At TwitchCon, one of the major bits of news
that Twitch announced was that they were building
their own streaming software.
Most of you that are watching this are probably
using one of the tried-and-true streaming apps
that currently exists.
So OBS Studio, Streamlabs OBS, StreamElements,
OBS Live or XSplit.
Well, now there is a newcomer in the ring built by Twitch
and it is called Twitch Studio.
Twitch Studio has been out for about a week
in its public beta.
I spent that week playing around with the software
and compiling a list of things that I think it is missing,
but also testing its functionality
and really pushing it to its limits.
So I wanted to create a video for you guys today
that went through everything that I think
about Twitch Studio.
Okay so upon installation of Twitch Studio
it takes you through a quick but surprisingly
quite thorough process covering things like your microphone,
your webcam, and setting up some basic scenes,
but it also goes into a bit more detail
with some advanced settings like noise suppression
and microphone compression, as well as some webcam filters.
There's also an automatic broadcasting setting feature
based on your existing hardware and internet connection
which attempts to automatically applie
some broadcast settings for you.
I've got to say I was really quite impressed with this,
and certainly for newcomers, new streamers,
some of these settings, things like bitrate, frame rate,
how to get your microphone set up with the right level,
These are real sticking points and things
that turn off streamers altogether.
They probably never tried to stream again.
So something that Twitch has done really well
with Twitch Studio is this new onboarding.
It's definitely the best I've seen, and it makes a lot
of the more complex things much more simple.
Now before we jump into what I think
are the biggest missing features in Twitch Studio,
Let's just go through a quick overview of exactly
the app's layout so you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Over here on the left-hand side,
we have the scene selections.
So these are the different scenes
that we set up in the onboarding,
and we can obviously swap between them
or add new scenes here.
On the right-hand side, we have the Twitch activity feed.
So this is anybody that has followed you,
subscribed to you, given bits to you, things like that,
as well as your Twitch chat.
So on the right-hand side, you can kind of see exactly
how your audience are interacting with you,
and on the left-hand side is where you have the controls
to choose which scene you are displaying.
So to be able to edit any of the scenes that you have set up
you just select the scene on the left-hand side,
and then come down here to edit layout.
That will bring up all the different sources,
or as Twitch Studio are calling them, layers,
for that specific scene.
Anything that you select on the left-hand side,
any layer that you select will bring up some controls
over here on the right-hand side
where you can customize certain things.
So exactly how it looks, where it's positioned,
colors and things like that.
So if we test out some of our alerts
like our follower alert there you can see
they're pretty basic, but you can test them out,
you can reposition them.
If you want to go in and customize the color
and the exact sound that plays for each kind of alert,
you can do that as well.
So it's cool to see that Twitch has built
its own alert system.
I'll get on to it, my complaints about that
a little later in the video, but any kind of scene
that you could select and any source that you select
within that scene, you can customize
over on the right-hand side.
If you want to add new sources to your scene
or new layers to your scene, you just click
the plus icon here and select what kind of layer it is
that you want add, very similar to OBS.
And if you want to crop or move any of the sources around
you can use the pointer to move them around
and the crop tool up here if you need to crop your webcam
or something like that.
Once you've finish making all the changes that you want to
one of your scenes, you can just click the save icon,
and then you're back to the streaming view
where you can again swap between your scenes as you wish to.
The final last two things are down in the bottom corner.
You have your audio controls so you can see
my microphone and my system volume.
You can also go in and actually adjust those volumes
and the filters that you sent earlier.
Down in the bottom middle, you have the option
to actually start recording a video or start streaming,
and then finally when you do click start streaming,
down in the bottom right, you will have a viewer count
as well as some stats as to how your PC
is performing while streaming.
So while the base features
that we've just rattled through there,
I think they've done a really good job of getting
a lot of the things that new streamers need.
I think they're still missing a handful of features
that many streamers have come to rely on,
and this is really my feedback to Twitch.
If they implement these six or seven features,
I think they'll have a really competitive piece
of streaming software that'll be very tempting for a lot
of streamers to use.
The first missing feature I think that they need to include
is some sort of scene transitions.
Right now if you swap between scenes in Twitch Studio,
it's just a basic cut, and whilst you might not think
that stinger transitions and things like that
are a hugely important feature especially for new streamers,
nowadays, when you go to something like Streamlabs OBS
and you download one of their free packs
or if you get a premium pack from somewhere
like Nerd or Die, they're all going to come
with stinger transitions,
and these are just becoming standard now.
They used to be just for the top,
the really professional streamers,
but pretty much everybody comes to rely on things
like stinger transitions now.
They already support WebM video files in Twitch Studio.
So you can a WebM video source for your alerts
or something like that.
So it doesn't seem to me like it would be that far-fetched
for them to implement WebM stinger transitions
or just some basic stinger choices in general,
maybe some included ones with the pack
that you choose on startup.
The second feature that I would love to see
Twitch Studio implement would be the ability
to add separate audio sources.
Right now, you have your microphone
and you have your system audio, and your system audio
includes your game volume, your music volume,
your friends on Discord, your Twitch alerts,
all those kind of things, and there's no way to separate
and control them which I think is a really key feature
that a lot of people rely on in streaming software.
The third feature that I'm going to talk about
is the alert system, and I think it's great
that Twitch have build their own alert system
so people don't have to use Streamlabs or StreamElements
or any of the other alert provider,
but one thing that Twitch haven't done
is they haven't allowed you to have an alert for a donation.
