What's up guys, welcome back once again
to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel,
where we help you build a career out of
livestreaming and content creation for
the gaming niche and if you haven't yet
noticed, I am in my new studio!
Obviously, I released a video last week
of me building it and choosing all the
parts for it and I'm just so happy with
how it all turned out, so if you haven't
yet seen that video, do click the little
icon up in the top corner to watch that
first. But today's videos are back to things
more streaming related, and I mean
obviously you've clicked on the
thumbnail and you've read the title, so
you already know what I'm talking about
and that is that elgato have announced a
new stream deck, called the stream
deck mini, basically a younger brother of
the traditional stream deck with 6 keys
rather than 15, but the exact same
functionality and a cheaper price point.
So today we're going to be looking at
this and some of the features that you
can do with it! So for those of you that
are unaware about the elgato stream deck,
and now the new elgato stream deck mini,
basically what it is, is it's a
customizable hotkey sort of switch pad
where you can customize certain actions
that help you with your stream or your
social media or any program that you use
on your computer, and they have little
screens behind each of the keys, that way
you can customize exactly what icon
shows so it's designed to be sort of a
hot key system that can really help in
the heat of running your stream by doing some
complex actions and also some simple
actions. So things like muting your mic
or changing scene as well as more
complex things like bringing up certain
graphics and changing music and you know
multiple actions at the same time even.
So if you hadn't heard of it hopefully
that's a brief description before we get
into setting up the software! So
obviously with less keys, the 6 keys on
the stream deck mini, compared to the 15
on the traditional stream deck, the
stream deck mini comes in at a cheaper
price point now that is $99.95 in
comparison to the stream deck which
usually retails for about $140 or
in pounds that is £90 pounds or £89.95 in
comparison to the £134 that you usually
pay for the stream deck. So it comes in
about $40 or £40 cheaper and I
think it's a really, really good price
point, you certainly wouldn't go wrong
picking yourself up one of these,
especially if you haven't already got
the stream deck.
And it's not just limited to 6 keys, as
I've said in the video, you can bind
multiple actions, you can put things
within folders within folders, so you may
be having to press one more key than you
would on the traditional stream deck but
it's still a massive, massive efficiency
improvement over alt-tabbing
into OBS or sending out tweets
and things like that. I really do think
that this is one of the best pieces of
kit you can get for such a cheap price
to up the level of your stream. I have of
course got links to the stream deck mini
in the description of this video
and so wherever in the world you are, I
would really appreciate if you were
looking to pick one of these up, if
you went through my links, Amazon gives
me a little tiny percentage of your
purchase price, it doesn't cost you
anything extra and it really helps me
work on this channel full-time which is
obviously what I'm doing now. So yeah if
you do want the stream deck mini I'd
appreciate you checking it out through my
links in the description! So as we can
see, now that we have plugged in the new
stream deck mini it comes up with an
elgato welcome sign on one of the
buttons and that's just sort of the
default as you get set up. In the
software, you can see that I now have two
different stream decks, one called stream
deck 1 and one called stream deck 2 -
obviously stream deck 1 is my original
stream deck with 15 keys and
stream deck 2 is the new stream deck
mini, so I'm just going to rename these
so that they're easier to know which one
you're customizing. So you just click the
settings cog up here, we're going to call
this one stream deck as it's the
original stream deck and I'm calling my
stream deck 2, my stream deck mini. So
you can see the default elgato gives us
is a little welcome button which I
imagine opens up the elgato website, but
we're just going to remove that so all
we have to do in the software is remove
the key itself and as you can see on the
stream deck it has also been removed. So
let's go about adding some of the basic
ones, let's say I wanted to set a button
to open up my YouTube channel, in the
system tab here there's a few different
hotkeys that have been set up for you,
and let's just drag the website one on
to the top left. Now we can name this
whatever we want, I'm just going to call
it YouTube channel and as you can see by
default it puts the text below but you
can set that to either show in the
middle or at the top, or you can hide the
title completely. Next we want to enter
in the URL that we want it to open, so
I'm just going to put in my YouTube
channel here.
