What is up guys, welcome to another video
for the Gaming Careers YouTube channel
I'm Pete and today we're going to be
doing another OBS studio tutorial, this
time looking at how to add a countdown
or count up timer into your stream. Now
on-screen now you can see the kind of
thing that we're going to be creating in
this tutorial and of course I'll be
talking through all the different
settings so you can customize it to look
exactly as you want it to for your
stream layout. So why would you want one
of these countdown timers on your stream?
Well typically they're used as a way of
counting down to the start of your
stream, so the idea is is that you
start streaming and you show this sort
of countdown timer and all your
followers and viewers will get
notifications from Twitch or from
YouTube that you're going live. They'll
gather onto your stream as the countdown
timer is counting down and eventually
when it reaches zero you can start your
stream. This allows all of your viewers
and subscribers or followers to be able
to start interacting in chat and you
know start creating an atmosphere and it
means that when you actually start
streaming you should have a healthy
number of viewers watching you. The other
way that these timers are used is for
counting upwards and this is typically
used if you're going to be doing a
charity stream or maybe a 24 hour stream
for some certain event and you want a
way of displaying how long you've been
live for for your stream viewers. So this
way you can start the timer when you
start streaming and it will be counting
up and your viewers can always see how
far through that 24 hour stream marathon
you might be. If you're new here to the
Gaming Careers YouTube channel, we're a
channel completely dedicated to helping
you grow your live streams on Twitch and
YouTube as well as the channels
themselves so you can eventually make a
profession out of your gaming passion so if
you are new here consider subscribing,
but let's jump into the software!
So the tool that we're going to be
using is a free software tool called
Snaz, and what it does is it
similar to some of the Stream labels
software, it generates text files which
auto update and then OBS can read from
those text files and display them to
your stream. Now there are quite a few
different online options for countdown
timers that are popping up, sort of
websites dedicated to creating a timer
that you can then use OBS's browser
source plug-in to capture. But I wouldn't
really recommend them for something like
a countdown timer because using browser
source in OBS is a lot more of an
intensive process for your CPU to do
than just simply reading a text file. So
it's going to be less intensive for your
computer and at the end of the day
streaming and recording if you're doing
both at the same time anyway
as well as playing games is a really CPU
intensive task, so you want to be trying
to minimize the impact you can for
things like this. So the first thing that
we're going to need to do is to download
and install Snaz, so if you visit the
link in the description below this video,
you can download the latest version and
just follow the installation process as
usual. Now when the application first
launches, it can look a little bit
intimidating because there's lots and
lots of different options but we're
really only going to be interacting with
a select few of them for our timer
functionality. The first thing that we're
going to set up together is the
functionality to count down to a
specific time. Now the output format
option is how you wish to display your
countdown in the text file, so the
options $d or $h, $m, $s
they stand for; days, hours,
minutes and seconds respectively and
then you can see that the default option
has these values separated by colon
symbols. Now personally for me I will be
starting my stream countdown maybe 15 to
20 minutes before my stream actually
starts so I don't need the day or the
hour option as these are always going to
be zero for me anyway. So I'm just going
to leave mine as $m:$s
which will display the minutes with a
colon and then the seconds on the
countdown. It's also worth noting here
that this doesn't have to just be the symbols,
you could add some text before this if
you want to such as live in and then the
countdown. Next up we want to set the
actual date and time that we want the
countdown timer to end at, so you can
click this little button to set it to
the current date and time and then just
adjust it from there.
I'm going to set mine for this example
to roughly 10 minutes from now. The live
output box will just display what the
text file contains when you start the
timer so it's a useful little box to use
when you're setting up because you can
check that it displays exactly as you
want it to. Next you can set what you
want the timer to display when the timer
is complete, so for me I'm going to
change this text to starting now with an
exclamation mark. These two buttons here
are the start and stop buttons which
are hopefully pretty self-explanatory
but for those that are wondering, one of
them starts the timer and the other one
stops it. Over on the right-hand side
we have options to play certain sounds
when the countdown is done, so if you
want that kind of functionality just
browse for an audio file on your
computer and select it. The use double
digits option, that allows you to choose
between having a leading 0 on the single
digit number. So for example you can see
how the output changes when enabling and
disabling this option in the live output
box. The removed time span equal to 00
check box, that allows you to not display
zeros if the days, hours or minutes have
reached zero. So for example if you have
set it to display days, hours, minutes and
seconds and the days are now zero, if you
enable this option it will stop the days
from displaying 00, it will just
remove the days once the days reach zero.
