Throughout all of these OBS Studio videos, two things you’ll probably hear referred
to most are Scenes and Sources.
So it’s probably a good idea to make sure you know what the heck I’m talking about,
then, right?
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I’m EposVox, here to make tech easier and more fun, and welcome back to my OBS Studio
tutorial course.
I have many, many more videos on the software in the playlist linked in the description.
Check that before asking questions, and check the introduction video to learn how this course
works, if you get confused.
Scenes and Sources go hand-in-hand and are essential to setting up a recording or live
stream with OBS Studio.
Sources are your…
well… sources of data for your stream.
Video input devices such as webcams and capture cards, desktop monitor captures, game inputs,
microphones, images, website overlays, and so on.
There are many different source types available.
It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the options available.
Audio Input and Output capture allow you to add audio devices to specific scenes that
you don’t want to be globally available.
Typically, you’d add your input and output devices in the “Audio” settings in OBS
– but sometimes you want specific things added only within certain scenes – such
as adding a music track to a “BRB” scene or something like that.
I have a virtual audio device set up (thanks to XSplit, ironically) which is always playing
a music playlist for my stream.
I have that device added only to my “Stream is Starting Soon,” “Be Right Back,”
and “Stream is Now Offline” scenes.
This way while in those transition scenes, my stream-friendly music is playing, but during
actual stream time, the music isn’t heard.
This makes it so that I don’t have to listen to the music, either.
I use VLC to play back the music.
A “BrowserSource” is a super fun one for live streaming.
In Classic OBS, you needed a plugin for this functionality, but it’s now built-in to
OBS Studio.
This is what streamers use to get their follower alerts and other pop-up elements on their
streams.
By adding a BrowserSource, you can input the URL of a website.
This is fine and dandy to showcase a normal website, sure, but it can also be used to
automatically chroma key out alert boxes from a service such as StreamLabs or TippeeeStream.
Set a resolution and frame rate appropriate for your stream settings, and whammo – stream
alerts overlaid onto your video.
TippeeeStream has a very advanced overlay editor that you can used to set up just about
anything, whereas StreamLabs has a solid, but more limited feature set.
I use StreamLabs during my streams.
We’ll cover these more in-depth in future videos in the course.
A “Color Source” is just that – a solid color.
You can give it a width and a height, and choose the appropriate color for your needs.
It’s pretty basic.
This can be handy for backgrounds, or if you nest scenes within each other, you can set
up some advanced masking or layered chroma keying for removing things from a scene – if
needed.
Display Capture is a direct feed from your monitor.
You can choose between multiple monitors if you use more than one, and you can choose
to show or hide your cursor, which is handy.
On computers with a single graphics card, this works perfectly, but on lower-end desktops
or laptops with both a discrete graphics card used for gaming and a graphics handler built-in
to the CPU, this can be finicky, as the two graphics cards handle different things in
your computing experience – and OBS can only use one at a time.
So you may end up with a black screen in your game but Display Capture works fine, or a
black Screen for Display Capture but games work fine.
In this case, you’ll have to set up different profiles and Scene Collections for different
activities.
We have a video covering Scene Collections more in-depth in the course.
I use Display Capture heavily as that’s how I record my tutorials of my desktop!
“Game Capture” is great for capturing games (duh) or fullscreen applications.
This creates a hook within your graphics driver to capture the direct feed from the game,
much like how older recording programs such as FRAPS and Dxtory worked.
As with Display Capture, if you have multiple display devices in your system, there can
be issues with black screens.
Just tinker around changing your Display Device in the “Advanced Settings” to try to fix
it.
Dedicated video on this is in the course playlist.
Adding an “Image” source is what you would use for adding stream overlays, webcam frames,
and so on.
I use an overlay for some of my stream scenes.
Many streamers use overlays, watermarks, and webcam frames to add a little more flair to
their streams.
“Image Slide Show” is useful for, well, slide shows!
Whenever my stream is just starting, I need to run to the bathroom, or my stream is ending,
I use slideshows to cycle between slides saying “Stream is Starting Soon,” “BRB” or
“Offline” and slides for my various sponsors or affiliate codes.
This adds a little more professional polish to a stream.
If you have a high-end Intel-based system and an Intel RealSense webcam, and chose to
install the RealSense driver package while installing OBS, you can set up the RealSense
green screen webcam view as a source, as well.
