 Welcome back for session two of OBS. I'm joined this week by Pilot. Hello. How's it going? It's going good. I'm really excited about session two. So it's only three sessions for our OBS course. Of course, last week, Meredith and I set the stage, talked about what OBS is for, showed off how to just get your basic settings. And a lot of that stuff is, we talked about this a little bit, but video is pretty complicated, especially if you're new to it. There are a lot of things that, even though I was watching that back, there were things we were talking about resolution. I don't really think I defined what resolution is. So my point being, if you're watching this and you're like, I'm still lost, please ask questions in the Discord. We can definitely clarify some of that. I did kind of glance over some video terms, just because everyone's at different places in this stuff. Well, you actually, you probably do know a lot of the stuff. I was a film major. Yeah, I always forget about that. And my major had a practical making things component. Yeah, so you're really comfortable with it. Meredith, I know probably has worked with stuff outside in her time at Reclaim, but when, even when she was at UMW, she worked in the DKC, so I'm sure she had a baseline of video stuff that she had to know for that. Mine kind of similar, I did some stuff. I had a, my very tiny elementary school I went to, had a video editing class for sixth graders, which is like, I look back at that and I'm like, so cool, I grew up in a town of 1800 people. So like the fact they even had that kind of mind blowing, like we were editing. That's awesome though. Yeah, I look back on that teacher, and I've actually talked to her about this since then because she still teaches there. And I'm like, I think I can point back, like my job all the way back to this sixth grade class, and I want to thank you for that. But in a lot of ways, it's cool. But anyway, we all come at this from different, you know, perspectives. So I just wanted to, if I haven't said that enough times, and I'll probably say it again next week too, this is very different from most of the flex courses we're doing, right? Most of these flex courses are sort of under, assuming a baseline like, oh, you probably use shared hosting or domain of one's own or something like that. This is a little bit different than a lot of that stuff. It's like fully new tool. Like even last time, the last one we did, which was Open Media Ecosystems, which is all about here's new tools, how to set them up. It did assume, I think, a baseline understanding of more, yeah, you can get, you already know how to set this up in Reclaim Cloud. So we're going to jump into setting up the application, whereas this totally blank slate. Yeah, for sure. So what we're going to, after last week, we got ourselves situated with OBS's configured for streaming and recording, and we got our webcam and our microphone added to it. This week we're going to do, what I think is kind of really the meat of working with OBS, which is making multiple scenes, switching between them. This is kind of where OBS gets creative in a way that I find really compelling, actually. We'll talk about kind of how to manage those things. And that's going to, this to me is like, if you had to, if I had to pick like a favorite session, this might be my favorite, because I think this is going to get into most of that. Whereas next week, it's great stuff, but we're going to kind of, next week is I think Jim and I, and we're going to kind of go a little bit off the rails into advanced stuff, which is fun. And I think it's theoretical conversation as well. Yes, yeah. So what I'm going to do is I'll pull my screen back up, of course, we will get, we'll get situated with creating scenes, and I'm kind of vamping, because I realize I had some applications to close, but I am ready now. So, all right. So yeah, where we should be left off, if you were following from last session, is you should have something like this. You should have your basic OBS setup. You should have a scene. It might be called camera. You might just be called default. If you didn't rename it, you can rename your scene by just right clicking on it, and clicking rename. You should have in your audio mixer section some audio device that is tracking your microphone, right? So if that's not working for you, you want to go back to settings, audio, and then mic auxiliary audio, you want to pick your audio from that device. Before we get into creating a bunch of scenes, the first, we're going to do a couple, I think we're going to do three other scenes. So at the end of the day, we'll have four scenes. But one of the first things that's going to come up for folks is they want to capture their screen as part of the recording. It's just a really common thing to do in OBS, right? Obviously, this is my preview window right now. That's just my camera is all that would be in this recording. So we're going to make a scene for that. But I want to mention one thing, and if you're capturing your screen, a really common thing you're going to want to do is also get the audio that's happening on your computer. To make that happen, it is supported. OBS can do that in both macOS and Windows, but the way it does it is very different for some reason. It's a little bit unclear to me why it is so different, but actually, I just closed this window, but they even have it documented on macOS because it's a relatively new feature up until recently. It just wasn't something that OBS did on the Mac, but on macOS, and I'll go through this in a second, they actually have a document on how to do this, we'll include it in our blog post. I'm also going to show how to do this on Windows because it's very different on Windows. First thing we're going to do is get set up with our desktop audio capture. I'm going to actually just make a new scene just to have a fresh place to work in. I'm going to call this screen, just I'm going to call it screen. That's what it is? Yeah, and I'm going to add my screen capture as part of this. Now, this is going to be a little confusing because you'll see OBS in my screen capture, so what I'm actually going to do... Infinite hall of mirrors. Yeah, you know what? I'm going to do this. I'm going to move some things around real quick. I'm going to move that over here. I'm going to capture the screen in my laptop so that you're not seeing that infinite hall of mirrors. And what I will do is put, I don't know, the Reclaim Hosting website on my laptop, so you'll be able to see that inside of OBS in just a second. Once I get that set up, it's always weird and I always underestimate the things I need to think about when I'm capturing my own desktop for the purposes of showing off OBS. It's like too many meta layers for me to fully understand. Anyway, okay, so I'm all ready. So what we're going to do, we're going to add our screen capture to that. So that's going to be a source. So I'm already selected on screen here. I'm going to click plus. And what I want is macOS screen capture. That's what it's going to say. Yep, that one's pretty easy. I'm going to hit OK and there's a bunch of options here. So it's going to say method. This will let you capture either an individual window application and all of its windows or the entire display. Almost all the time I'm doing just an entire display. But these other options are nice to know