Finally we get the option to
customize the icon itself, now if we look
across at the stream deck mini, you can
see that our icon is now in place and if
we click it it should open up our
YouTube channel. So I've got a browser
open, click the button and as you can see
it now opens up our YouTube channel. So
let's look at another example of
something we could do a little bit more
advanced. Let's say we want to tweet
something at the click of a button and
you can imagine as you're starting your
stream, maybe you want to tweet out that
your stream is going live and rather
than writing out this tweet every time,
you could assign it to one of the
buttons on your stream deck. So what we
do is we browse to the Twitter category,
we drag tweet onto one of our keys, we
can name it if we would like. I'm just
going to name it live and the account
I've already linked is my Twitter
account, you obviously have to link that
within the elgato software. Here we can
put in the text that we want so let's
say 'I am tweeting from my elgato stream
deck', so let's actually change it since
this isn't a live one, let's just name
this test, from the gaming careers account,
'I'm tweeting from my elgato streaming deck!',
do I want to add an attachment? No, I
don't for this one and hopefully now if
I also open up my Twitter and I click
the button you can see a tick
mark comes up on the screen to say that
the tweet was successfully sent,
hopefully now if we refresh our Twitter
you can see the tweet went out: "I'm
tweeting from my elgato stream
deck", okay cool, so we've got a couple of
basic ones out of the way, now as you can
imagine the main purpose of a stream
deck is to help with your stream so you
can customize all sorts of things within
OBS studio or streamlabs OBS, as well as
things like alerts and you know sound
boards and things like that. So let's
look at a couple of examples of that. So
now I've opened up streamlabs OBS and I
just have a couple of example scenes, you
can see here I
have my live scene and a starting soon
scene and a be right back scene and I
can obviously control these using my new
stream deck so if I open up the streamlabs
OBS tab, here you can see I can drag
scene across to one, and let's say that
this is my game scene, so I'm just gonna
write "game" and spell it right, you
choose the right collection that you're
using, I'm using vivid IRL and then you
choose the scene that you want. This
is all already integrated so I'm just
going to choose my live scene that's my
game one, of course you can change the icon
if you would like to. I'm just going to add
a second scene here, let's say this is my
starting soon and it's already selected
the right one, I'm going to remove the
text since it doesn't all fit in and
then I can push the right icon on my
stream deck and we should see the streamlabs
OBS change. So pushing it now and
as you can see it's absolutely instant,
so you don't need to alt-tab across to
OBS or Streamlabs OBS, you can easily
control the scenes very quickly. Now
obviously, with the stream deck mini you
have less keys than the traditional
stream deck but one thing that you can
do with the stream deck is you can
create folders so you can have basically
an infinite number of buttons at your
fingertips. So what we're going to do is
we're going to delete these two that
we've just created, and we're going to
recreate them inside of a folder. So
right click on the space, create folder,
you can name this whatever you want, we're
going to name it "scenes". Again we can
change the icon if we would like to and
if we go into the folder then you can
see we have a back button, which is
already selected so if you ever click
that you go back, but you can click into
your scenes and then we can have a few
different selections of scenes in here.
So let's recreate the two that we had, we
have our game scene which is live and we
have our starting soon scene
which we'll hide the title from. These are
starting soon, and then let's just do
be right back as well. There we go,
so now if we click through our scenes on
our stream deck you can see it changing
instantly in OBS and of course we
can go back up to the root folder and go
in and out of folders. Now obviously,
there is absolutely loads of
customization that you can do with these
and I haven't even scratched the surface
of the kind of cool things that you can
program into each of the individual keys,
but I'll probably save that for another
kind of video. I'm just hoping to give
you a sort of taster as to the kind of
things that you can achieve with the
stream deck. One of the newest features
that elgato added in the latest
software update, is something that
they're calling multi actions. What
that allows you to do is to do multiple
different actions with your stream deck
with just one key press. Now this hasn't
really been explored too much and it
probably deserves a video on its own but
I'm just going to show you an example of
the kind of thing that you could set up
with just one key press. So let's
imagine a scenario that you're in quite
often, when you're streaming you want to
start your stream, you want to be on your
starting soon scene, you want to
tweet out that you're going live, you
want to maybe wait three to five minutes
and then swap to your webcam scene and
then you want to unmute your mic at the
same time and post a message to your
chat saying that you're live, and then
maybe change your Twitter username to
show that you're live and all these kind
of things that can all be done with the
new stream deck software with just one
click! So let's do something
similar to that, let's say we want to do
a starting stream multi-action. So what
we do is we go to the stream deck
section here and we drag across multi
action and here we can start to drag in
actions. You can add sort of delays
and timers in between each action. So we
can obviously name this, let's just name
it "live" and we can set a custom icon. I'm
just going to grab one of these icons from
an icon pack, which I'll show you where
to get later for free. Let's say we
get the Twitch one where's this Twitch
one?
So it'll be the Twitch icon with live
and let's start setting up our multi
actions. So the first one that we want to
do is start our stream, so depending on
your streaming software, OBS studio or
streamlabs OBS, or xsplit, for this
example I'm going to use streamlabs OBS.
I'm going to drag stream in and
that is going to be starting my stream.
The next thing I want to do is to switch
to my starting soon scene, just in case
I'm on the wrong one, so drag in the
scene switch to starting soon. Next I
want to wait a bit of time before
tweeting out that I go live so if you go
into the stream deck option you have
this delay we add that and we can delay
in a certain number of milliseconds if
we want to wait one minute then that is
60,000 milliseconds.
