Hi everyone, Kevin here. Today, I want to show you how you can both get and also use OBS. First off, what is OBS? It’s an extremely powerful and also versatile screen recorder, and you could use it to stream to services like Twitch, YouTube, and also Facebook. In fact, I use it to record all of my videos on this channel. Best of all, it’s entirely free, and it’s also open source. All right, let’s jump on the computer and first off let’s see how we can get OBS. Here I am on my PC and first off I want to show you how you can get OBS. Once again, it is entirely free. To get OBS, head to the website obsproject.com. I’ve also included a link in the description. You can simply click on that to navigate to this website. The great thing about OBS is it works across all the major platforms including Windows, Mac, and also Linux. To download OBS, simply click on the operating system that you’re using and then run through the installation process. Once you finish downloading and installing OBS, go ahead and launch the app. That’ll drop you on a screen that looks like this. For those of you who are wondering, well, how am I recording this video today, well, of course, I’m using OBS. I’m using OBS to record OBS. You can launch multiple instances of the app. It’s kind of like the movie Inception. Now right now we simply have a black screen. How do we get started? By far the easiest way to get going with OBS is to go up to the top menus, click on tools, and then let’s click on the auto configuration wizard. This opens up the auto configuration wizard, and here we have a choice to make. You need to decide what exactly you want to use OBS for? You can use it for streaming, for screen recording, or you could use it as a virtual camera. With the streaming option, if you select this, it’s going to go through and have you select the service provider, so whether you’re using Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and then it’ll also help you identify the best bitrate. With screen recording, well, just like the name implies, you’ll be able to record your screen and then you’ll have a video file on your computer that you can go and edit, or you could send it to others. Lastly, there’s another option for using a virtual camera. What is a virtual camera? Well, in a moment, we’re going to compose a scene using OBS. With a virtual camera, you can send that scene to different video conferencing software. Whether it’s Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Google Meet, or any other services, you can use a virtual camera. For this tutorial today, I’m going to optimize for recording, but just keep in mind what you see today, you can use it for streaming, and you could also use it for a virtual camera. Once you make your selection, let’s click on next. Next, we have a few more questions that we need to answer. First, we need to indicate what our base resolution is, and I would select the option that matches the resolution of your display. When you click on this drop-down list, here I see display one. I only have one monitor and my resolution is 2560 x 1440. I’ll select this option. Next, there’s a question about the frames per second that we would like to use, and we have several different options here. We could go with 30 frames per second, or 60 frames per second, or we could do either one, but prefer either higher frames or lower frames. In general, if you’re going to be recording, say, gameplay, you probably want to go with a higher frame rate. That makes it look a little bit smoother. If you’re going to be recording things like your desktop or an application, you probably want to go with 30 frames per second and you’ll have a little bit better resolution. So, I’m going to select 30 frames per second now, but feel free to choose the value that matches what you’re planning on recording. Once we make all of our selections, let’s now click on next. On the next screen, we’ll see the final results of the auto configuration wizard, and this shows us the various settings that it’s going to put in place for our recording, and all of this looks good, so next let’s click on apply settings. If you want to go back and make any modifications to the settings, you can always click on tools again and you could run through the auto configuration wizard. Once again, this is by far the easiest way to get started. Alternatively, if you want to tweak the various settings, you can click on the file menu, click on settings, within settings, click on output, and then you can customize your streaming and your recording settings. If you want full control, you could also click on output mode and then click on advanced and you have full control over the settings of your streaming and your recording. Once again, using the auto configuration wizard is by far the easiest way to get going. Now that we’ve gone through the auto configuration wizard and all of our settings are in place, next we need to tell OBS what we want to record or what we want to stream, and to do that, we’re going to use this real estate right here. This black rectangle area, this is referred to as the scene, and we are going to add different sources to the scene. Down in the bottom left-hand corner, you can see that this scene is called scene, and we’ll leave this name for now. However, you can also add additional scenes. You can also remove scenes, and later on, we’ll do that. Especially once you start getting multiple scenes, it’s a good idea to rename them. First, though, I want to simply get started using OBS, so let’s now focus on sources and let’s start adding a few simple sources. You might be wondering, what is a source? Well, let’s click on the plus icon to see what types of items we can add to our scene. Here