about. We're going to do entire display. And then below that, I'm going to select a display. So we'll go built-in retina display. That's my laptop. I have laptop and then two monitors. And does that do those numbers have anything to do with resolution? Yes. So this is the, it's like weird because it's actually not the resolution, but it's the... Related. Yeah, it's the resolution. I mean for all intents and purposes. Of my laptop. And I'm not really sure at what that means. Like I think that might be the coordinates relative to other monitors or something. I'm not, I've never needed to worry about that, but you should be able to tell by the names of the monitors what's going on. Like I have two matching monitors and then one laptop monitor, which is why I've got two with a similar name and then the laptop one. So the first thing, so when I click OK, I've, it's here, but you may notice that it's actually cropped. And that's because my laptop's a higher resolution than our canvas is. If you're forgetting canvas in, if I go to settings and then video, that's the resolution of the sort of the preview area in OBS. I was about to say the word, I was about to say canvas is the resolution of the canvas, which is not a helpful sentence. The idea of this is what your video window looks like and how big it's allowed to be, how much it's allowed to show. Yeah, it's your workspace in OBS, really. Again, I like to think of like Photoshop or other image editing. It's similar to, how big is your document? You copy the huge picture into, or if you load in a huge picture into a document that's smaller in Photoshop. Yes, it'll be too big and you'll have to resize it. So same thing here. So I can manually resize it and position it. I can also just right click on it, go down to transform and then fit to screen. This is what I would recommend. Very nice. Yeah, so one thing that is kind of going to be a little bit weird here is technically our canvas is 1080p, which is a 16 by nine aspect ratio. That's a ratio of height to width in pixels. My laptop is taller than that, so there's going to be a little bit of black bars on either side, but it's not a big deal. Yes, it doesn't make it look funky or anything like that. But yeah, so this is what's on my laptop screen which is over there, which is why I keep pointing over there, but it doesn't actually matter. So that's another scene, we got it. So now that I've got screen capture here, you'll also notice that in my audio mixer I have a second audio device. So microphone auxiliary, this is me, in fact, I could just, and I did this last time too, I could just rename this to be Taylor. And this is up here, all of the sound that I'm hearing on my default audio device from macOS. So in fact, I'm not listening to anything. Oh, so I'm in there. That's me, those little spikes are me. Exactly, yeah, so those little spikes are you. So if I wanted to say, you know, have you, like we, you know, to pull back the curtains for a little bit, we are using this tool called StreamYard to produce this right now and we use this for a lot of our courses for Reclaim EdTech. But, you know, I could just capture my own desktop and then we could jump on like Discord and I could make the videos this way. And in fact, Jim and I have done some sessions like that, our Docker workshop was done similarly to that. So yeah, I also could play music, you know, I could, there are some downsides, it is capturing everything. So like, I was going to ask, if you can capture a single window, can you capture a single audio source? Yes, yes. So, so I was going to say right now it's capturing everything, including like if Slack was pinging me with notifications. Although I will say by default on Mac OS, when you open OBS, it's going to default to putting you in Do Not Disturb, which is really cool. That's lovely, I like that. Yeah, so normally those notifications don't come through but there are some apps that don't properly honor that. So, but yes, I am capturing all of that because of that. So if I go here and go to Window and instead I have to, I just get a list of every single window and by the way, it's kind of ridiculous because there are some things that aren't even really windows, like one password. I don't have one password open, there's just a single menu bar item. Share your doc. Yeah, yeah, let's share my doc. Yeah, just that. But let me, let's, I'll open like Safari or something or you know what, I'll do, how about this? I'll open the music app and we can look at that. Maybe that'll work. Now the weird thing about this is this menu does not refresh when you, you have to like reopen the window for it to re-list everything that's open. Music, music. So here's the music app. Now if I, so I hit okay here, so I'm capturing the music app. But if I talk, I don't show up. Yeah, the audio doesn't bounce anymore because it's only getting the audio from the music app. Now I don't have this routed in a way where folks in StreamYard, so people watching this video we are making right now, they're not going to hear this music. But if I play music in here, we should see this show up. Oh, you know what? It, sorry. Now we're getting layers of complication. It doesn't work that way because of another application I'm using to do my audio mixing. So that's not going to work properly. But, but. For you. Yeah, just for my specific thing. I'm using a tool called loop back to do all kinds of crazy stuff. That's for next week. But normally it will capture the audio from just that one application. And it actually does go into this in the OBS guide that we'll link. It says like, hey, you can capture a single audio application this way. So I'm going to switch back to display for now because honestly, most of the time I use that, it's way easier if you're demonstrating something to be able to like put multiple windows on one screen and know it's all going to, know it's all going to work. Window capture is really nice if you only have to show one thing and you're positive about that. I use that a lot for like when, honestly a lot for reclaim stuff because everything I'm showing is usually happening in a web browser. Yeah. But there are occasions where display capture is much nicer. Okay, I actually have two questions about this now then. So for something like a web browser where you can have many windows open at once, you are picking just the one window as opposed to the application specifically, but including application capture. There we go. Yeah, we were doing window. So that will list every single window. So I only have one Firefox window open right now, but if I open several, it'll put a listing for each of them. Now, so if I cancel this and go back in, oops, switch it back to window, it'll go and show multiple listings. Now, if I switch this to application capture, I actually don't know. It just says you have to pick a display and then you pick an app. And then I think what happens here, yeah, it'll show each window from that application, but only that. So what? What happens if you hide? If I hide the app? Yeah. Then it just only shows my menu bar for some reason. That's really weird. But also nothing from your menu bar, just that it exists. Yeah, that's very strange. Really funny. Yeah, so this is all, this is getting pretty in the weeds, but this is all enabled by basically, there's an API in macOS that allows this to happen. And the other thing I wanted to mention