Finally we are given the path to the text
file that Snaz has created for us and
a button to copy that path to the
clipboard, which we're going to use
because we need to paste that into OBS.
So if this text file path doesn't show
yet, you're going to need to click start
to start the countdown timer and then
click copy path to clipboard and we'll
open up OBS. So in OBS studio I'm going
to create a brand new scene and call it
countdown because we want to be having a
specific scene to start the stream with
a countdown and then when the countdown
reaches zero, we
want to be swapping to our normal scene.
Maybe that's a webcam or your gameplay
or whatever you'd like to stream but
we're going to make a new scene and call
it countdown. Next we'll go across to our
empty sources and click the plus and
then select text GDI. Let's name it
something that can easily identify it so
I'm going to call mine countdown text.
Now here you want to be ticking the read
from file box and you'll notice at least
in the current version of OBS studio
that I have in this video, you can't seem
to paste in the file location which we
have copied so maybe by the time
that you're watching this video in the
future they might have fixed this, but if
not we can just click the Browse button
and then paste the path into the file
name box and press open. Now in the
preview hopefully we should have a timer
counting down to zero. If not make sure
you have clicked the start button in Snaz
to make sure the timer is counting
down. Next we can customize the font,
color and size of our text. I'm going to
make mine white, nice and big with a font
size of around 200. As I say in all my
videos that are to do with putting text into
OBS studio, if you want to increase the
font size make sure you come back into
the font properties and increase it here
rather than just dragging the red box
that you get in the preview window.
Because as I keep saying it doesn't
scale text properly so it's going to
start to look pixelated. Feel free to go
absolutely nuts on the colors,
backgrounds, alignments all the other
font options, but for me this is all I
need so I'm going to press OK. Now you
should have your countdown on your
preview in OBS and you can drag it
around to position it wherever you'd
like in the scene. Now obviously this
doesn't look fantastic but the
functionality of a countdown timer is
there. Next I'd recommend spending some
time in Photoshop or any similar
application that you might have
installed, create a nice background image
for your text to sit on top of. I've
created this in about two or three
minutes and I think it looks pretty
decent or if you want something a little
more advanced you could find a looping
video background online that you might
be able to download for free or purchase
for a very small amount and then you can make
a transparent image like I have done
here in Photoshop, which just has the
text and then finally the timer sits on
top of all of that. You can see in a
really small amount of time I've created
something that I think looks pretty
decent for my stream that counts down to
when I'm going live. A couple of useful
things to know about the Snaz
application is that it needs to be
running whilst you want to display the
timer, I think that's fairly obvious but
you can close it once the timer is
complete. It's a pretty lightweight
application so really it's not using
much of your CPU, so just make sure that
it's running when you want the timer to
be displayed. I often recommend having
sort of a to-do list of things that you
need to do before you start your stream,
so if you're going to use a timer every
time you stream, make sure you add that to
the list. The other just useful little
tip in OBS is that if you want
something to be centered you can right
click on the text or the layer, go to
transform and then click Center to
screen then you can use the up and down
arrows on your keyboard to position it
vertically whilst always remaining
centred. Finally the last thing that
I'll cover is if you want the counter to
count upwards like I mentioned if you
were doing a marathon stream or a
24-hour stream type thing and you want
to count upwards rather than downwards,
you just go back to Snaz and click
Chronos, go to chrono up, choose your
format similar to how we did in the
countdown and then click start. Copy the
new file path into OBS and add it just
as we did with the countdown text file.
I hope you guys have found this video
helpful, if you have got to this point in
the video and you've been following
along please do give it a thumbs up so
we know that you guys enjoy this kind of
content and can keep creating more of it.
If you're new here and you haven't heard
of Gaming Careers before, check out the
YouTube channel we've got loads of
tutorials on OBS and growing your
YouTube and Twitch channels to hopefully
make a profession out of your gaming passion,
subscribers I'll see you in the next video!
Peace!
you