Transcription
In this video, I'm going to show you how to use StreamYard like a pro. Whether you're looking to live stream, whether you're going to record a podcast, or even record video content like this, StreamYard is a great tool to do it. Make sure you stick around to the end cuz I'm also going to share with you my three-step sticky note plan, which really takes the pressure off if you're live streaming.
So, it's actually been quite a while since we've created a video like this on StreamYard. There's been lots of new additions, so I'm going to cover off on a lot of the new features as we go through this, too.
So, the first thing you want to do is head to the StreamYard website, create an account if you don't have one already. You can get started for free on a trial version, or you can log in. Now, I would recommend that you're using a Chrome-based browser. There's been the ones that have been way more stable and had the best results for me. Even though I love Safari, I have had some issues with Safari. So, use a Chrome-based browser for this.
But when you log in, this is what you'll see. So, this is your main dashboard where we can quickly create a live stream, a recording, or we can even run a webinar depending on which plan you've got access to. We can see our upcoming scheduled live streams here. And we've also got our past ones in here as well. So, we can download the recordings and all of that stuff.
Now, straight off, I love that they've implemented the ability to switch the theme or night mode, dark mode here because if you're using a teleprompter, this used to be a nightmare with Streamyard and you get glare and reflections and all sorts of stuff. So, you can switch that up here. Now, for this tutorial, I'm going to leave it on light so that it's easier for you to watch, but yeah, normally I'm rocking the dark version.
So, for this video, I'm going to take you through setting up a live stream, but obviously the process for setting up to do camera recording as well is going to be very much the same. So, we're going to pick live stream here, create a live stream. We then get to pick where we want to actually go live. Now, we can go live to multiple destinations at the same time, and that's something I love about Streamyard. So, if you're not ready to connect your account yet, you can skip the destination for now, but I'm going to choose YouTube. I've then gone through and verified and linked it to our YouTube channel. Again, if we want to pick something else as well, maybe a Facebook page or group or something, then we could select that here as well.
So, first off, it's going to ask you, is this like an actual live stream, me talking, going live like this, or is this a pre-recorded stream where maybe we're playing back a video? So, we can select that. Here we've got our destinations here. We can give this a name, test stream. Again, we give it a description. I want you to treat this, especially if it's YouTube, like a YouTube video where we want to put in a good title, a good description. In the description, we also want to include anything that might be of benefit to the viewers while we're live. So, if we're going to be talking about a course or a program that we have, then we could put that in there. So, if it was me going live now, I could have something like join Primal Video Plus today for just $19 a month. There's the link to join, cancel anytime.
So, no, this video is not sponsored, but hey, if you are interested in checking out Primal Video Plus, where you can access Justin AI and all of our deep dive training and courses and things all in one place, then you can access it for $19 per month and you can cancel anytime. Great product placement, Justin. Well played.
So, then we've got here, we can add our referral link, like our affiliate link if we'd like to, into the description as well. This is your personal preference if you want to turn this on or off. We are big fans of affiliate marketing. It's one of the biggest ways that we make money. So you could add that in there and start to generate revenue as well.
But then this next setting here is really important. Are we going to be broadcasting in landscape? So widescreen or portrait or there is the option to go live in both. Now YouTube themselves have actually released a way where you can go live on YouTube to both portrait and landscape where it's just going to crop in on the widescreen version. And I'll have another video linked in the description box below on how you can turn that feature on because in some cases that might be easier or better suited for what you're doing. So we're going to leave this as landscape. We're going to choose here. Do we want our live stream public, unlisted, or private? So public, pretty obvious. This is one where YouTube can push it out or it's public for anyone to find on whatever platform you are broadcasting to. Unlisted, they will need to have the link to join. and private. Really, no one's going to see it unless you manually add them to that live stream so that they have access. I'm going to leave this one here as unlisted for this one as this is a test.
We can then choose a category. Again, same options you have for a regular YouTube video. Just pick the one that is best suited or best matches the type of content you're going to be putting out. Maybe I'll choose film and animation. And now we get to choose, are we going to go live now or reasonably soon or are we going to schedule this for later? So, if you do want to schedule this for a time in the future, then we can specify the daytime, all of that stuff. We can upload our thumbnail image. And I like now you can actually create a thumbnail image with AI in here. And just for some peace of mind, it does say down the bottom here that your scheduled live streams won't go live automatically. You still need to trigger it to go live. So, if you forget or something or everything seems to happen last minute when you go live, that don't panic. It's not just going to send you live. You still have to manually trigger that.