is that if you've ever shared your screen for Zoom or something like that, you have to grant applications privileges to do screen recording the first time. We had to do that when you set up OBS. OBS actually will pop a message in your face because it assumes that's something you're going to want to do. So you've already done that, but the reason why you have to grant those privileges is there's like an actual API hook in macOS that applications have to use to record your screen. It's a security thing basically, because it's nice to know that applications can't just record what you're doing without you knowing. That is not how Windows works. Windows, anything can just capture your screen, unfortunately, if it has, you know, obviously, hopefully not everything is. Yeah. But they don't need any specific privilege to do that. Okay. So I am going to just demo that really quick here. Now that we've set up display capture and desktop audio capture. One more question. We'll show that on Windows too. Yeah. One more question is, if you wanted to share multiple applications or multiple Windows at once, but not all of the Windows in an application or all of the applications at once. So you have this screen scene. Could you have multiple share sources? You could, but keep in mind there's not, they're not doing like transparency below it. No, yeah, I know. You'd have to flip between them. Yeah. Basically. And that's where at that level, I think it's significantly easier to just capture your display and put anything you don't want to show on other displays. Right. For me, my method. I'm just thinking of the people like me who don't have multiple monitors. Yeah, but I think what you're describing is a pretty significantly complicated recording scenario where it's like, okay, at that level, I think it may be time to invest in a monitor. Right? Right. Right. And so that's all I'm saying. If you are truly juggling multiple things like that, because there are a lot of advantages too, right? Like, for instance, I can be looking at you. You're on a monitor over here. Hi. This is in front of me is what everybody on the stream is seeing. And to the left is the monitor where I have what's in OBS, which obviously I understand that making content about video content is, again, like two meta layers here. So two extra monitors. Yeah. So, well, For every meta layer, you add another monitor. And to be perfectly honest, there are, like, I am like, you know, a third full-size monitor would actually be nice. So it's a problem that gets out of hand really quickly. But yeah, that would be the easiest way to handle it, I think, in most cases. But, you know, you could, for instance, say, hey, I'm going to capture Firefox in here. And I'm going to maybe open up I'll open up Safari and I'll open up, like, my RSS reader in Safari. Or yeah, Macedon's probably a good one. And I can make another one here. And let me rename this just so I don't get confused. We'll call this Firefox. I can do another one, call it Safari. Go to application capture. And Safari. And, oh, so that's interesting. It does have transparency. You see that? Because you can see my Firefox window under. Yeah. Okay, that's really cool. I didn't know that. So, that is... If you wanted to do a split screen type thing. Yeah. And then this is a little bit more advanced thing, but you can crop in OBS. So one of the things you can do is you can hold the option key or alt on Windows. And you can drag the edge here and it will crop out part of what your source is. So what I'm doing right now is I'm cropping out my menu bar. Because I don't, frankly, I don't even understand why I put it there. That's just pointless. But now I can move these things around and say I have Firefox over here and Safari over here. This is actually really cool. Yeah, I'm glad I asked about this. I thought, oh, maybe I'm... I did not think it was going to work that way. I thought it would be behind the application window. It would just put my wallpaper or something. Yeah, and you'd have to toggle, but... But no, you actually can... And then they're layered, right? So this sources panel controls what's on top. So the things at the top of the list are in front most visually. Again, think layers and Photoshop. Does he try to Safari down? Yes, then it'll be behind. Got it. So that's awesome. I did not know. And again, the cool thing is this is new to OBS. So for this application stuff to work and the desktop audio capture, you do have to be using macOS Ventura, which is the most recent macOS that came out like five months ago now. So that is a requirement and you have to be on OBS 28 or higher, which, I mean, I don't know why you'd run an old OBS. So just don't do that. If you're following along in this course, you have the latest one. I think it will prompt you to update when you open it. It's one of those. I almost never use OBS. Yeah. Well, I'm just saying, like, you know, if you're you're not in there right this moment, but like when you open it, it will ask you to update. You can always redownload it. But I want to mess around with OBS a lot more than I do. I just never have time. Yeah, it's it's it's fascinating tool. And I am I'm really compelled by the fact that you can do this because this is kind of cool. So like I said, before this, though, what you had to do is you could only capture a whole screen and you had to use an external program to get external your desktop audio in. So this is all new capabilities. Let me switch over here to Windows for a second. So this is a Windows computer. And let me hide my dock to make this slightly less confusing. So this is a Windows computer. This is my personal Windows computer. And you'll notice my OBS looks a little different. I just have a different theme. It doesn't actually it's not actually that different. But oh, and I have like this little stats window up. But it doesn't really matter. What I want to just show is how that works in normal OBS. So I'm going to actually make a new scene collection. We're going to talk about more scene collections in a second. But here we go. I've got a basic scene. I can't add my camera to it because there's no camera attached to this computer at the moment. But I can capture my display. So let me add a source. It's a little different. It's not going to say macOS screen capture. You might have guessed that. Oh, and they have something specifically for game capture. Yes. So there's multiple different things on the Windows side of things. So first of all, if you want to capture a specific audio from a single application in OBS, that is a beta feature. I will say, on my computer, it does not work. So I think it's very much early beta. And so there's also display capture, like we mentioned earlier. And when you do this, it's just there's basically there's like different methods, but you can only pick a single display. If we go out of here, though, there's also window capture, which is just like. So all of these options are still there, but they're broken out into their own entries on Windows. Yeah. I don't see an option for sharing a whole application, though. As far as I'm aware, that is not a thing on Windows. And then game capture, which basically game capture tries to use some smarts to figure out if what you have up is a game specifically. And it's using that basically guessing on like, oh, is this a full screen application? And it makes sense that