And it's kind of understandable, right.
Twitch has often said that they want
to have the donations happening on-platform.
That's why they built the whole bit system
so people could donate bits.
The reason for that is Twitch can take a cut from people
if they donate through bits.
Whereas if somebody donates through PayPal,
then they're not getting any of that money
or any of that revenue.
So the options for alerts they're building to Twitch Studio
are obviously follow, host, raid, subscription,
and cheer or bits, whichever way you want to call it,
but they don't have the ability to show an alert
if somebody donates through PayPal.
So I can understand why Twitch has done this,
but at the same time, I think a lot of people
if they are going to start using Twitch Studio
are going to then go and add their usual Streamlabs
or Stream Elements alerts through a browser source
rather than use this, just purely because there is no option
to be able to show an alert when somebody donates externally
without using cheers or bits in Twitch.
So the fourth thing I would love to see
comes down to the actual stream settings
and your encoder settings.
Twitch has done a fantastic job of taking away that burden
of having to choose actually what bitrate, what resolution,
what frame rate, all those kind of things
that are really technical and difficult
to understand things, but they still give you the option
to go back and change some of those things.
Now what I can't understand is why they give you the option
to come back and change these things, but then they
don't give you any option to actually choose the presets
that are used by these encoders.
So, for example, if I chose to change my encoder
from NVENC to x264, it's giving me the option
to be able to do that, but it hasn't given me
the actual x264 preset
which is one of the most important settings really.
It's all good and well me having a bitrate of 6,000,
but if I have a CPU that's actually capable of encoding
at a preset slower and hence higher quality than very fast,
there's no way of me being able to choose that.
The fifth thing I'd love to see implemented
into Twitch Studio is the ability to read text sources
from somewhere on your computer.
You can obviously add a text source in Twitch Studio
and customize exactly what the text says
and which font it uses and the size and position
and things like that, but what a lot of people use in OBS
and other streaming software is they use programs
that manipulate text files online or on their system
to display some cool functionality.
So the common examples are people displaying things like
their most recent subscriber or how many followers
they've had in the last 30 days or their top donation
or using a program to display what their current song
playing on Spotify is.
And how these programs work is they update a text file
somewhere on your computer whenever something changes,
and then OBS or whichever streaming software you're using
reads that text file and updates it live
as it gets updated itself.
Right now in Twitch Studio there doesn't seem to be a way to
set a text source to read from a certain file.
So it's just static text which is a bit disappointing
in a feature a lot of people rely on.
The sixth feature I'd love to see implemented
is the ability to record multiple audio tracks.
So it's great to see that Twitch Studio of the gate
supports both streaming as well as recording
'cause obviously this is built by Twitch.
So part of me presumed that it was just going to be
streaming self and there was going to be
no recording options.
So the ability to record is great,
but you can only record one audio track.
That is going to be a mix between your microphone
and your system audio, so effectively exactly the same
audio that a stream would hear if you were streaming.
The final thing we're going to be talking about
is the webcam software.
So obviously during the onboarding process of Twitch Studio,
they make a massive deal about adding
a webcam and customizing exactly how that looks,
and the problem is that a lot of cheaper webcams come with
all kinds of software that automatically optimizes
exactly how the image looks.
It does things like change the brightness, the contrast,
the focus, all automatically,
and it can be more of a hindrance than a help.
Usually my advice is to dive into the webcam software,
disable all these optimizations, and actually control things
like the brightness and the contrast and the focus yourself.
As I can find in Twitch Studio, there isn't an option
to be able to customize things like that.
You can turn off this auto-optimize, and then change things
like the resolution and the frame rate and the color space
that's used, but you can't actually go
into the webcam settings and disable things like
this auto-brightness and auto-focus and things like that.
So, again, that'd be something
that's really important for people
especially if they're using these cheaper webcams.
Twitch has publicly stated that Twitch Studio's
current set of features was selected to specifically meet
the needs of new streamers, but you and I both know
that when you start streaming, it doesn't take long
for you to get that feeling that you really want to dive in
and customize your stream.
Half of the fun of streaming, I think really,
is being able to put your own personal touch on your stream,
really get creative and make your stream look different
to all the others that are out there,
and that's where I think the current build
of Twitch Studio falls short.
Whilst Twitch have said that Twitch Studio is aimed
at new streamers, I wouldn't expect that
to stay the same way forever.
Twitch has shown in the past that it wants to own
the whole streaming ecosystem,
from the platform that you broadcast to
to how you donate, not through PayPal,
but through their internal system of bits,
to the relationship between brands and partner streamers
through the bounty program, and now I think
they're going to be adding Twitch Studio
that owns streaming software to that ecosystem.
So you may be thinking some of the features that I think
are missing from Twitch Studio are more for advanced users,
but honestly I think that Twitch is going to be pushing
this software in probably even less than a year's time
to all of its users and really trying to compete
with the streaming software that's out there today.
So if they want to compete,
they need to implement these features.
I'm super interested in hearing if any of you guys
have tried out Twitch Studio and if you think it's missing
any of the key features that you use in your streams
that I've missed in this video.
Put your comments down below
or join the Gaming Careers Discord
and add some comments in there.
I'll definitely be checking through some of those lists
and adding some of the feedback to my report back to Twitch.
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and I'll catch you guys in the next video.
Peace.