Next we want to tweet out that we've
gone live, so we go down to Twitter,
drag in tweet and let's just have "I am
now live on twitch.tv/gamingcareers,
obviously you put a bit more
thought into what you actually want to
write. Then we want to wait another
three minutes so we drag in the delay
one again, three minutes will be one
hundred and eighty thousand milliseconds,
then we want to change our scene in
streamlabs OBS, we chuck the scene one
back in and we change to our live scene.
We also want to unmute our desktop mic,
so we take in mixer audio and we make
sure that we activate our mic, whatever
your mic is called and we also want to
post a welcome message in our Twitch
chat, so we get onto the Twitch category
and as long as you've linked your
account, we can do chat message and we
can just write out into our Twitch chat:
"Hello everyone, welcome to the stream!"
Obviously, I'm not encouraging you
copy this word-for-word, I haven't really
put much thought into it but I just want
to demonstrate you could do all of this
from one button on your stream deck and
I think that's such a powerful tool. We
haven't really seen it to its full use
but there's no limit to how many actions
you can add, so you could have
a whole custom scene with all
of things going on and noises playing in
the background and cool dance music and
honestly I can't even fathom the kind of
things that you could do with just one
button on your stream deck. One of the
main differences between the stream deck
and the stream deck mini is that the
original steam deck that came with a
stand where you could change
the height that you wanted your stream
deck to sit at, then you can have
various different angles depending on
your use case. The stream deck mini
doesn't come with a stand, in fact it has a
sort of non-sticky underside to make
sure it doesn't move whilst you are
pressing it, but it can't be mounted at
any angle so that's certainly something
to consider if you're one of those users
that wants to have your stream deck
completely flat, like your keyboard or
you know you want to mount it in a in a
different orientation, that can't be done
with the stream deck mini. So you might
be thinking who is the stream deck mini
aimed at, and I think what elgato have
thought about in this product is that a
lot of people do really enjoy the stream
deck, but it's quite an investment
especially for a new streamer starting
out. So they wanted to introduce them
something with a slightly lower price point
that could come in under $100
and really help people level up their
stream in terms of production
quality, and all these kind of cool
things that you can do with there as
well as people that want to
work outside of streaming, in Photoshop
or Premiere Pro without a second
macro keyboard and so that really I
think aiming more at the smaller to
medium growing streamers as people that
want to start taking their stream more
seriously and up the professionalism,
if that's even a word, of their
stream. Yes you might have to press two
keys to get to the same function as you
do in the traditional stream deck, but I
wouldn't say that's actually a massive
disadvantage because you'd be surprised
at how quickly your muscle memory kicks
in and you you start to know exactly
where you're going to be within a new
folder, and you start tapping to a folder
and you know exactly which key is the
action that you want to complete after
that. So it does have less keys obviously,
they had to reduce the price somehow
they decided to do that with less keys
and I wouldn't say it's a massive
disadvantage, just purely because you're
not really limited by the number of keys
anyway since you can have both multi
actions and folders where you can have
actions within folders. Using my crystal
ball, I can already see that one of the
common questions
I'm going to get a lot in the description
of this video, is "where can I
get icons from, I don't want to use
my own icons, I'm rubbish at
Photoshop, I can't create my own cool
looking icons. Well thankfully both
elgato have their own tool, so you can
sort of go through the elgato website
where you can use any of their icons
that they already have and customize
them in certain ways as well as
uploading your own images to
use as wallpapers, if you'd like to like
I have with my Gaming Careers logo which
I have as my default layout on
my elgato stream deck but also Twitch
Temple who are associated with Nerd or
Die, they do sort of a lot of alerts
and things like that, they have uploaded
a stream deck icon pack which you can
download for free through the website, of
course I will be linking to that in the
description below and they have a lot of
cool icons ready for the
standard programs that people are using.
If you would like to see a video
covering more advanced parts of
the stream deck and things that you can
do with the multi actions,
especially if you've got any ideas
yourself then jump in my discord or send
me a tweet with some of your multi
actions that you've come up with
yourself because I'd love to see what
the community comes up with in terms of
cool things that you can do with your
stream deck and I'll definitely create a
video of some more advanced things and
more advanced multi actions and sort of
workflows that you could have using the
stream deck or stream deck mini, if
that's something that you'd like to see
please do let me know through the
comments. Hopefully you guys have enjoyed
this little video on the elgato stream
Deck mini, I tried to cover a few
different things from first impressions
as well as a bit of setup, hopefully you
found that useful. If you have, please do
give this video a thumbs up and if you
are new to the Gaming Careers YouTube
channel, I would heavily recommend
subscribing for more content like this.
I would just like to say a massive
thanks to my patrons, the people that
support me month-to-month and help
me keep creating content like this and
doing it full-time, so a massive thanks
to my patrons and subscribers I'll see
you in the next video. Peace!
[Music]