Hey everyone welcome to part 2 of our OBS Studio general settings video. If you missed
the first video you probably want to go back and watch it to catch up to speed and see
what we talked about so far. In this video we're going to coverr the remaing section
in Output which is going to be a bit about how to set up recording in OBS Studio. Then
we're going to get into the audio, video, hotkeys, and advanced tabs.
Okay so let's open up OBS Studio and then go back tn the settings menu, we’re going
to continue under Output tab. Let’s take a look at th recording options. First, the
recording path will determine where our recordings will be saved. I sometimes use OBS to just
record screen captures, and more - sometimes while I’m streaming! The next option we
want to select is the recording quality. This by default is set to “Same as stream”
but, might not be best for you. Let’s say you’re streaming at a lower bitrate and
resolution, but you want to capture high quality videos for use on YouTube or in other videos
- you can change that here. If you have a lot of extra hard drive space - you can use
losless quality, but I’ve found indistinguishable quality to work quite well. Next, I like to
use .mp4 as my recording format. Hit apply to save.
In the audio tab, we’ll leave most of the settings at their defaults. The first option
I want to talk about here is the “Desktop Audio Device”. This will basically tell
OBS what sounds from your computer to pick up. Generally, leaving this on “Default”
option is what most people will want. For most cases this means that OBS will broadcast
the sounds that play through your default audio devide, which will typically plays all
the sounds your computer makes, including music, voice chat, and the game. More advanced
tutorials will explain how you can include only certain sounds in your stream.
For Mic/Auxillary device, you’ll see that “Default” is selected already. However,
if you’re like me, you might have multiple mics attached to your computer. If you’re
unsure what your default mic is set to, then you can directly select the microphone you’d
like to use here. For myself, I’m going to choose my AT-2020 mic.
You can also see that we can add multiple mics and desktop devices if we need to.
We can also choose to enable push-to-mute, which is useful if you want to avoid loud
noises like coughs on stream, or push-to-talk which is great if you have a lot of background
noise and want there to be silence from your mic unless you’re talking. If you select
these, I’ll show you how to set up their hotkeys in just a bit.
Let’s hit apply and move on to the video settings. The video tab is the last of the
quote unquote important tabs, so let’s take a look. The base canvas resolution represents
our strating resolution. I prefer to leave mine on 1920x1080, or 1080p, for a few reasons.
First, I create all of my graphics are meant for this resolution, and second when I record
videos they will be recorded at 1080p instead of a lower resolution. For most people, this
should work fine. Next, our Output (scaled) resolution will represent what resolution
of video is sent to the Twitch servers. This size will be determined by our bitrate. I’m
going to check out Twitch’s recommendations for resolutions based upon our bitrate. The
link to this page is in the description.
The bitrate I have set is 2,400kbs - so I’m going to downscale my resolution to 720p - or
1280x720 - which I can just type in or use the drop down to select. Leave the downscale
filter and FPS option at their default values. Hit apply to save your settings so far.
If you’re still having any issues with these steps, then you should check out the OBS estimator
page https://obsproject.com/estimator
Before we move on, I want to talk mention that it’s important to keep at the 16:9
aspect ratio. Most of you will be doing that with 1920x1080, 1280x720, 852x480 and so on.
But if for some reason you have a different aspect ratio - I recommend setting your canvas
to one of these aspect ratios, as they are recommend for Twitch. You can always play
your games in windowed mode and match these aspect ratios in order to make things look
great… but more on that in another video.
Now, let’s check out the hotkeys tab. This section is pretty straightforward, if there
is an option you’d like to take advantage of by hitting a key, or combination of keys
- you can click inside it’s box and press the button or buttons to assign to that function.
You can hit revert to go back to an old setting or clear to remove the command. This is also
where you can set up the push-to-talk or mute buttons we saw earlier. Set up any hotkeys
you find useful to you at the moment, the most notable is the start and stopping of
recording options. The studio mode and other keys we’ll discuss at another time. The
scene options we will also set up once we get to adding scenes into OBS. Hit apply to
save any changes.
Finally, let’s take a quick glance at the advanced tab. The options under video will
all be left at default. The stream delay options are useful if you’d like to make your stream
be delayed by a certain amount. Let’s say you’re broadcasting some information that
you don’t want your viewers to see in real time. You can enable this option and set the
amount of seconds for your stream to be delayed. You’ll also see an estimate on how much
memory OBS will need to make this work properly.
The automatically reconnect option will tell OBS studio what to do in the case that we
disconnects from the Twitch server. I leave mine at the default values.
With that, let’s hit apply and “Ok”. We’re finally done with our OBS settings.
Remember, these settings will be saved in our profile. So, if for any reason you’d
like to make a completely different profile, you can do so by going to Profile > New, and
giving it a name. Perhaps you want different hotkeys or different resolutions set for various
games.
With everything now completely set up, we could actually hit start streaming and go
live. But first, let’s add some sources to our stream - which we’ll cover in the next video.