This is different than normal webcams.
Next you can add a “Media Source” - adding a music or video file.
You actually have two ways to set this up - “Media Source” or “VLC Media Source.”
This is for compatibility purposes with some systems.
If the video isn’t playing back properly on your system, you can try switching to the
other kind of Media source and see if it has better results.
This can be used to had a graphic to your scene that cycles in and out if you enable
looping on the media, or for having a dedicated scene to just share in a video.
I have a scene set up in my Twitch layout with a gameplay match I want to share with
my followers.
I haven’t used it yet, but if something comes up that requires me stepping away from
the stream for more than a minute or two (such as when my cat randomly decides to vomit)
I can flick this scene on and give my viewers something to watch and talk about instead
of sending them all away due to dead air.
If you want to be able to hear the video playback, in your Mixer you can enable audio monitoring
for that source and the audio will play back to you.
A video covering audio monitoring and the audio mixer in more depth is in the course
playlist.
Next up, you can add a scene to your… scene.
This may sound confusing, but this kind of “nesting” is an important part of video
production.
This can be used in some very, very advanced and complicated ways to create some live streaming
magic, but hopefully my examples are straightforward enough to help it make sense.
I primarily use scene nesting in two ways.
The first way is to create and organize my overlays for my live stream.
I have a lot of overlays combined into one scene – Follower and Donation alerts for
Twitch, Super Chat alerts for YouTube, “Now Playing” text for music, along with the
bar at the bottom of my screen which highlights my most recent Follower, most recent Donation,
and top Donation of the month.
The bottom bar and text sources for the 3 names are in a scene of their own, just called
“Bottom Bars (for overlay).”
Then I have an “Overlays” scene which adds this scene in, along with the StreamLabs
alerts and so on.
Then I add this entire scene to all of my normal scenes such as my gameplay view, webcam
view, and so on.
By doing this, I can make quick adjustments to the overlays and have the changes affect
all of my scenes at once, and I can turn off just the bottom bars with a simple hotkey
press while still having the Alerts show up.
It’s kinda neat.
Another important use for this is for my facecams.
Normally with a video source, if you make a change to the source – such as adding
a crop, filter, or so on – it affects that source EVERYWHERE in the scene collection.
So If I have a full screen webcam scene, and a scene with my webcam over my gameplay and
then I crop off the empty sides of my webcam on the gameplay scene, suddenly my webcam-only
scene also has the sides cropped off showing a bunch of black space.
To work around this, I leave the “webcam only” scene alone, but then made a new scene
called “Webcam Nest” which just has the webcam in it again.
But now I add this “Webcam Nest” scene as the facecam to my gameplay scenes and apply
the crop.
Now just uses of that nested scene have the crop, where the original Webcam scene with
the raw webcam source looks just fine.
It sounds a little complicated, but once you experiment with it, it makes a world of difference
for what you can do.
Text Sources add text to your scene.
Who would’ve thought?
You can customize the font, size, and so on.
That’s pretty basic.
The cool part is that it can automatically load text from a text file and keep it updated.
This is used to show the “Now Playing” for currently-playing songs, as well as the
StreamLabs Stream Labels I use to show my recent followers and donations and so on.
It’s kinda handy.
Lastly, we have the two other big source types – Window Capture and Video Capture Device.
Window Capture is for what it says, capturing windows.
This is useful when you want to show literally only what’s happening within a specific
window (for showing work in a program or non-fullscreen game) without showing anything else you do
on your desktop.
And it keeps showing whatever the window is doing, even if you bring other windows in
front of it on your computer.
Some streamers use this to show the Twitch chat in their live stream.
Window capture is also beneficial because it captures the same view of the window, even
if you move it around your screen, whereas with Desktop Capture you’d have to adjust
your scaling and cropping once you move the window.
You can still choose whether or not you want the cursor to show in the capture.
I use this to stream Old School RuneScape.
I only want to capture the game, and I want the same capture to happen no matter where
the game is on my screen.
Window Capture works perfectly here.
Video Capture Device is the fun one.
This is for external video devices, usually via USB.
This is for your webcams and capture cards, important stuff.
I use 2 webcams and 3 capture cards within my system, so they’re quite important to
my streams.