it's its own thing on Windows because no one's really gaming on a Mac. So it's like barely a thing. So that's its own feature, but none of that by default will capture audio in. That is separate. On Windows, if you want to get your audio in, you just go to settings, audio, and pretend I have a mic here. But then these first two options are desktop audio, and you can just pick default, which will use whatever your default device is set to, basically whatever you're listening to. And it will just capture that. It is if we were, this is a little weird, I'm remoting into this computer. So it's not actually going to show up as you in this particular case, but if I'm playing something here and I have a music app up over here, this is the music from there, and I can adjust the volume as such. Okay. And that is registering because you're in the remote desktop. So that's actually the music app from your Windows computer. Correct. Correct. Yeah. So the other cool thing is you can manually adjust the volumes of these, right? So it's a good idea, switching back to Mac OS again here. It's a good idea to have your microphones of your speakers to be loud. And if you have like background music, you want to turn that down if possible. Yeah. The other thing here is these audio sources, even though I'm on this scene, the audio sources here are only shown in this scene. If I switch back to camera, it's gone. There is a way to basically the hack on Mac OS is to, yeah, to make them persist is to, let me switch back to, I have all these windows up now. I have lost the thread on where I had this guide up, but they actually address this in the thing. So basically you're going to, if you do this on display capture, it's smart enough to say that all audio from all applications will be captured regardless of which display you set. Apparently that is different on application mode. So I just wanted to show that here, that this audio mixer is communicating to you what is currently being captured, right? So as I switch and it's removing things from the list, that's changing. If that makes sense. So I'm going to actually undo all this and we're going to just go back to a display capture. Again, this is what I recommend using most of the time. This is the most common use case, which is just just capture everything on my screen. That's typically what you want to be doing. So let me grab this again. And see now, so that's so interesting. And they must have made it an exception for that because what I just said, they said it will be in every scene. And it's not. So I think what's going on here is that they have a, you only wish to capture audio, not showing any. I think what they're going on here is they made an exception for this. Now I will have to do that testing. And the reason I'm being a little doubtful here is because I again, I use a little bit different method of capturing my audio. The other solution here is you can always copy things. So this, when working multiple scenes, really common that want to set something up the same way on more than one scene. You can always just right click on a source, copy it and bring it over to the new scene. And I can paste a reference to it. And then this, these little eye icons will change if they're visible or not. So this is kind of a hack here. You can change the visibility in that case. It removes the audio. That's really interesting. So some of this stuff is so new to OBS, like literally between last week and this week, this stuff is new, the audio stuff. So I'm a little bit, I'm still coming to terms with some of it, but I'll do some testing between now and when this video comes out to assure people whether or not this source comes through all scenes or just a scene that's attached to. Yeah. I was going to say for, you said that the audio for the screen capture disappeared when you made it no longer visible. And did it come back on its own or did you have to turn it, re-enable it basically when? It came back when I, when I unhid it. Okay. But it doesn't, it will not continue to capture sound while the display is not, it is not possible. No, because, yeah, and I'm using kind of bad terminology here. This is an eye icon and I'm saying hide and unhide, but technically it's turning the source on or off is what it's doing. So it makes sense that it wouldn't include the audio because that's attached to the source, right? Got it. But yeah, so we've got our basic screen capture scene here. We've added our screen to it. Great. We're going to make another one. This one we're going to make a scene where it's capturing a screen and showing my webcam in the corner. This is like a real common thing. I use this all the time. So I'm going to make another scene. We're going to call this screen plus camera. Okay. I'm very creative with my names. So I mentioned before that I can copy things and I'm going to do that. So I'm going to copy this one. So just so I have the same exact layout and setup. And I can paste it here. You'll notice that there's paste reference and paste duplicate. I'm going to show what that means and why that's relevant in just a second. I'm also going to go to my camera and copy that and paste reference. And then so my camera is on top but I want to make it smaller, right? I don't want it to be everything in the scene. So I'm going to grab a little handle at the top right or top left or whatever and size it down or what I want. That looks good to me. I like to have a little bit of, it's like a small aesthetic thing but I like to have a little bit of border. Like I'll pop it out from the corner just a little tiny bit. It is a little bit tricky because it likes to do some snapping. But you can usually get it how you want. If you hold the command key or on Windows, I believe it'll be ALT on Windows as well. It will not snap. So if you want to get really precise, say I only want a four pixel border on either side, if you hold the command key down, it won't do any snapping. So that's just one thing I like to mention because I use that quite a bit. If you can move it out a little bit further and then mouse over the window at large, it'll be easier for people to see where the border, where the distinction between the border is because it's black on nearly black otherwise. Oh, good point. Here, let's do this actually. Let's actually, I'm going to grab this and we're going to crop the bottom off so that it's... Yes, very, very visible now. Yeah, there we go. So that's probably a little bit easier to tell here. But you can do this however you want. You could also could snap it to this corner and leave it right in the corner, right there. So you can do whatever you want with this. But yeah, the other nice thing is you can use that cropping trick I mentioned before. I've got a lot of empty space on either side of my head, right? So I could hold the option key and that's not working properly. There you go, there you go. Now, this is going to be a problem though in a second. I'm going to show you why. So you'll notice I've got it cropped. That's cool. Now, I copied and pasted my camera and it's a reference, right? So these are sort of the same object in OBSs or the same source in OBSs terms. And unfortunately, that can have unintended effects. So in this particular case, I cropped it and that's fine because it's smart enough to know what you want here. But there are cases where you can do something and it will affect both