- If you're a streamer or content creator
then chances are you've heard of Elgato Stream Deck.
This handy little interface is used by thousands
of content creators across the world
to assist them in managing their live broadcasts.
There are tons of videos out there on how you can set up
and use your Stream Deck for things like switching scenes,
muting microphones and moderating chat.
But there are very few videos
about the really advanced things that this device can do.
So, in this video, I will be sharing nine advanced tips
that you can easily implement to upgrade your Stream Deck.
(upbeat music)
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If like me you make use of a second
or maybe even a third monitor
to manage all of the different aspects of your stream,
things like OBS Studio, your Twitch chat,
your Twitch dashboard, maybe your music software,
your audio software to make sure
that they're all being sent to the right channels,
then you probably used to arranging
all of these applications in pixel perfect locations
on your second or second and third monitors,
and that can take quite a bit of time.
There's a Stream Deck plugin called Windows Mover
that you can add, which allows you to save
the specific position and size of any open applications.
So, that the next time whilst it's open all you have to do,
is click the button on your Stream Deck
and it'll snap directly into place.
Now, I'd recommend actually setting a multi-action
of several different instances of this Windows Mover action.
One for each application that you use once you're streaming
that way it's only one click on your Stream Deck
and all of your applications nestle their way into position.
If we take this one step further,
you could actually in the multi-action add
the actual launching of these applications first
by using the system open action.
Just make sure that you add a suitable delay
after the launch actions as you don't want them to trigger
the move actions before they finished opening.
There's two different plugins
for the Stream Deck that I use for my audio.
The first is super simple, it's called Audio Switcher
and it allows you to toggle
between two different audio devices.
So, I actually use this button all the time
to swap between the speakers and the headset
as my default option on my PC
or for swapping between different microphone inputs,
if I'm testing out a new microphone or audio interface.
The second plugin is especially useful for those of you
that use something like a GOXLR
or Wave Link software or RODE Connect
or even Voicemeeter with virtual audio cables,
but basically if anybody that's wanting to send
certain application audio to different audio outfits.
The plugin is called Sound Deck
and it has an action called Set App Audio Device
that allows you to easily change the audio device used
by any application.
Previously, I had to open up sound settings,
scroll all the way down to App volume device preferences,
and then manually change the output device used
by each application.
Instead, now I have this set up to allow me to change
the output device of any focused application
to use my GoXLR's music channel.
That way when I'm getting ready to stream,
I can focus Spotify, click one button on my Stream Deck
and I'll start using the music device
rather than my speakers which now gives me full control
over the audio levels of my music using my GoXLR.
I have a similar button which does the exact same
but with any chat applications
and sending it to the chat channel.
So, if I want Discord or Zoom
or even a call through my browser in Google Hangouts
to start using my chat channel on my GoXLR,
it's just one button pressed when the app is focused.
Again just to reiterate,
this isn't specific to having a GoXLR,
this works with Wave Link software from Elgato
or RODE Connect from RODE or even Voicemeeter
and virtual audio cables.
It's basically just a way to set a certain application
to use a certain audience device.
One that I think is incredibly important to do
before you go live
is just to check your internet connection.
The last thing you want to do is go live
and get your audience all hyped only for them
to have a buffering stream because you're dropping
frames all over the place.
And thankfully there are some tools
in Stream Deck's plugins store that can help you test that.
The Speed Test plugin will run a full test on speedtest.net
and give you back the results showing
your average download speed but more importantly,
your average upload speed and connection quality.
This can be useful just to see if there's any issues
with your upload speed before you go live.
Win Tools is a plugin with various different actions
for Windows' users but in particular, we're going to talk about
the ping action that you can set up
to ping a certain IP address to test your latency.
So, I have this set up to ping google.com
and a couple of different game servers that I use
just to give me a good overview
of if there are any latency issues.
You can even set custom images to show
if the resulting ping is higher than a set threshold.
So, I have that key set to go red if my ping to Google
is ever higher than 25 milliseconds.
Unfortunately you can't currently ping
Twitch's ingest servers,
which are the actual servers that you're streaming to,
to test your connection before you go live.
You have to currently go through Twitch's API
to be able to do that.
So, that would be a really useful function.
I've actually spoken to BarRaider,
who is the guy that's made probably over 50%
of the plugins that we're mentioning today,
to see if you would be interested
in making a plugin to do just that.
So, if you see this come out in a couple of months time,
you all know who to thank.
Well, don't thank me, thank BarRaider,
he's the one that will have built the plugin
but I had the idea.
One advanced tip that was shared with me from Phil,
who is the technical marketing manager at Elgato,
is that you can actually set up this ping tool to also ping
your modem and your router or rowter as American say,
and all you need is the IP addresses of those devices,
and then you can again, test things in your local network
before going live.
If you want a simple and easy way to create countdown timers
on your stream, for example, in your starting soon scene,
there is a plugin called Stream Countdown Timer
that you can use to create any length timer
and show that on your Stream Deck,
which can also update a text file
that you can then add into your streaming software.
You can choose exactly what is displayed,
if anything, when the countdown ends
and you can also pause and resume timers
with a single tap on your Stream Deck.
If you're ever running a stream marathon
where maybe the time left increases
when you hit certain subscriber thresholds,
you can also set this plugin up to increase or decrease
the timer by certain amount each time you press a button.
And for those of you who like to display counters
like your win/loss results
or how many deaths you've had on your stream,
there's also a plugin called Stream Counter,
which allows you to keep track
of how many times a button has been pressed.
And again, output that result to a text file,
which you can add into your streaming software.
That whole process makes it so much easier
than going into OBS Studio
and updating these numbers manually each time you die.