we see a list of all the different types of sources that we can add. Now, two of the ones that you’ll probably most likely want to use, one of them is called display capture. What this means is, well, this is basically capturing your display or your desktop. If you’re going to be playing a game, you’ll likely want to click on game capture instead. This is optimized for gaming. For now, though, let’s click on display capture to simply capture our desktop. This opens up a prompt where we can give it a name. I’ll simply leave it set to display capture. Once again, if you start adding many different sources, it helps to give it a unique name so you could identify it later on. Let’s now click on OK. This opens up properties and here I can now see my display. Down below, let’s say I had multiple monitors, I can choose which display I want to focus on. I could also select whether to include my mouse cursor. Everything looks good, so I’m going to click on OK. Back on the main screen, you should see your scenes start coming together. We now have the display showing up here. As a very quick aside, if you’re using a laptop and you have a black screen after adding a display, go down to Windows and search for graphic settings, then click into graphics settings. Here, select desktop app and then click on browse. Navigate to where OBS is on your computer. Here’s the typical location where you’ll find it. Next, click on the OBS64.EXE. Once you add it, you should see a new option appear within graphic settings. Click on options and you can toggle between power saving or high performance. Once you change the selection, try restarting OBS to see if your display shows up. We now have our desktop appearing here. If you’re recording or streaming and you would like to include audio, we also need to add a source for your microphone or for your system audio. Let’s click once again under sources on the plus icon, and at the very top of this list, there’s the option for audio input capture. Let’s click on this. For this one, I want this to be my microphone, so I’m going to rename it to microphone. Next, let’s click on OK. On the properties screen, I can choose the device and I’m going to select my microphone. Next, let’s click on OK. I can now see my microphone in the audio mixer, and it is working. Here I can see that the audio is coming through. If I also want to record my system sound, I also need to add another source for that. Let’s go down once again to the plus icon, and this time let’s go up to the audio output capture. For this, I’m going to rename it system sound. Next, let’s click OK. Within properties, I can choose the device that I want to capture the sound from, and I’m going to select speakers or headphones and then click on OK. Now that I’ve added system sound, I can see both my microphone and the system sound. Now that I’ve added a few different sources, you could start to see the importance of making sure you give the source an easy to understand name. Especially when you start getting many different items showing up in this list, you want to know what the different items are. Next, let’s focus our attention over on the audio mixer. Here, once again, we can see all of the different audio sources. You can also drag here to adjust the levels. You can also mute or unmute the source, and you have some advanced audio properties here. To the right of the audio mixer, you also have scene transitions, and later on, once we add another scene, we’ll come back to what you can do with this, but before we do that, let’s start recording something so we could just see how OBS even works. Over on the right-hand side, we have a variety of different controls. At this point, we can start streaming to our favorite streaming service. We could also kick off a recording, and in a moment, we’ll do this. We could also start our virtual camera, and there’s something called studio mode. We’ll come back to this a little later to see what you can do with this. Also, you can jump into settings or exit the application. For now, though, let’s simply kick off a basic recording. I’ve now started my recording and you can see I’m now recording my screen, so all of this will be captured. While I’m recording, I can also click on this icon to the right of stop recording and that’ll pause my recording. Once I’m ready to record again, I can un-pause, and that’ll once again resume the recording. Once I’m all done, I can click on stop recording. Congratulations, we have finished our first recording. If you want to watch your recording, go up to the file menu up on top and then click on the option that says show recording. This will open up File Explorer and here I can see a recording. Let’s click on this to see how it turned out. I’ve now started my recording and you can see I’m now recording my, now that recording looks great. The one thing you’ll notice though is this is an .mkv file and an .mkv file, you typically can’t open that in editing software, and it’s not as easy to share with others. To be able to work with this file, go to the file menu, and then click on remux recordings. You can click on the ellipses over here and then select the file that we just recorded. You can then click on open, and then once you’re ready to remux, click on this button that says remux. The recording has been remuxed. Let’s click on OK and then close this window. If we go back to show recordings in the file menu, you’ll now see that we have an MP4 file. You can very easily work with this in whatever editing software that you want. Now you might be wondering, what if I just want to record directly to an MP4? That’s kind of a pain to record something and then to have to go to remux. To be able to change the default, you