versions of the source, right? So in this case, the cropping is fine. It's basically OBS, the developers understood that this is a common thing you'd want to do. But there are cases where it would affect each other and sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not, right? What if I wanted to have a webcam and maybe I have two cameras? And in my case, I do. I have one on my laptop. I don't really use it, but it's there. What if I wanted a different webcam when I'm on this scene? Well, if I change this webcam here and change the device to FaceTime HD camera, which is my laptop camera, if I go back to the other one, it will have changed that one as well. That's because I copied it, right? So that can actually be a good distinction to keep in mind though because there are situations where you'll want to change it in multiple places, right? So the advantage there is if you were to change webcams or sometimes USB devices are weird and they will identify themselves differently in your OBS or your operating system will get confused and not remember that this is the same device it always was, if that makes sense. You can fix that and just change it one time and it will be changed everywhere in your OBS scene. And that's because you did that copy, paste as reference thing. The alternative, if I turn this one off, would be to just make another webcam source, right? I could just add another video capture device call it webcam two or something and pick another camera. Okay, if you were going to... So earlier, when you were copying and pasting your webcam, you copied it and then when you were going to paste it, it only had reference as an option. You couldn't copy it in as a duplicate. How would you do that? So the reason it doesn't let you do that is most of the time you... It's a weird inconsistency, but on Windows, you actually can't have two applications or the same application to... You can't have two webcams video sessions open. Basically, when an application is talking to a video device, only that application can receive a feed. There are some exceptions to that, but that's how most webcams work. macOS doesn't work that way. So you can have multiple... And this is actually kind of one of the big reasons I like making video stuff on the Mac. What I'm doing right now, where I have my webcam shown in our video software we're using to make this video and in OBS, does not work on Windows. There are workarounds, there are applications you can use to kind of fix that. I have, in some cases, run multiple copies of OBS at once and done some really weird hacky stuff to get around it. And then there are devices that do let you have multiple video sessions, but basically, that's why it doesn't give that paste duplicate option. Unfortunately, I wish it would, because that is possible on macOS. And you know it is because I just did it on accident when I was demoing. You can always make a new video capture device. And if I select this shadowcast, which is my main camera, again, it's here, again. So now it's being used three times, technically. Yeah. Right? So yeah, if I was to do this on Windows, it would actually say that that camera is not available. It's already in use. Yeah. So that's why it does that. But a lot of ways OBS is made kind of Windows first because it was used, especially in its early days, primarily for that game streaming, which is happening on Windows and not really happening on macOS. And so sometimes there are some weird little inconsistencies like that between the behavior on the two versions of the application. So yeah, there are other situations that we'll show in a second when we make scenes with images and text, though, where you can duplicate them instead of paste them as a reference. Cool. So here we got three scenes now, right? We've got our camera scene, one where it's just our screen, and then we've got screen plus camera. And I have these cropped a little bit differently. But there. Now they're more close, similar. So last scene we're going to make today, is going to be a little bit more involved. We're going to make one that will be like a getting started scene. I use this a lot for streams, particularly when it's just me. So I can start the stream, but not show myself on camera. And that will let me kind of... Or have any audio get. Yeah. Well, I have to manually mute myself, though, because my audio is still in the scene, right? Right. But it's easy to do that. I'll have a scene that just shows an image and some text, letting people know, hey, we're about to start, basically. But you could use this for a lot of different things. And I think it is itself a good way to kind of get comfortable with adding text and images to scenes. So let's make a new scene. We'll call it getting started. And I'll hit OK. And we can manually add images from here. We can also add text from here. I'm going to start with text. So I can make you name it just like any other source. So let's call this getting started text. I don't know. Call it start text. I mentioned in the last session that you can't name things the same in OBS. So it's going to complain because I already have a scene called getting started. Yep. It's a little annoying that the names had to be unique in my opinion in that way, but whatever. OK. So I can from here select a font. I have a bunch of fonts. I have a VCR font that I'm going to use because I think it's funny. And we'll do getting started. So this is going to use your system fonts, like whatever you've got installed. OK. And yeah, that's it. You just you just hit you just type in the box. Now there is capability for it to read from a text file. I've never used that, but you know, that's a thing. You can change the color and you don't really select you. So you can select sizes from here to typically what I do is I just select a really large size because it's really easy to resize the after you've done this. Yeah. So mine defaulted to 256 point font. That's perfect. And then I can go in here manually and, you know, drag it to be smaller or larger as I want. So I'll put this like right near the top. In this case, I want to actually center it. And I could look at these numbers and manually center it, but that's kind of fiddly. So I'm going to transform and then say center horizontally. There we go. Now it's centered. Nice. So we can also add an image. You can do it from the menu here. Honestly, what I typically do is just go to my finder and drag an image right onto OBS. So I in my iCloud drive actually have an OBS folder and I keep a ton of stuff in here, frankly, too much stuff. But I also have a folder called images and it's just the images I use for OBS. I like doing this in iCloud drive. You could do this in Google drive or Dropbox, something that syncs. I like it because it's a backup, right? Like if I have to, for some reason, start my OBS stuff over, like I got a new computer, I still have those around. And that's important because OBS actually has to be able to read the file, right? So it's actually looking for it in the same name and same path on your computer. This gives it that consistent path. So let's do... This is one of my favorite GIFs. It's just the... It's a Unix system. I know this from Jurassic Park. And I think it's amazing. So we'll throw that on there. You resize it. That's it. So GIFs and images work that simply, basically. You can also do videos. And I do have those. There's a