is there. Unfortunately, it is only available on Windows, but hopefully one day, you know, we'll get Mac and Linux involved in this too. After you download the zip file, make sure you extract it. Go into the folder and find the Streamerbot executable file. This is what you're going to need to run in order to pop up this window that you see here to do the things that you need to do.
But before we even can get to that, we're going to need to set up something in OBS called WebSockets, which just provides a link between OBS and Streamerbot to be able to communicate with one another. So, to enable that, you're going to need to go to your Tools, go to WebSocket Server Settings. Here, you're going to want to make sure that the "Enable WebSocket Server" is checked off. That is very important for this to work. Below that, you're going to see your server settings where you can go to "Show Connect Info". Select that. And this is where you're going to see your server password. Go ahead and select the copy button. And then if we pull back up the Streamerbot application, you're going to want to go to the Stream Apps tab, go under OBS, and then right-click, select Add, and then within here, you're going to want to give this a name. So, we'll just call it "OBS Midnight Project". We're going to paste in that password that we just copied. We'll select "Reconnect on disconnect". Select OK. And then we'll see that the host appears, but it's not yet connected. We're going to need to right-click it, select Connect. And now when we go over to the bottom right-hand side to see our connections, we'll see that OBS is in green status, which means it is connected.
The other things that you guys are going to want to set up are the platforms that you're going to be streaming to on YouTube or Twitch. So go over here to the Platforms tab. You'll see under Twitch there's an additional tab where it says Accounts and this is where you can log in to your broadcast account. For YouTube, you can go to the YouTube tab, go to Account, and this is where you can log in to your broadcast account.
But anyways, the first thing I wanted to show here is setting up a command that people in the chat can use to trigger certain functions within your OBS project. So, I'm just going to go ahead and set up a new action here. We're going to call it "Chat Trigger". Select OK. And then where it says Triggers, we can right-click, go to Core, go to Commands, and then go to Command Triggered. We're going to create a command. Focusing on the top left here, we can give it a name. We can call this "gameplay". I can set where I want the source of this to come from. So, Twitch message, a YouTube message, and then looking over here, maybe I only want my moderators to be able to do this function. So, I can just select this arrow icon here with "Moderator" selected, and that will allow only the moderators to perform this action. So I'm going to select OK. OK again. And then under Actions we can right-click OBS, Set Active Scene. Then we can go with "gameplay". Select OK. And now when we're live on Twitch and someone does that exclamation point gameplay command in OBS, that scene will switch over. Really freaking cool the amount of customization you have there. Like honestly this is probably the biggest like rabbit hole app that you could go down guys. Just like look at all the available options that you have just within OBS. You can do so many things with different media files, sources that you guys might be using in your OBS project and just automate them and allow viewers to literally have fun with different elements of your stream to make it that much more interesting and that much more exciting.
Luckily, Streamerbot has put together a massive collection of resources that can be used for people to configure a wide variety of different functions. So, I'll link this page in the description below as well. If there are any areas or plugins that you guys like to see more of on the channel, let me know. But in the meantime, subscribe, like, all that good stuff. And I'll see y'all in the next one. Peace.