- OBS Studio is the king of live-streaming software,
and, rightfully so.
It's free and open source.
It's the most popular application used by streamers today.
And it's got a passionate community of developers
constantly looking to improve it.
It also has some great advanced features and functionality
for streamers to help them either
improve the production quality of their stream,
or make managing a live stream
and creating content much easier.
But some of these features are hard to find.
In this video, I'm going to be going
through my five favorite features
telling you exactly why you should be using them
and show you how to set them up in OBS Studio.
Let's go.
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Okay, so first up,
we're going to be talking about scene nesting,
or nested scenes,
and they're exactly as they sound.
Effectively, you can add a scene
that you've previously created as a source within a scene.
So if you have certain elements that you want to use
in multiple different scenes, like for example,
your camera, your camera frame, and maybe some overlay info,
like your latest subscriber,
you can make a dedicated scene for them,
and then just add that new scene to all the other scenes
that you want that information to appear it.
The reason this is so useful
is that they are all then managed from one spot
rather than having to go
through all of your different scenes
if you want to make a single change.
Now, of course, you can just use groups
of sources to achieve this, as well,
but as soon as you want to then make a single change
to anything within that group,
you'd have to go through all of the different scenes
where that group exists and make that same change.
Whereas with scene nesting, you make the change once,
and it will show in every single scene
that has that nested scene within.
I, in particular, find this super useful
because I'm so often testing new cameras for this channel
that I don't want to go and add a new camera every time
to every single scene that I want to use this in.
I can instead just have a camera scene
that I nest within all the other scenes,
and when I want to change out a camera,
I just do it in one place,
and then it replicates through all of the different scenes
that the camera is used in.
The other reason that scene nesting
is better than source grouping
is that source grouping does not allow you
to turn on and off an entire group of sources
with one hockey.
Whereas if these sources are all nested within a scene,
you can then easily enable and disable that nested scene.
So if you do want to go ahead and start using scene nesting,
I do have a couple of recommendations for you.
Firstly, I would add a NS
to the start of any nested scene name
so that you don't accidentally swap to it,
and it keeps it easier to see at a glance.
To get started,
I would recommend having nested scenes for your alerts
for your camera and the webcam border and for your overlays.
Those are the most common things
that I see people reusing from scene to scene.
So it makes most sense to nest them first.
Even if you're thinking right now,
"Oh, I don't have a complicated enough stream layout
to use nested scenes."
I promise you it will make more sense in the future
as you start to add more and more complexity
to your OBS scenes and your OBS sources.
It's just going to make your life a lot easier
if you start using nested scenes earlier rather than later.
Feature number two is custom browser docks
where you can effectively add any kind of webpage
and dock it within your OBS Studio window.
I hear about people still using Streamlabs OBS
just purely for the reason
that they can have their recent events
inside of their streaming application.
Well, you can do that in OBS Studio too,
and you have been able to for quite some time.
The most common examples of things
that people dock within OBS Studio are their Streamlabs,
recent events or their stream elements activity feed.
So they can make sure that they don't miss
any subscriber or donation events.
I've also seen people do pop-out previews
off their stream on Twitch to make sure
that nothing is going wrong
actually in the sending of data to Twitch.
I've even seen people embed channels
from their Discord chat.
So if members of their Discord
are chatting about the stream,
you could also read that alongside your Twitch chat too.
So all you're going to need
to dock any kind of webpage within OBS Studio
is you need to get the URL of whatever it is
that you want to dock.
And a lot of these websites have little pop-out buttons
where they'll give you a pop-out window
of just that feature itself.
So all you have to do is pop that out.
Take the URL from the new window,
and add it to your custom browser docks in OBS Studio.
It's also worth mentioning that a lot of people
used to use this feature to embed their Twitch chat
for improved mote support
through BetterTTV or FrankerFaceZ.
But now there's a mote directly built
into the Twitch chat window in OBS Studio.
So all you have to do is make sure
that you have the window showing
and enable the extensions through the setting here.
Feature number three is the replay buffer in OBS Studio,
which will continuously record
the last 10 seconds of your stream
and keep it in your computer's memory.
Then when you hit the replay buffer hockey,
it will take those last 10 seconds
and save it as a file on your computer.
In fact, you're not even limited to just 10 seconds.
You can set the duration to whatever you like.
Just bear in mind
that it's using your computer's RAM memory.
So you don't want to eat into it too much,
especially when you're trying to stream
and game simultaneously.
It will show an estimate as to how much RAM
it will be using as you customize it.