little bit more to those. Here's this one. But those will also pull sound, won't they? If there is sound. They will if there is sound. So this particular video I have does not have sound. But yes, you will get the sound in there. It'll be its own thing in the audio mixer. So if I... But if you double click on video, there's a couple things in here. So you may want to have it loop, right? In my case, this is a video, but it's more like a GIF, right? So I am going to have it loop. By default, it's going to restart playback when the source becomes active. So that means when you transition to it, when you pick that scene, that sounds good. I don't know what this checkbox realistically does. I've never touched it. It's never been a problem. I've turned it on, turned it off, whatever. It doesn't seem to matter. And then when playback ends, show nothing. So I'm looping it. So playback will never end. But theoretically, you would maybe have a need for a video that would only play one time. And then instead of being paused on the last frame, you want it to disappear. That's an option for you. So that'll fully deactivate the source? Or will it just... It will just be empty looking. Because when you come back to it later, it'll play again. Because that restart checkbox is there. So typically, I'm using the video option the same way as the image option. It's just some things are longer animations that the GIF would be a huge file. But so that's another one. Let me actually turn that one off too. I think this has audio in it. This is the Monty Python and the Holy Grail intermission screen. Yeah, you can find and see the audio playing now. Yeah, and you can see the audio playing. And again, you're not going to hear this in StreamYard. But one thing I want to show here is I'm also not hearing it. And that's because anything happening in this audio mixer is going to the recording. It's not being like sent back to my headphones. And you wouldn't want that. That might sound weird to you, but... You'll get speech jammed so fast. Yeah, and that's because my own microphone is in here, right? So I would hear myself on a 10th of a second delay that's actually really disorienting. It's... I have a friend who showed us this thing called the speech jammer once. And that's literally all it does is you speak into it and it plays your voice back to you on like, yeah, 10th of a second, maybe a half second delay. And within 10 seconds, none of us could talk coherently anymore. It just could be work. So there are occasions where you would want to hear it though. So you can do this, but you have to enable it on a source by source basis. So if I go to advanced audio properties, it will show all of my audio sources here. And you can go to audio monitoring and turn monitor in output. So monitor off is a default and that means it just goes in the recording. Monitor only. I don't know why you'd want this, but you can have it play the audio for the sound in your headphones, but not go to your video. Maybe if you wanted, well, I was going to say maybe if you wanted to do like something where you want it to start at a specific point. So you're listening for it to hit that point and then you go, but it seems very odd to me. I'm burying the lead a little bit because I actually do use this in some really advanced setups, but again, it's like, I don't know how much I want to get into it. But yeah, for things where I'm using loopback and making virtual audio devices that are routed via virtual mixing, it can be nice to basically have it go to my headphones, which are then being looped back into OBS. But it's a pretty weird use case that most of the time isn't going to be what you want. This last one will let you monitor it. So monitoring is you hearing it and output it, which is going to your recording or your stream. So if I click on this, I can now hear the audio. You can't because in StreamYard, I don't have this going. I'm not feeding that in. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I could, technically I could change that. But no, no need right now. Yeah. Well, no need, but you know, when have I ever done things based on need? So let me, let me leave this. We are also getting that on me. Okay. So that's stopped now, but yeah, instantaneously. Yeah. That's no good. I've fixed that. We're not going to demo that. I'm not up to demoing that. If I had thought about that ahead of time, maybe, but I don't, I don't, it's a pretty weird use case, right? But yeah, you can just trust me when I'm hearing this because I've said it. And yeah. And you can of course, you know, you can also see it happening, right? So sometimes it's actually nice not to monitor it just because, again, like we're having a conversation, but it can be useful to monitor it to be able to adjust the volume. So in this particular case, if I was, say, making something where I wanted, you know, audio under something we were doing, I probably would want to turn this down just so that we're still intelligible on the recording. I'm not competing for it. Yeah. So yeah, that's how you add stuff. And so you can, you know, I've got this getting started scene. Well, how do we put internet downloaded here? I can size it properly. And then the nice thing is I've got these other things. I can just flip between them, right? So I can just turn ones on and off as I need. And if I actually line these up properly so that they overlay each other and then put my getting started text on top, this would be a little bit, this would make a little bit more sense. So I can do like this. Maybe I don't want the music from Monty Python playing. So I can just mute that. And now I can flip between these, right? Yeah. So that's kind of a more advanced scene composition, basically, in OBS. And, you know, potentially, depending on your workflow, maybe these are multiple scenes, right? Maybe instead of turning these on and off, you've got getting started dash Monty Python, getting started dash Jurassic Park. You can have a virtually unlimited amount of scenes and sources. So it's kind of makes sense to fit whatever your workflow is. I tend to think in terms of scenes, however, having too many of them can get a little bit unwieldy. On that topic, can you, just as an example going back, copy and paste the getting, I don't know, the getting started text or something as a duplicate into literally anything else, I guess. Yeah. You know what we're going to do is we're going to actually make our other scenes the way I just described. So we're going to call this one getting started Jurassic Park. And I could duplicate this scene. So that's one thing you could do. But for now, I'm actually just going to make for the purpose of doing what you asked, which would be a good demo. I'm going to make one getting started download. And it'll just be blank. So now I can go in here and copy this and then paste it as a duplicate. Yeah. And then you could change it to getting started now or something like that without affecting the original. Yes. Or what I think I'll maybe we'll do from this one. I mean, that would make sense. But maybe I pick like a different font or a different color or something. Maybe color might make sense. Yeah. Let's do like, sure. Yeah. There we go. Ooh, that's a gradient. I didn't even, that's cool. Oh yeah. Here, I'll put a little drop shadow on it. Okay. And then maybe Top corner. I bet you there's a way to animate that gradient