If you make use of an Elgato capture card
to capture something like a camera
or a second PC or a games console,
then you can use something called Flashback Recording
to retroactively save the previous up to 30 minutes
as a high quality video file.
Now, you can set this up to be anything
from the past 15 seconds all the way up
to the past 30 minutes.
And I'd recommend having a few different buttons
so that you can quickly click it.
If it's only a short moment ago,
you can click a shorter time
and then you don't have to scrub through 30 minutes
of video footage.
This becomes particularly useful,
if you want to repurpose any of your live content
for other mediums, where having a full quality version
of something like your camera feed would be super helpful.
An advanced tip that I would share
would be to set up a multi-action to save
both the Flashback Recording of say your camera
and OBS Studio's replay buffer simultaneously.
This way you'll have both the full quality stream recording
and the full quality camera recording that you can use
however you want in your editing software
without having to do any weird reframing
or cropping around your tiny camera.
If you like to end your streams
by raiding one of your friends over on Twitch
and sending all of your viewers across to them,
then there's an action in the Twitch Tools plugin
that makes it super simple to do.
The action is called Live Streamers,
and it shows you the number of streamers
that you follow on Twitch that are currently live.
Clicking on that button opens up a folder showing you
a preview of all those creators streams,
how many viewers they have
and then if you press on that button,
you will then raid that channel with all of your viewers.
You can also set this action up to host the channel
rather than raid them,
but this whole process of finding a channel that you follow,
that's live and then typing in the raid command
just became so much easier.
And the little preview that you get on your Stream Deck
can be used to ensure that the streamer
isn't on their BRB scene or their Ending scene,
so, you hopefully know the kind of content
that you're going to be sending your viewers to.
If you use one of the 25 different webcams
that frustratingly for whatever reason, seems to forget
all of the settings every single time you restart your PC,
this next plugin is going to be a game changer.
The plugin is called Cam Control,
and it allows you to manually set
with one press all of the different settings
like brightness, contrast, gain, exposure,
saturation, white balance, the list goes on.
To make this really useful,
I definitely recommend making a multi-action
to change several of these settings all at the same time.
Now, whenever you're setting up your stream,
you can just click one single button
to have all of your webcam settings set exactly
as you like them, without having to go
into the camera properties and change each option
every single time.
If your lighting conditions aren't consistent day-to-day,
you can even set this up to have plus and minus buttons
for each setting, so you can adjust your settings
on the fly to suit your needs.
So, newer webcams are kind of built
to hopefully not suffer from this so much,
but if you're using something like the C920,
and I know a lot of you are,
this has been an ongoing problem for years now.
And hopefully this button that you can now add
to your Stream Deck to set all of your settings
with one click should hopefully help.
Now, what do you do when there's an application
that you use all the time that supports hotkeys,
but hasn't yet had a Stream Deck integration built for it?
Well, here's a cool tip.
Stream Deck has an option to add a hotkey action
that allows you to set the button to map to a hotkey.
If you come down to F-keys here,
you'll see that there's an option to map function keys
that you most probably don't even have on your keyboard,
F13 through F24.
If you assign one of these F-keys
to your Stream Deck button,
and then head over to the applications hot key settings,
you can then press that button on your Stream Deck,
and you'll have the exact functionality you want.
Also, if you have a tenkeyless keyboard or even smaller,
then you can also assign all of the numpad keys
to any hotkeys that you want in any application.
And you'll know that you'll never accidentally trigger them
from your keyboard
cause your keyboard doesn't even have those keys.
Now, throughout this video, I've mentioned a few examples
of some good multi-actions,
but there are three more examples that I want to highlight.
Hate Raids are obviously a big problem on Twitch right now
and I think it's definitely worth taking the time
to set up a panic button that you can hit,
as soon as you see this happening on your channel.
The multi action could include changing your chat
to follower only mode, clearing your chat entirely,
muting and hiding alerts to make sure that text-to-speech
doesn't get abused, slowing your chat down,
sending a chat message to exactly what's going on
to your regular viewers,
you could optionally even play an ad
if you wanted to capitalize on these new viewers
and of course creating a stream marker and creating a clip
if you wanted to then look into reporting them.
The second multi-action that I use all the time
is to be able to turn on and off all of the lights
in my studio with one single key press.
And now, Stream Deck supports
many different types of products, many different companies.
You can obviously use anything from Elgato,
like their key lights or light strips,
Phillips Hue, CORSAIR iCUE, Nanoleaf,
LIFX, Colorlight, there's a whole variety
of different brands that are support it now,
and you can add all of these into one multi-action.
And the last multi-action that I use all the time
and I see many members of the community
have already set up themselves
is a Start Stream multi-action which can do things
like open up OBS and all of your different applications,
change to your starting soon scene,
muting your microphone and starting music from a DMCA safe,
in that music playlist and setting the volume of that,
positioning your Windows properly
like we covered at the start of the video
and starting a countdown timer, start your stream,
changing your Twitter name, really the list goes on and on,
and you can customize this to be whatever you normally do
whenever you start streaming.
So, those were my nine advanced tips for the Stream Deck,
but I would absolutely love to see what you guys
in the community are using your Stream Decks for.
So, let me know down in the comments,
I'm definitely going to be continually going back there
to check out what you guys are creating
and maybe implement some of them myself.
If you've enjoyed this video, please do give it a thumbs up
it's the best way to let me know you enjoy
this kind of content so that I can make more of it.
And if you're new to the Gaming Careers channel,
have a look around and consider subscribing.
I'll catch you the next one.
Peace.
(upbeat music)
If you're a streamer or content creator
then chances are you've heard of Elgato Stream Deck.
It would help if I held it upside down, wouldn't it?
I mean the right way up.