So, for this one though, I'm not going to schedule it for later. We'll just do as if we're going to create a stream for now today and we're going to create this stream.
So now this is taking us to where we can get ready to join the broadcast studio. So straight out we can see here that Chrome is asking me to grant access to my camera and to my microphone. And I want to definitely allow it either this time or while visiting this website. So we can see that that's working here. Now we're now getting a preview. I can see that my audio is coming through because we're getting those audio bars there.
Now, from here, I'd suggest that you're clicking settings, and we just want to go through and make sure that we have everything set up the way that we want. So, just under general here, we can specify the resolution or the quality of our live stream. Again, depending on the plan that you're on, you might have some different options in here. For this one, I'm going to leave it as 720p. Now, a lot of these settings you could actually leave on default, but I would recommend that you're going through and reading them at some point just so you can see the types of things that you can customize up here because the more that you understand what you can do in here, the more you can make it yours so that it works for your workflows and everything just becomes easy.
So, let's come down here to camera. This is where we can again pick which camera we want to use. We can specify the camera resolution. So, that's really low for some reason. So, I want to do at least 720p camera resolution here, but obviously we can go higher. And there are higher plans that will unlock up to 4K. Once we've picked those, we can come over to our audio settings. Again, we want to pick our microphone. We can choose our speakers. So, if we are going to have a guest, then maybe we want headphones through. So, we make sure that those are selected. And then we've also got the ability in here to turn on things like echo cancellation. So, if you're in an echoey room, I mean, I'm not in the best room right now, but if we're going to have sound coming out of our speakers, there's going to be echo coming through, then we can actually enable that and it does a really good job. There's also some tools in here to remove the background noise. Again, if you're in a noisy environment, these tools can help make that sound better. But again, if this is your first time, just know that these things are there and do some test runs with just leaving it as default. See what it sounds like, see what it looks like, and we can come back and tweak these for the next one.
There's some visual effects and things in here as well. So, we can enhance skin appearance. Are you saying my skin needs Wow. Okay. Yeah, probably not. I mean, I can dial this down. Lots of stuff. Green screen effects, virtual backgrounds, color filters. I do like that they've added this now. So, we can actually customize up our shot. Ideally, you're getting this set up right in camera or with your webcam settings, but we can also adjust your brightness, your contrast, all your color correction stuff. We can I like that we can do that in here.
Now, for those of you that do want to be a bit more advanced with this stuff, too. I like that there are hot keys. So, we can actually program up a stream deck or something. I'm going to pull this. Come on, cable. Uh, a stream deck or something. Uh, where we can just press buttons and it's going to trigger that for us. Or we could just remember what they are and press those things on the keyboard.
Okay, let's back out of this now. And we've got our name, our display name in here. We do get to choose later on if we actually want to show that or not, but it's a good idea to have that in. And then we hit enter studio. And this is going to take us to our main streaming and recording interface, the studio.
So, straight out this big black box here, this is our preview. This is what we're going to send live or what we're going to be recording. And we can see that we currently have nothing in here. It's blank. So, by default, this is what you're going to see. You will need to add your camera here to the stage. And you can see that when we do that, I'm now on stage. So, this is where we're going to see our video assets. So, if we've got multiple cameras, if we've got a screen share, we're going to see those line up down the bottom here that we can just turn on and off by clicking the buttons, adding them, and removing them from the stage. I'm going to leave this one back on screen here now.
Now, as for customizing up what we're seeing here, I love here that we've got these presets down the bottom here to switch between different looks, different layouts depending on what it is that we're actually doing. So, there's some here that are not a full screen layout. So, we'd be able to see our background when we add that in or run it with the black. Sure. a 50/50 screen split. You see that's also made it full screen for me because it's just me on here right now. So, we've got a bunch of different layouts that we can just click on while we're live or while we're recording and that's actually going to switch in real time. So simple.
Now, there's other ways that we can do this as well. Like if you put your mouse over the camera, then we can do things like make it full screen. Hidden up the top here as well. There's also a few settings like we can remove this person from the stage. So, if we have multiple people on and someone was just talking too much, no. or we just had to remove someone. We could come up here and we could remove them from the stage and they're gone. Add me back in. Now, we can also mute them. We can change some of their settings and things, volume levels and everything all from this screen, too.
