What's up guys! Welcome back to the Gaming Career YouTube channel. This
channel is all about learning how to livestream and create content within the
gaming niche. Today's video, we're going to be looking at the latest version from
our friends over at OBS and that is OBS Studio version 21. This is actually one
of the biggest updates that OBS have released in recent memory. Apparently
there's been 35,000 lines of new code written by 35 different developers so
our thanks as always goes out to the open source community that helped build
this great software. And some of the features that we're going to be covering
in this video and I'm gonna have to look at my notes to make sure that I don't miss any,
scripting has been implemented, multiview, a complete overhaul of audio
mixers including a surround sound support and audio ducking, you can also
relable your audio sources now, they'll be scene specific transitions, vertical
layout for portrait monitors and finally a couple of new themes. We're going to
covering some of those in this video, so let's jump in!
So when you open up OBS it should automatically notify you of the new
update but if it doesn't just come up to the help menu and click check for
updates and we should be all set. The first thing that you might notice is
that OBS' default theme is now set to dark.
It used to be light and you had to change it to dark if you wanted it but
now dark is the default. So the first feature that we're going to be covering
is scripting. This is basically using either Python or Lua, you'll now be able
to quickly extend, automate or add features into OBS studio without having
to recompile the OBS software or build a native plug-in module as you had to
previously. OBS themselves have included some example scripts to get you going
but I think the real benefit of this scripting function is going to come as
more developers write scripts that you'll be able to download and use to
enhance your OBS experience even further. One of the included example scripts is a
countdown timer which you can use to count down to your stream starting. In a
previous video on this channel we've covered how to set this up using an
external program, but now we can do it completely within OBS, so let's take a
look. Now how this script works is it sets a text source to act as a countdown
timer when the source is active, so the first thing we need to do before we open
up the script is we need to create a text source. I'll quickly create one now
called countdown and just set some basic font style and sizes quickly, but we can
always come back to play with these more later if we need to. Next we go up to the
Tools menu and select scripts. A new window opens up and we can see that we
currently have no loaded scripts yet so let's add one by clicking this plus icon.
Here we can see some of the example scripts that OBS have included in
version 21, so let's just select countdown.lua. If you click on the script
you'll see a brief description of what the script does as well as some options
that we can use to configure it. First we can set the duration in minutes, then we
can select the source that we want to actually use so this is the text source
that we just set up. And finally we can select the final text that we want to
show when the countdown has finished. We also here have an option to reset the
countdown if we'd like to. Now it's important to note here that the
countdown starts when the source is active, so what I would do is when I'm
starting my stream is deactivate my countdown source just by
clicking this icon here and then when I start streaming I'd reactivate it so the
countdown timer starts. And that's it that's how simple it is to add a
countdown timer using the new scripting function in OBS studio version 21.
Hopefully you can understand the kind of possibilities that this new scripting
feature will allow once some more clever developers get their hands on it. I
really like this feature and I can't wait to make some videos on some of the
cool scripts that are going to come out of it. I'd also recommend playing around
with some of the other example scripts that OBS have included, there's an analog
clock one, an instant replay script and a URL text script all included. The next
new feature that we're gonna be looking at is multiview, which if you've ever
seen a control room for a TV show it might look kind of familiar.
To enable multiview we go up to the view and then you can see that we can
set up multiview to either take up a full monitor, which is super useful if
you've got you know second and third monitors to choose from or we can set it
up just as a window. I'm going to set it up as a window because it's much easier
to demonstrate. Multiview allows the ability to view the preview and program
screens as well as eight other scenes at the same time, so you can see exactly
what will show up on each scene and then you can switch to it just by clicking on
it, or if you're running in Studio mode you'll need to double click on it. Now
this is probably more aimed at advanced users and people running you know
complex setups with many different scenes but it's a heavily requested
feature and it's really going to help up the production quality and make it a lot
easier to manage the stream, since you take out the guesswork of what a scene
will look like. Imagine running an event where you have multiple cameras filming
the action. In multiview you'd be able to see exactly what each camera is
filming and then swap the stream to the camera that has the best shot. It's also
worth noting that if you have more than eight scenes you can blacklist certain
scenes from displaying in multiview just by right-clicking the scene and
unchecking show in multiview. So you can choose your eight favorite seems to show
up in multiview. Next we'll look at the audio meters and some of the more
observant viewers might have already noticed that the audio meters down below
have changed. Now quite a lot has changed down here so I'm going to do my best to
break it down into smaller sections. Firstly, the audio meters now behave much
more like peak program meters that you might see an editor
software like Premiere Pro or audio software like Audacity. Each audio source
now gets its own meter with mono, stereo and surround devices now showing a meter
for each channel. And yeah you heard me right, OBS is now supporting surround
sound streaming. Certain platforms do and don't support it but I'll probably do a much
more detailed video about that later. Now having individual channels and being
able to monitor them, this allows you to much more clearly see if your audio is
clipping and you can set your audio levels accordingly. OBS have written an
amazingly in-depth guide all about these new audio levels, channels, indicators and
I just wouldn't do it justice if I was just reading it out, so I've linked it
down below. I'll quickly go through the most basic level of setting volumes but
I absolutely recommend going and having a look at this article if you want to
set up your audio properly. Now as you can see each volume meter is made up of
three different zones, there's the green, the yellow and the red.