can go up to the file menu, then click on settings, and then let’s click on output. Within output, under the recording category, you can change the default recording format, and here look, you could change it to MP4. Of course, there’s a reason why OBS sets mkv as the default. Let’s say that maybe you’re recording a 2-hour lecture. With MP4, if, let’s say, halfway through the lecture your computer crashes, well, you’re going to lose every single thing that you recorded up to that point. With mkv, on the other hand, if your computer crashed, let’s say halfway through this lecture, everything up to the point of the crash would still be saved. So, in a sense, you can think of mkv as an insurance policy. Sure, it takes an extra step where you have to go to file and remux, but that way you have a little bit extra security. Now of course, if you’re recording something short, maybe it’s just a minute or two, feel free to go with MP4 because the risk of having a failure is probably pretty low, so whichever one you prefer, feel free to set that here. I’m going to leave mine on mkv. One of the things that you might have noticed in the screen recording is at the very beginning of the screen recording, I click on start recording and then I can minimize OBS. At the very end of the recording, I would have to open OBS again and then click on stop recording. If I don’t want to show OBS at all, well, I could use editing software to cut out the beginning and the end or alternatively, I can use OBS to set shortcut keys to both start and stop the recording. To set a shortcut key, within OBS, go up to the file menu and then let’s click on settings. Within settings, over on the left-hand side, click on hotkeys. Within hotkeys, you can set a shortcut key to start the recording and to stop the recording. Here for example, I’ll press Alt + F2 to start and then I could also press Alt + F2 to stop. So, this way I could toggle that key combination to both start and then to stop the recording. You could also set shortcut keys for pretty much any action that you could take in OBS. Here too, you could pause or un-pause the recording, and there are many others. Now that you know the basics of how to use OBS to capture your display, next I want to show you some of the more advanced uses of OBS, and now I want to show you how you can build a more complex scene. I want to use this scene that we just created as the base. Let’s right click on this scene and then let’s click on duplicate. I’m going to call this scene desktop capture with webcam. Once you’re done typing in the scene name, click on OK. I now have a second scene and I have all the same sources. I want to add a webcam, so let’s click on the plus icon, and a webcam is a video capture device. Let’s select this option. Next, I can give it a name. I’ll stick with the default name of video capture device and then click on OK. This opens up my webcam properties and all the defaults look good. Next, I’ll click on OK. My webcam image is now on the screen, but it is massive compared to the size of my desktop. To adjust this, down within sources, click on your video capture device and then you’ll see a red rectangle appear around that source. Now I can click on the corner to adjust the size. If I want to modify the position, I can click on the item and then I could drag it on my screen. I’ll continue adjusting the size just to make it smaller and here once again by clicking on the item, I can reposition it. Now I just want this to be a small rectangle in the bottom right-hand corner of my screen, so I’ll move it down there. That’s looking a lot better now. Along with being able to simply reposition and also resize my webcam image, I can do the same for the desktop image that appears here. Just like before, within the sources list, I’m going to click on display capture. Here I see a red rectangle appear around my display, and just like with the webcam image, I can reposition my desktop or I could adjust the size if I want. Now, once again, this entire black area is what I’ll be recording, so here in this case I want to record my desktop, so I’ll leave it, so it uses up the full space. With my webcam image, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of space on both sides of me, and that takes away from being able to see the desktop behind me. So, I want to crop my image a little bit, and luckily, that’s pretty easy to do. Once again, I’ll make sure that I select my video capture device, and then I see this red rectangle again that appears around the image. I can press the alt key and then click on this red rectangle, and I can drag it in and that’ll essentially crop the image. Here again, I’ll do it on the other side and just tighten it up a little bit around my face. Now you see a little bit of a tighter image and you can see more of the desktop behind me. Now, just like I cropped my video, I can crop any one of my sources. So even here with my desktop, let’s say I only want to record a certain area of my screen, I can do that using cropping. Here I’ll select the display capture and just like I did with the video, I can click on this red border, press the alt key, and then I could drag this in, and that’ll only record this specific area of my screen. Now of course I want to record my whole screen, so I’ll press the alt key and then drag back out and that’ll re add my entire screen. My scene is really starting to come together, but I do want to add a few more sources. Now I can click on the plus icon down below to add additional sources, or I could also drag and drop items directly into OBS. Here I have a logo sitting on my desktop. This is a PNG file. I can simply click on it and then drag it over onto my scene. Here now I see