But we can also now set up custom presets for these layouts down the bottom here as well. We can either edit the ones that are there or we can hit the plus to create a whole new layout. And we can just go through and add what we would like in here. So, let's go add a dynamic camera grid recommended. Okay. So, we've now got this placeholder here for me plus a guest. We can pick this up. We can move it around. We could make it full screen if we'd like. If we wanted something else on here, we can add another item. Maybe we add a media slot. So, this could show our screen share. Maybe we have a screen share shown down the bottom here like this. And cameras up the top here like this. We can customize it up. So, when we hit save, we can give that a name. Let's save that layout. and it now shows here whenever we want to switch to that view.
Now, it's also worth noting at this point that while we can control and mute stuff from here for you with your own camera, you as the host of this, you've also got your own controls down the bottom here. So, we can mute the microphone here or it says we've got the shortcut command D because I'm on a Mac be control D on Windows. We can turn our camera on and off here as well. So, I'm still in the stage, but I turned my camera off. So, I like that we got control over both. we don't really have to come in here and fiddle around and like shoot I need to quickly mute my microphone and try and find that button.
There's a couple of different ways that we can do this. We'll keep moving on to some of the settings and options and stuff that you have in here and then we'll go through the process of adding in a guest and a screen share too.
So over on the side here, there's a whole lot of extra settings and things in here. The top one is comments. So while you're live, if the platform you're live to supports it, and most do, then we can get our comments and everything listed out here. So we don't need to be now over on YouTube or Facebook to read the comments. We can actually see them all live and we can feature them. So, let me just switch back here to the full screen me. Let's say I was live now and this is a comment that came through. I can press on that and it's going to show on screen. We could then answer that question, that comment. I can then click on it and it's gone. Very simple. And again, it's easy for you to run and manage this stuff while you're live. You can even respond to a comment like you could post something in there, ask a question. We can do all of that stuff really easily.
The next one down here is banners. These are different titles and things that you can bring up while you're live, while you're recording. Again, we can create these ahead of time. We can choose how long it's going to show on screen for. And then we can create that. I've got one here. If we just click on this now as an example, we've brought a title up. So, these could be different topics that you're covering off as you're live. Or in this case here, another shameless plug for Primal Video Plus. But we have all of this set up before we go and we can just click to show and hide them as we're live.
Now, just to show you what the scrolling one looks like if we turn this on and then we come up here to edit. Let's have a scroll across the bottom. Let's hit save. Oh, now we need to turn it back on. And it's now scrolling across the bottom. Very news style.
But down below this, this is where we can preload different graphics and things that we've got in here. So, right now, I'm just on the free plan because I like showing things off on the free plan so you can see what you can access and what it's worth upgrading for. But, we've got different logos and things that we can bring in here as well. You can see that we've used this before. We've preloaded here our primal video graphics, which you will need to be on a paid plan to customize this stuff up. There's different overlays that we can bring up on screen. And obviously, again, we can upload our own, too. And we can turn these on and off while we're recording or live as well, just by selecting on them.
We also have the ability to add a QR code in here as well. So, if we hit create on this now, we've now got a QR code that if someone scanned is also going to take them to Primal Video Plus.
Now, down below that, this is where we can upload some video clips to play while we're live. It could be a countdown timer. It could be a be right back or any any video clip that you want to play really. So, there's some demo ones in here as well. So, this is an example. So, you could have something like that run at the start of your live stream. We're just again tapping on them or clicking on them and they play. Again, you want to load this stuff up ahead of time.
Now, back while we were on the other view at the start, I think it was this one where we could see the background. This is where we can customize what that is. There's some AI tools in here to generate one for you. We can upload our own or there are some preset ones in here that we can pick and that now becomes the background. So, again, if we're running them full screen, it's not really a big deal. is when we start to bring in guests and you're on one side, they're on the other that if we wanted the widescreen look, we're going to have that border box around the outside. So, showing the background, there are some sound effects and stuff built in. And we can upload our own as well. Things like applause and a gong. Very important. And you can also select or add in your own background music and stuff here, too.
As for customizing up the titles and the style of everything, that's this next area here. So, this is where we want to match things up with your brand. So you put in your brand color and then we can choose bubble, classic, minimal or block as for themes. So if I come back here and add a comment back on screen, then we'll get to see what these actually look like as we click through them. So this is the minimal look. If we hit bubble, classic, and block, and then back to minimal, we can customize this up to some degree. You also get some control over your fonts and things in here as well. You can see this is another premium feature with this star. And if you're someone who prefers the square or the circle camera look, especially if you're going to be sharing your screen, you want this down in the bottom corner or something like that, then we can switch between the different aspect ratios or cropping on our main camera here, too.