Firstly you want to avoid any sources, any audio source at all from reaching
the red zone as this can cause clipping which sounds pretty horrible to your
viewers. The yellow zone is ideally where you want your own voice to sit and
that's not just your own voice but also the voices of any of your friends on
Discord, Teamspeak or Skype. Basically the yellow zone is where you want the voices
to sit. Finally the green zone is where you want all your other sounds to sit
things like background music, game sound, alert sounds etc etc. This way your voice
will always be heard over anything else. One last little but again highly
requested change to the audio meters is that you now can rename your audio
sources just by right-clicking them in the mixer. This is particularly useful
for those people that have USB microphones that have been named
something strange by Windows. Hopefully this new audio meter interface is going
to make it much easier to set up proper audio levels as well as be able to
diagnose any issues. A common example is stereo devices only playing out of one
channel and you couldn't used to be able to diagnose that within OBS because it
only showed you one meter, but now stereo signals will show you a left and right
channel so you'll be able to see you know if one of your audio devices is
playing up. Whilst we are on the topic of audio, it makes sense
to cover the side-chaining or audio ducking feature that OBS has added in
version 21. Now audio ducking is when an audio source can automatically lower its
volume when another source starts playing. So the most common use case
when you have background music or game music playing at a certain volume, but as
soon as you start speaking the music or game volume decreases temporarily to
create room for your voice. When you stop speaking the volume of the music or game
volume increases again. It's probably easiest for me to demonstrate with an
example. So since it's my music that I want to be applying the audio ducking to,
I click the little cog next to that audio source. Next I'm going to click
filters and add a compressor filter to my music source. Now I'm not going to go
into loads of detail on these settings, as they're pretty specific to me and my
setup, but to get a general feel of what audio ducking can do, I'm going to set my
threshold to match what my music volume is playing at and I'm going to up my
release to the maximum of 1000 milliseconds. Finally I'll select my side
chain or ducking source to be my microphone, as this is the audio input
that I want to be ducking for. Now let's see and hear exactly how this sounds,
first of all I'm going to swap to my desktop mic and start playing some music.
Now what you should notice is as soon as I start speaking the music volume has
gone down and as soon as I stop speaking the music volume will come back up again.
Again when I start speaking the music volume sound goes down.
This is audio ducking!
Hopefully that was all understandable, I'll likely do a much more detailed
walkthrough of this feature in a future video. The last feature that I want to
cover quickly the OBS have included into version 21 is the ability to add scene
specific transitions. What this means is that you can set a transition to always
happen when you change to a specific scene. So for example if you wanted to
always have a luma wipe that takes 750 milliseconds to complete, when you swap
to your game scene, all you have to do is right-click the scene, click transition
override and select the transition and time in milliseconds that you want. Now
whenever you swap to that scene it's going to use that transition. You can of
course have every single scene setup with a different specific transition.
Again it might seem like a super simple feature, but for broadcasts when you
always want to have you know a sting or like a certain transition when you're
going to a scene it really helps add continuity to your stream and make it
look more professional. They've of course added other little
fixes and new features into the software, but I think that about wraps up the main
features that I wanted to cover in this video and again I would like to say
thank you to the OBS developers. A massive community of people helping
build this amazing free software for us all to use, so thank you OBS devs! I hope
you've enjoyed exploring some of the new features of OBS with me. If you have
enjoyed the video please do give it a thumbs up and if you're new around here
please have a look around at the massive amount of videos that we're creating all
teaching you how to livestream and create content within the gaming niche.
Subscribers I'll see you in the next video, peace!