because that looks awesome. That's so cool. So. But now if you drag your. Yeah. And I'm going to go back to my images folder. We'll find appropriate. That's, well, sure. We can throw a reclaimed tech logo in here in the corner maybe. I'll throw this coffee steaming gift. Maybe I'll do this. Like it's too big. That's good. And then I can take my text and make sure it's on top, right? So that I can actually see it. And then you got the drop shadow. That way you see my drop shadow a little bit. Yeah. Which also helps with the white gradient on the white background too. For sure. For sure. Yeah. Drop shadow definitely helps with the readability text. In fact, if I was doing this for real, I mean, this is pretty ugly, but. I think it is. I think it's peak. It's perfect. I mean, I don't mind this if I could get a wider version of this image. Unfortunately, this is what I have, right? That's fair. But. You could just make it really, really large. I could, yeah. And then get more of the top and bottom. Yeah. Here just like no. Ooh, actually. You can't even get the full coffee. That's very funny. Here, we'll do this. The drop shadow still kind of helps with legibility a little bit too. Let's do like that. And we'll put this in the corner. You know what? I'm going to make it the logo on the cup. Oh, there we go. It's perfect. Okay. I actually like this a lot now. 15 seconds. 15 seconds to make magic. Yeah. So this is, but this is cool. Like OBS lets you do this stuff that would be like bad photoshop. Right. In live video. Super cool. Super cool. All right. So one thing I wish you could do, and maybe there's a better way to do this, I wish you could configure this drop shadow because I would actually want to do it more like a thicker drop shadow, technically. So, but you know, that is what it is. Now there's also not going to dive real far into this, but this is something I want to point out and people can play with it. But there are more than that you can do with sources. So you can also right click on sources and then go to properties or just double click on them. Whoops. Sorry, not properties. Filters and you actually have to right click. I'm just remembering this. If you right click and go to filters, there's all kinds of built in things in OBS that are effects and there are different ones based on what you're looking at is image or text or video or something that has an audio component too. So here if I click on these filters and we'll use one of them next time, which is chroma key. That's going to be in session three and that lets you do green screening, which is really neat. But here I can do screen because I've done that and it just because of the color of my walls. Yeah, that was what I was trying to cut out. It took out half my face. Yeah, it's chroma keying. And again, you probably you know this from your experimentation with it. And maybe it's like a film major chroma keying is not like a smart technology. It's literally just like subtract this color from the image. And in in kind of a real dumb way begin. Keep in mind like chroma keying is something we've been doing since I don't know color television. So it makes sense that it was kind of simple. But so there are other settings in here. I was hoping to find one that would maybe let me do something with the drop shadow. But I don't see one in here that will work for that. Sorry, what I was going to say, we could try scroll. But what about I don't even know what that does. Wait, that's filter. What about properties? Yes, I didn't know this is a thing. Perfect. Yes. Yes. So I think what I would do here and I don't know if this is going to work this way. Yeah, I'd add some spaces and like you need I feel like with something scrolling, you need more than one exclamation point 100%. So give it a little space. That's maybe too much space. Yeah, it's too much. And then let me do this like Oh, I just realized now that because I had this because of the size of it, it's a little bit weird. But yeah. Oh my God, this is amazing. Look at this beautiful game changer. I know for a fact that's going into your stuff now. Yeah, I was going to say I'm keeping this one. I love this. That's perfect. And I love this gradient too. I didn't even know that you could do built-in gradients like this. So yeah, you know, a lot of the stuff I'm still learning and a lot of the stuff changes from version to version significantly. One other thing that you can do that's a little bit fancier is you can do like rounded corners and stuff with video and audio sources using image masking. I'm going to actually demo this. This is a little bit more advanced technique. I mentioned this in the Discord that you could do this. And I basically I follow like a video tutorial on how to do it. But we're going to do it here with my with my camera source. Let me uncrop it. I'm going to actually make it big just for the purposes of demonstration too. And then we'll make it small at the end. Yeah, if you turn off the screen cap going on underneath it, we might also be able to see a little better. Yeah, good point here. Let's do this. Let's I'm turning off the audio. Let's actually just turn that off. And then I think I can just put a white color under it. Or gray or maybe let's go with like I think I was going to say black actually will work because the corners of your screen are pretty much all light. Although actually, you know, that that's good too. Let's do that. Just give a good contrast here. And OK, so I've got my source here. Now, so if I right click on here or on over here to and use a filter, I can add a filter to I had that over the top. Let me get back out of here. I can add a filter to my my camera. And there are audio filters. Like I mentioned before, there are different like you can do like noise suppression and some real advanced stuff in here equalizing noise gate. That is a little bit out of the scope of what I love this OBS. Yeah, even even that it's a little audio stuff is so tricky and individualized. All right. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to add an image mask. And I did link this image in the discord if folks want to use this. But now I can do browse and because I already have it on my computer in my images folder. And whoops, that's not the right folder. I'm going to do 16 by nine. How did I move it? Oh, here it is mask. And it might be a little hard to see something. Yeah, you got to make it bigger, but it is showing. You can see that it now has rounded corners. And the reason that that works is basically the image I've told it to use. Let me go back to finder. I made an image that simply is a black image with a white section. And OBS will read that and go, ah, I'll show your camera in this section. Okay. So that's cool. You got rounded corners. I also have a drop shadow. We'll get to that in a second. The problem is I did that filter on the source. And I duplicated the source or copied the source. So it's now applied to my main one as well. That's no good, right? I don't actually want this in here twice. So what are my solutions? Well, if I'm on Mac OS, I could add a second video capture device. But there is honestly an even easier way that will also work on Windows. And instead of doing what I just did there where I added my webcam as a copy, I'm going to get rid of it, I can also, you can also put scenes inside of other scenes on OBS. And that itself is pretty wild, a little