my logo file appears and it’s for the Kevin Cookie Company. Now, just like with all the other items, I have this red rectangle around the item, and I could resize my logo. Now I want to position this right above my video image. Now I can click on my video, and I can reposition this as well. So now that’s looking pretty good. I have my logo and I have my video. I also want to include a border around my video. Right now, it seems like it’s just kind of hanging there over the background. To add a border, let’s go down to sources and I’ll click on the plus icon. For this, I want to add a color source. Let’s click on that. I’ll leave the default name and then click on OK. This opens up properties for color source. I’m going to move this over a little and I want to use the same blue that appears in my logo. Here I can click on select color and I want to pick a screen color. Let’s click on that. Over here, I can hover over my logo, and I’ll take this blue color. Next, let’s click on OK. So, I now have this color source. Let’s click on OK there, and now I see a rectangle with that color source. I’m going to adjust the size of this and I’ll put it right over my video. Now you’ll see that the video sits in back of the color source. I want the color source to be a border for my video, so I want it in back of my video source. Down here within sources, I can see all the different sources within the scene. Now the item at the top is the topmost layer. The item at the bottom is the bottommost layer. Now I want my color source to appear behind my video capture device, so I’ll simply click on this item and then drag and drop it behind the video device. I could also use these up and down arrows to shift the layers of the different items. So here now, you see I have this color source behind my video capture device. Of course, the border is pretty thick right now, so when I have color source selected, I can reposition this and just like I did before, I can use the alt key to crop the size of this color source. So here I’ll do it, so it’s a nice border around my video and that looks pretty good now. Now as I’m working on my scene, I might want to make some sources visible and some sources not visible. So, let’s say I wanted to work on the desktop and having my video here somewhat distracting. I can go down here and there’s an eye icon. When I click on that, that’ll hide that source, so I could hide all these topmost items. I could simply toggle that again to re-show those different items. Now let’s say I’m all done positioning my video and the logo. I might want to lock those items, so I don’t disrupt their current position. So, I’ve now locked those three items and I can move my desktop around and I don’t have to worry about mistakenly clicking on my logo or the video because those are now locked in that position. Now that I’ve locked the position, this is one unit right here. So, I have the logo, the video, the color source. I really view this as a group. Now I can click on the sources, and I’ll press this shift key to select these three items, so the logo, the video, and the border. I can now right click on this, and I can group the selected items. Let’s try this. I’m going to call this group logo and video. Now I’ll click on enter and I can collapse this group, so it helps clean up my list of sources, and this way I know when I select this item, I can show that whole group or it can hide the whole group, so it helps organize my sources a little bit better. My new scene is all together now and at this point I can now start streaming. I could start recording. I could start my virtual camera, so I could basically go live with this. Now, let’s say that maybe I have my webcam up here, but then I want to hide it because maybe I want people to focus on the full screen and not my face. Well over here on the left-hand side, I can click on the other scene, and this will shift the scene back to just my full desktop. Now let’s say I’m done explaining the whole desktop, I can now click on my scene and that’ll show me again here in the bottom right-hand corner. Now one of the problems is when I click on these different scenes, it’s a little bit of a hard cut. What if I want to have more of a transition? Well, that brings us to this category, here called scene transitions. Right now, it’s set to simply cut, but I have all these other transitions that I can set. Let’s pick the swipe transition instead, so I could select this. I’ll click on it OK for that name. Here I can preview what the transition looks like. That looks good. Let’s click on OK. I now have a swipe transition. So, when I’m streaming, when I’m recording, I can now click on the other scene and now you see it swipes away. If I want to go back to my webcam image now, I can click on that scene and once again, that also swipes it away. So here I can choose from many different transitions, and I can customize the transitions to make my recording, or my stream look better. Now, just like before, I don’t want to have to open up OBS to shift between my scenes. Instead, here too, I can also set shortcut keys. If I go to the top left-hand corner, once again, let’s click on file, click into settings, and then go to hotkeys. Within this list, I see my different scene names. Here’s the desktop capture with webcam and I see my scene. I can set a shortcut key to switch to this scene. For example, I’ll set alt + F2 to switch to the desktop with webcam, and then for my full desktop, I’ll set that to alt + F3 three. Next, I’ll click on apply and then OK. Back within the main screen here, now if I want to jump between scenes, I’ll press alt + F3. That jumps back to my desktop, and alt + F2 and that jumps back to my scene with the webcam. So