Now, the main reason you'd want to use the replay buffer
is because it allows you to quickly and easily
create full quality clips from your stream
without the need to manually create a Twitch clip.
You can then, of course, use these video files
to share highlights from your stream on social media,
or make a compilation of your highlights
for a YouTube video or guide.
Now, if you do want to use the replay buffer,
I'd recommend heading into the settings
and checking this option
to automatically start the replay buffer when streaming.
That way,
you only have to click one button when you start streaming,
and it will automatically start the buffer,
and then whenever you want to save the last 10 seconds
or 20 seconds or minute,
you just press the hotkey that you've set up
for the replay buffer save.
Feature number four is using separate audio tracks
when recording in OBS Studio.
Now this is something that I've hammered on about
for a long time that you can use separate audio tracks
for all of your different audio sources
in your OBS Studio recordings.
So your microphone can go to one track.
Your game sound to another,
and your teammates in Discord to another.
That way, when it comes to editing your footage for YouTube
or for social media sharing,
you retain full control over the volume levels,
or whether you even want to hear an audio source at all.
Too many great clips and recordings are ruined
by things like copyrighted music, screaming teammates,
or badly mixed audio levels, which all could have been fixed
if they used separate audio tracks in their OBS recordings.
To set this up, go to your OBS recording settings.
Make sure you are using a format
that supports multiple audio tracks, like MKV,
then enable how many separate tracks
you would like to record.
Next, head down to your audio mixer,
click the cog next to any audio source,
and go to your advanced audio properties.
Here, you want to select
which track each device will record to.
So for me,
I'll have my microphone go to track one
and my desktop audio to go to track two.
And don't worry about your audio for your stream.
For streaming, OBS Studio automatically mixes
all of these audio tracks together
and sends that to your stream.
This is purely just separating the audio
for your recordings.
Streams are completely unaffected.
Now, if you use the MKV format like I suggested,
most editing software actually won't recognize this
and will require you to remix MKV files
to something like MP4 before being able to edit,
which you can do within OBS Studio
by going to file, remixed recordings,
and then adding all of your different MKV files there.
You can also automatically set up remixing
as soon as you finished recording an OBS
by enabling this option here.
Then when you start editing your OBS recordings
in whatever editing software you're using,
you should see multiple different audio tracks,
each of which can be muted,
made quieter or louder or edited in any way,
completely independently of all your other audio sources.
The final advanced feature
that we're going to be talking about today,
feature number five is called transition override,
which effectively allows you to use
different transitions for different scenes.
So many people make use
of stinger transitions in their streams.
If you haven't yet used a stinger transition
or made one yet,
I actually have a full video breaking down exactly
how you can make your own stinger transition,
which is then wildly popular.
I'll leave that linked up in the top card
in one of these corners.
So if you do want to make a stinger transition,
you can do.
But what we're talking about today is transition overrides,
which effectively allows you to customize
different transitions for different scenes.
Because as great as stinger transitions are,
maybe sometimes you want something a little different
when you switch to a specific scene.
Maybe you even want to use
a completely different stinger transition
when you watch a replay or something like that.
Well, this can be achieved by using a transition override.
All you have to do is firstly,
you want to make sure that you have added the transition
that you want to use in the scene transitions window.
So for me, I have my main stinger that I use by default.
And I've also added this secondary stinger
I want to just use when I transitioned to a specific scene.
Next, choose which scene this applies to,
right click, choose transition override,
and select which transition you would like to use instead.
And that's it.
Now, by default, all your scenes will use
the default transition set over here in scene transitions
and any scenes that you've set to use an override
will use the overridden transition instead.
Easy. So there you have it.
Those are my five favorite advanced features in OBS Studio.
And, of course, you can do much more advanced things
if you start to install plugins.
So maybe if there's enough interest,
I'll also cover my five favorite plugins
that you can add to OBS Studio
if you really want to get super creative
with your livestream or your content creation.
If you want to discuss these any more,
or if you think that I've missed
any of your favorite features in AVR studio,
I'd highly recommend joining
the Gaming Careers Discord server,
where we have thousands of members
who are all involved in streaming and content creation
who love discussing things like this as well.
There'll be a link to that down in the description below.
Finally, if you have not subscribed
to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel,
I would highly recommend doing so.
This whole channel is built
around the ethos of learning to live streams.
So we have dozens of other videos about live streaming
and how to do cool things in OBS Studio,
as well as much, much more.
So check out the rest of the content.
Subscribe if you haven't already,
and I'll see you in the next video.
Peace.
(gentle music)
- [Player] Slice to play tennis.
Where we. (players laugh)
He's going to be the champ again.
I want to find out.