Introduction to OBS and creating your first scene

Christopher Biscardi: [0:00] Now that we've created a Twitch account, the next thing that we need to actually stream to Twitch is going to be some broadcasting software, or streaming software. There are two major options for this. One is called OBS, and the other one is called Streamlabs OBS.

[0:18] It may be a little bit confusing if you land on the Streamlabs page because Streamlabs is also a service, as well as a software. You can download Streamlabs OBS. Notice that there's a Windows icon here. The Mac version of Streamlabs OBS is not out yet. If you're on a Mac, you're going to have to either get yourself into the beta program, or you're going to have to use OBS.

[0:48] In this video, we're going to be using OBS. If you have a Windows PC, I highly recommend checking our Streamlabs OBS, especially for beginners, because it tends to be more understandable and the user interface is a little bit more intuitive.

[1:03] There are other softwares aside from OBS and Streamlabs OBS, but I won't be covering them in this video. I'm on a Mac so I'll download the Mac OS version. Open it up. I will need to drag the OBS icon into my Applications. I already have one, so I'm going to replace it.

[1:28] Note that OBS wants some additional permissions to receive keystrokes. This is because if you interact with the browser scenes in any way that you need to login to something, which we might cover later, that you will need it to accept keystrokes. I've got a couple of scenes set up here already. I'm just going to remove them.

[1:50] This is OBS. OBS is a piece of software that we can use to take what's happening on our desktop and send it to Twitch as a stream. OBS is split up into scenes and sources. Scenes are a collection of different sources organized in a specific way on your screen. Sources, however, are the individual captures that you will use to actually stream.

[2:19] The basic thing that we need to do here is do a display capture, which we'll name desktop. We make source visible checked as well. Now that we have our desktop source set up and we've enabled all the permissions that OBS needs in our system settings, we can see that we have a zero and a one, because I actually have two monitors connected to my computer. We can also crop. Now, this isn't super interesting, because it's just OBS recording OBS. If we move the OBS window a little bit, you can see that it's actually getting my entire desktop.

[3:02] The other thing that we'll want to have set up is this mic audio mixer will show if you're inputting audio into your system, that will go out to the stream. We can go to the properties and choose a device. In this case, I don't have any connected, because I do my audio through the other computer, which you're listening to right now.

[3:25] If you have a mic set up, it will show up in this list. This will include if you have Airpods, if you have Powerbeats Pro, if you have a USB mic that you can plug in, if you have a more advanced audio interface that you have plugged in. They'll all show up here. Then you'll see the audio moving in the mic aux.

[3:44] I'm going to use a Powerbeats Pro. I'm going to connect it. I'm going to go to properties, and I'm going to check Christopher Biscardi's Powerbeats Pro, because that's what my Powerbeats Pro are named.

[4:02] You can see that we see an audio inflection here now, which we can now scale up and down. Because this is already set up fairly well by default, we can just make sure that the audio coming from the Powerbeats Pro is all the way up.

[4:17] The thing that we care about here is this line, and how big it gets. So how far it goes into the red. If it goes into this yellow occasionally, that's OK. If it goes into the red, which I can't get it to do actually, that's bad because in the red is when you end up clipping and your audio will sound horrible on stream.

[4:38] If your audio is right around here, in the yellowish-green area right here, that is perfect. That is right where you want your audio to be.