here too I could set shortcut keys to kick off my recording and I could set shortcut keys to switch my scenes. Now that we’ve looked at how you can seamlessly switch between scenes, I want to show you some additional functionality related to sources. Down here within sources, when you select one of your sources, you’ll see some buttons that appear right up here. Here you can return to your properties, and you could also jump into filters. I’m going to select my webcam image and then let’s see what filters we have. Within filters, up in the top left-hand corner, I have audio and video filters, and then down below, I have some effect filters. Let’s first take a look at some of the audio filters. Here you have all sorts of different audio filters that you can apply. For instance, the gain, the limiter. One of the interesting ones is you have noise suppression. So, let’s say that you’re streaming or you’re recording in a louder environment. Maybe you have a dog barking, or maybe the landscapers are outside, you can use noise suppression to cut all that out. Down below, I also have effect filters. Let’s click on that to see what we could do. I could apply different LUTs, I can use a chroma key. Let’s say I have a green screen in back of me, and I want to remove it. I could use a chroma key for that. I could correct the color. Here I could crop my video here too, and you could even set something up to scroll, so let’s say you inserted text into your scene, you could have that scroll across your screen. So, there are all sorts of different filters that you could play with. It’s definitely worth some time looking in here and seeing what you can do. Along with being able to apply filters to individual sources, I could also transform a source? So, what does that mean? Well here down below, I’ll click on the group that I created with the logo in the video. When I right click on this, there’s the option for transform. With transform, I could rotate items, I could flip items, or I could also center them on the screen. Here I’ll click on center to screen and here you see that my logo and webcam jumps to the center. I’ll move it back to the corner, but here with transform, I could very quickly make changes to my different sources. We’ve been looking at many of the different ways you can take advantage of the power of OBS, but I also want to show you how you can make the experience your own. Now, so far, we’ve been using the user interface as it comes out-of-the-box. You can adjust things to meet your needs. For instance, I could click on controls, and I could drag it out of the experience. Or maybe I want to put scene transitions over on the left-hand side, I can move these different items wherever I want. Now let’s say you move a bunch of things, and you want to reset it. Well, you could simply right click on an item and then click on reset UI and that’ll return it back to the original state. Along with being able to customize the user interface, you can also set up multiple profiles. Up here, there’s a menu for profile. So, what is a profile? Well, let’s say you go into file, settings, and you go through, and you make a whole bunch of modifications to these settings. You can set up a profile to store all of those settings. So maybe you have one profile for streaming, and then you have a different profile with a different set of settings for recording, you can then very quickly jump back and forth between those profiles. Another way that you can customize the experience is using something called scene collections, and what is a scene collection? Well, the easiest way to describe it is it’s a group of scenes. So just like a scene has multiple sources under it, a scene collection can have multiple scenes under it. So, it’s basically one level up from scenes. Probably the easiest way is to simply show. I’ll click on scene collections, and I’ll jump to my scene collection that I use for my YouTube channel. So here you see I have an entirely new set of scenes and then sources under those scenes. If I want to jump back to my other scene collection, I can simply click here and now you see the scenes that we created together. We’ve covered quite a bit of functionality today, but the last thing I want to touch on is how you can use studio mode. Over on the right-hand side, there’s an option called studio mode under the controls and you could use this when you’re streaming or when you’re recording. Let’s click into this to see what we can do. Within studio mode, you see a preview over on the left-hand side, and then I see the program over on the right-hand side. The easiest way to think of what program means is when you’re streaming or when you’re recording, this is what’s being recorded, or this is what’s being streamed. Over on the left-hand side we see a preview. Now with the preview, I can move different items around, so I could click on my desktop, I could adjust the size, so maybe I want to modify things. Now anything I’m doing over on the left, that’s not being recorded, and it’s not being streamed, so I can make adjustments over on the left and let’s say that, you know, while I’m streaming, I want to change my view to look like this, I can then click on transition, and this now goes live out to my audience where I’m streaming or when I’m recording. All right, well that was a quick look at how you can get started using OBS. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up. To see more videos like this in the future, hit that subscribe button. If you want to see me cover any other topics, leave a comment down below, and I’ll add it to my list of videos to create. All right, well that’s all I have for you today, I hope you enjoyed, and I hope to see you next time. Bye.