Add a Video Capture and choose the correct device – you’ll recognize it from there.
Then you choose “Custom” next to “Device Resolution” and choose the appropriate options.
For example, my Logitech C922 webcam I set it to 720p 60 FPS, but my BRIO webcam is 1080p,
60fps.
My capture cards all get pulled in at 1080p, 60 fps.
You can mess around with color spaces, video formats, and custom audio devices – a necessity
for the AverMedia Liver Gamer HD 2 – but for most things the defaults are fine.
For all sources, you can click the setting cog while selecting the source to change the
preferences again.
It’s worth noting that if an added Source is removed from all scenes, it will disappear
from the list of sources of that type and you will have to set the source up all over
again.
If you remove the source, but it’s still present in other scenes, you can add it again
by Adding a Source, selecting the type, then choosing it from the list when it asks you
to name the source.
If you right click a source, you can apply de-interlacing and scale filtering, if necessary
(you’ll know what those are if you need them) or add a “Filter.”
Filters are basically effects for the audio and video of your source.
For video filters, you can crop, mask, add color correction, chroma key or green screen,
apply camera LUTs, and add a sharpen filter.
For audio filters, you can apply additional gain to make it louder, correct for a delay
in your video, add a noise suppressor or noise gate, a compressor to even out your audio,
or a more complex VST plug-in.
We cover some of these more in-depth in future videos.
To resize or re-position Sources on your canvas, click on the Source - either in the video
preview or in the Sources list - and a bounding box will appear.
Click and drag to move it around, or use the circle corners to resize.
Holding Alt while doing so will crop the Source, as desired.
You will also see a small lock symbol next to individual Source names in your Sources
list.
This allows you to lock a Source in place and prevent it from being moved or resized.
This is super handy if you have some primary, full-canvas Sources like gameplay, desktop
captures, or a full-scene facecam shot that you don’t want to get messed up.
It’s super easy to be working away at moving and resizing Sources and accidentally click
the bottom layer and move it way out of wack.
This helps prevent that and is a huge convenience buff.
Use it well.
Once you have some static Sources in your scene that you don’t plan on ever moving
- i.e. not your overlays - might as well make sure you lock them before moving further.
That’s the world of Sources in OBS Studio in a nutshell.
Scenes are more simple – they’re a layered view of multiple sources together.
This is absolutely necessary for creating a dynamic and engaging live stream experience.
I use different scenes for my BRB and Starting Soon slides setup, a main fullscreen webcam
view for chatting directly with my viewers, my console gameplay and facecam via capture
card, a desktop capture and facecam for doing computer things, as well as a window capture
for RuneScape, as I discussed.
I also have plenty of extra scenes for nesting, as mentioned before.
Scenes get super complex and really help make streams more professional.
If you hop into the settings, you can set hotkeys for switching scenes or showing or
hiding specific sources.
This gets even better when you use the hotkeys in conjunction with a macro keypad, something
like the Elgato Stream Deck, or a foot switch to quickly switch scenes without having to
switch windows, fiddle with OBS and so on.
Also, you can go to the right-hand side of OBS and click “Studio Mode.”
This changes your view from 1 scene to two.
This is super useful if you need to make an adjustment to a scene – if something isn’t
positioned correctly or something.
The currently-open scene moves to the right.
The right side is your active scene, the left side is the scene you have selected or are
editing.
You can keep a scene live and un-edited to your audience, then once you’ve made the
fix, transition to the new scene.
That way your viewers don’t have to watch as you tinker with your webcam positioning
or something – that’s just not very professional.
If you use hotkeys to switch scenes, the hotkeys do immediately transition the active scene
– the one on the right – regardless of what you’re doing to the scene on the left.
This was a longer video than the previous one, but I wanted to make certain we covered
all the bases when it comes to scenes and sources within OBS Studio.
They do sometimes add new sources to the mix, but by understanding them this far, you’re
more ready to handle anything new the dev team throws at you.
I hope this episode of my OBS Studio tutorial course has been helpful for you.
If it was, drop-kick that like button and subscribe for awesome tech videos.
If you like game streaming, come follow me on Twitch and drop a message in chat.
Until next time, I’m EposVox, Happy Streaming!
Thanks for watching this episode of my OBS Studio tutorial course.
More videos like this and a full master class are linked in the playlist in the video description.
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