Now, this next feature, notes, is actually a teleprompter that we can use while we're live. So, we can turn this on or off, or you just have your bunch of notes, your bullet points to keep you on track while you're live. So, this could be some top questions that you've got or any important details that you want to share. Actually, I've got a really good tip with this coming up at the end. What I have written as my notes before I go live to save me when I'm recording, I could easily put that in here. But with this teleprompter feature, we're not just limited to having them in there as notes just off to the side here. With the teleprompter, it'll actually overlay them so we can read them and still make eye contact with the viewers, but we're actually reading a script or we're reading our bullet points. Pretty cool feature.
If we're bringing in guests or doing an interview or something like that, then we can access everyone's information and their settings and everything from here, we can do simple things like just verify the audio is coming through at a decent level, which we can see there with those green dots. Might be hard to see on the screen recording, but all of your guests will be listed out here. We've also got the ability to copy this invite link to get someone into becoming a guest as well, something that we can share out, but I'll come back to that one really soon. We've also got private chat in here as well. So for people who are on here, whether it's your team helping you with a live stream or your guests, we can privately chat with them outside of the comments, the public ones that are going out to the whole live stream.
And then down below that, we've got our recording options and settings and stuff in here. This will show you that you are recording, but you'll also see it up the top here, too.
So to bring in other elements like sharing your computer screen, there's a couple of different ways that we can find this. There is the option down here, the screen share button. There's also the option to click here, present or invite. And then we can choose to bring in an image, a video file, an extra camera if we'd like to as well. If you've got a second webcam or something connected, slides and PDFs, we can access those from here and have them as another media source that we can click on and bring up on our screen. But I've also got our screen share option here, too, where we go through, find what we want to use. Maybe I'll hit entire screen here. Let's pick the screen that I'm recording with right now. We can choose if we want to bring sound in with that here and hit share. And we've now got that as an option here that we can add to the stage. So this obviously going to look a little crazy because I'm sharing the screen that I'm on. But again, now when we switch through these layouts and things, we can see this happening what it looks like with a screen share as well. I'm going to hit remove on that one there.
So same process. If you want to bring in a guest, we can do it from here or we can come down the bottom here to add a guest. We get our unique link here that we can send out to someone. We can copy that link and then we can close that. send it out. Now, I don't have many friends, so I'm just going to open this up on another device. I'm going to open this up on my iPhone to show you what this looks like because your guests can join from a phone. So, I'm going to paste that link in. On the phone side, all your guests will need to do is just to allow access to their camera and their microphone. They can type in their name as we did at the start. So, if we look down the bottom here now, we can see our very good-looking guest has joined. They're down here in the waiting room that we can bring up on screen at any stage. So, if I just click on this now, we can add to stage. And we can see, oh, my phone's in portrait. So, that's why they got the black bars here. So, you want to tell your guest if they're using their phone to rotate it. So, we can see now that this is working just like with any of the other things that we've got on the stage here. We can control things. We can edit the name. We can kick them from the studio. We can ban them from the studio. We can click on these different layouts now and they're going to happen in real time. I got bad Wi-Fi, that's why the quality isn't good here from the phone. But you can see we can have combinations of these things. Screen shares, sharing slides, switching between the different people, the different camera angles. I absolutely love how simple this is. Let's go ahead and let's remove second Justin from the stage. Let's actually let's kick them from the studio al together. Let's kick the guest out. So, that's how easy it is to bring in a guest or multiple guests because these themes, they scale out if you've got more people on there.
But, in terms of actually recording or going live, that's all done up the top here. You can see we've got the go live button. It is worth just doing a quick sanity check. We can see here the different destinations that we're going live to. So, if we're picking multiple destinations, Facebook, YouTube, whatever, we would see them all across the top here. So, I've just got the YouTube one there because that's what we've selected. I like that we can click on this. We can quickly see that we're going live. It's unlisted. We've got our title and everything there. All good to go. We can make changes to it. We can add extra destinations right up until the end as well under this edit area. And then when we're ready to go live, we just hit go live.
Now, if you're using this for recording, that will be switched for a record button instead of a go live button. So, let's hit go live. It's going to prompt us. Do we want to have an intro video that plays automatically? Again, we can set this up ahead of time. We don't have one, so we're going to hit go live. Again, I'm going live to an unlisted link, so no one will actually find and see this, but we can see straight away that we're live. I've got the live count up timer. They a countdown count up here. So, we can see that we're live. We've got everything goes red. There's red up here where we can leave the stream or end the stream. Our comments would start to come through here in real time. But again, we can switch stuff out. So, we can feature our comments. We can hide our comments. We can come back to our banners. We can bring up our primal video plus ticker along the bottom. We can have that up there while we're also then playing a video file or clicking through different things, changing the background, changing the scenes here for the different looks. Maybe we show our background here or we switch to bringing in our screen share.
And then when it's time for us to finish our live stream, we just hit end stream up here. We can choose to play a video again if we'd like to, but I'm going to hit end stream. We wait a few seconds and that is done. That's a wrap.
There you go. So, there is a cool new feature now when you're finished that you can have AI automatically generate clips from your interview, from your live stream, too. So, if we click on this now, obviously, we're not going to have anything really exciting in here from that stream, but it says these media items will be deleted in 24 hours from now. Obviously, we can upgrade to keep them there longer, but it's then going to go through and generate clips based on what's been said. So, it's pulling the transcript. It's looking for viral clips or things that it thinks would be really good. This is almost like your Opus clip equivalent built in here now into StreamYard. We can download the full recording. We can do our manual editing in here as well, which is pretty powerful. But this is also available back on our main dashboard area on the home screen here. If we come back to past live streams or past things, there's our one here from today. And we can view it. We can download it. we can go back into the studio. So, if we want to replicate those settings again to run next week's live stream, then we can use that same studio setup for that.
So, personally, I just love how fast and easy it is and how intuitive it is that you could be an absolute beginner. You could jump in and just create an amazing looking live stream just with a few simple clicks. You don't need to dive into an OBS or features upon features or menus upon menus to find little settings and configure everything up. you've got a decent amount of configuration in there to create something amazing really simply.
Now, back at the start, I said I'd also share with you my sticky note plan. My three things that I'm putting on a sticky note before any live stream. This has saved me so much. And it all came about from when I had a total failure of a live stream where I freaked out. I went live. I didn't know what to say. There was no one that showed up and I was just freaking out. So, I don't want that for anyone. I want you to be calm, collected, and actually have fun when you're live.
So, before I go live, there are three things that I'm putting on a sticky note. The first one that I suggest you put on there is your opening sentence because you're going to be setting things up in StreamYard or whatever you're using to go live. Let's just have that first sentence down or a bullet point of what you're going to say when you first start off. So, we're not, oh, are we live? Are we live? Guys, just let me know in the comments. Are we live? You can actually start with a compelling hook. In this live stream, we're going to be doing a Q&A. We're going to be hanging out, getting your questions answered. or in this live stream, I'm going to be taking you through the top five things you need to know. Like, it's a compelling hook. It's great for people watching live, but it's really powerful for the people that are watching the replay afterwards because it starts like a regular YouTube video. So, definitely number one, your first opening sentence.
Number two, have a bullet point or a quick note around why you are doing this stream. What is your goal for the stream? Is it to promote your courses or your programs? Is it to just to hang out and answer questions and it just pulls you back into focus? All right, cool. Maybe we'll mention this thing again. Maybe we'll tell people to hit subscribe so that they don't miss future videos.
And the third thing, which is aligned to that, is your call to action. What specific action do you want people to do after watching this? So, this is normally something that goes to the end, but with a successful live stream, you could actually be mentioning this throughout. So it could be something like if you're interested in checking out Primal Video Plus, there is a link in the description to check it out. Right? We're giving a clear direction on what we think would be the logical next step for a viewer watching this piece of training. Which also then comes back to when we're setting up our live stream, we're thinking about these things and we're making sure that all the links to our call to action, what we want our viewers to do next are easily accessible for them. Whether that's a title that we're bringing up on screen, whether that is something that's in the description box, a link that they can just click, or whether we've copied and pasted some text that we can post as a comment in the chat while we're live. We want to give some thought to that. But having that sticky note up front, it's going to help with your planning and your prep, but it's also going to keep you on track and keep everything running smoothly while you're live.
Now, if you're wondering where you can get legal licensed music that won't give you any copyright issues while you're live streaming or for your YouTube videos, too, check out the video linked on screen. If you liked Streamyard, but you're looking for something a little bit more, then check out the OBS tutorial I've got on screen for you as well. That's a much more advanced step up from StreamYard. And as always, we've got a bunch of other links and resources in the description box below to help you even further. I'll see you in the next video.