bit more advanced thing. So I can actually include a scene as a source. And I actually have to go back in here. I forgot to disable the masking I just did. At the bottom. Oops. It's a little bit weird because I have my screen really zoomed in so that I can, you can see one video I'm doing and this is a small screen now. So instead, I can actually add that filter to this duplicated not duplicated, sorry, this scene instead, the scene as a source. The other thing you can do, which is another way I've done it. And there are reasons back and forth on why you might want to do it this way. I can also do this. So let me copy this. It's not letting me copy it. Why isn't it letting me copy it? That's weird. Okay. So I can paste it. I can also make a group and groups are another kind of advanced thing in OBS, but I can drop my webcam into a group and then what groups do is I'll let you apply the same effect to multiple things or it lets you unhide groups of things. So like say I wanted to unhide both my webcam and this pink box I made at the same time, I can just unhide the group at once. But it works with effects too. So let me move that out of that group. I can also apply a group, sorry, an effect to the group. And I'll do that with my image masking. And now that's masked, let me make this box the proper size again. You can see it. If you were to, okay, and so then you still have the sharp corners in the same size. If you were to make the purple part of the group, make it a little smaller, yes, first make it first make it a little smaller and then it's going to apply. Oh yeah. There we go. No, that's what I meant is you don't have to mess around to make it pick up the same settings. It just automatically does that as part of the group. Correct. Yes. So the okay, so going even further here though, I'm going to get I'm going to put this back out just so we can see that again. And actually, you know, I'm going to turn this off. I'm going to put my screen capture back on. So now I've got this nice webcam with rounded corners that I could throw, you know, this is a little bit again, a little bit large, but just to for it to be visible for you all. I can put it in the corner. I can also add a drop shadow below it. And that is really simple in this one. I literally just made the image that is a drop shadow. And I just put it in the scene. That's it. So all I'm going to do is just put it behind. I don't want it in the group because I actually don't want to image masked. Otherwise, it'll crop the drop shadow right out. But I can just resize this here and line it up. And now if I select these and move them all together, whoops. It's actually a little bit hard to do. I don't know if I can now that I think about that. Maybe I can't move them all together. But let me put them in the corner. What if you make them a group within a group? You can't do multi-nested groups, unfortunately. Yeah. But now there's a slight drop shadow on it, which is I think looks really nice and kind of sells the effect. And it also helps it again. It also again helps with visibility. Yeah. And just making sure you're all you. Yeah. That your stuff is not blending in as much. Yeah. Another thing I could try that I've not tried is I wonder if I put my webcam in here. Oh, whoa. Oh my gosh. Bye. I don't know why it's doing that. But if I made this smaller than my group. Yeah. No, this wouldn't work. Okay. But yeah. The reason why I don't want this. So let me turn this off. I'm going to turn my pink. I don't know what to call that. It's not really pink, right? Some other color. If I put my drop shadow back in here and resize it to fit the whole screen and do the same thing with this. You'll notice that it's not doing anything. And that's because I've masked out the part that is the drop shadow, right? Yeah. So as soon as I pull that back out, now you can see it. So yeah. So I use that a lot. And basically what I will do is I'll have my screen capture. I'll resize these things. I don't need to move them around a lot, right? Like once you position it, it's you're pretty much good. And I have a couple different things in OBS that work that way. So go is a little bit fiddly. But once you got it, you got it. And now I've got a nice little drop shadow on my camera. So that's a pretty advanced technique, I think. And as you kind of saw, there was a little bit of fiddling. It's like, okay, we need two different images. And we're going to apply one of them as a filter to a group. But it's kind of a cool effect. Yeah. And I mean, once you've got it set up, it seems much, it's the setting up is maybe a little more complicated, but the implementation. Certainly. But once you have it set up, then it's there. Yeah. And this kind of gets to one other thing I wanted to touch on too. I mentioned that I put all my OBS images in a single folder in iCloud Drive. And I would recommend doing some kind of thing, whether it's OneDrive or Google Drive, something that can sync. That way, if you get a new computer, it's really easy for you to find these things. Because when you drop them into OBS, it's not like attaching them to some OBS document. That's not really how OBS works. If I was to go in right now and rename this, and I will, we'll call this mask one, my mask is gone. And if I actually reopen OBS. Is it going to throw an error? Yeah. Oh, maybe it won't be cut. Oh, it interesting. So it didn't. Well, that's the drop shot on the mask. Oh, oh yeah. I'm sorry. Oh, okay, okay, okay. So the mask on your camera is gone. It is gone. But now it's back again. Now it's back because you named it. But let me do that with the drop shadow instead. So if I do that, it should also be gone. I think it will complain when I reopen OBS. Just taking a second. Yep, there we go. Say some files are missing. The cool thing is it actually gives you an interface to fix this. And so you can go in and you can browse and find the file. You can also if you're importing something, you can actually, if it's named the same, you can tell it, here's a folder where all my old files are. And it will just find a bunch of them if there's like a lot of things missing. So that's super handy. Let me put this back because I don't actually want to do that. And we're going to close this again and open it again. There we go. So, but that's a nice thing. I would highly recommend putting your images in some cloud service or something like that. Or if you're not going to do that, back them up regularly to some external hard drive or backblaze or something like that. Or you could, and I experimented this for a long time, I used to keep my OBS images and stuff in GitHub. And that pretty much works, except that GitHub has a pretty low limit on how large a file can be. And so the minute I started adding videos to my OBS libraries, kind of what I think of it as, GitHub was not really a good option anymore. Because it was like, yeah, you can't put a half gigabyte video file into GitHub. So I stopped doing it for that reason. But you know, you don't have to put, like frankly, I probably, like that, I think it's that Monty Python video I had. It's actually like the entire length of that recording, including all the music, that one's a large file. I could crop that to be smaller, right? It's a bad bit anyway. Like it's not funny to anyone except me. So there are ways to get around that to use something like GitHub too. And the cool thing with that is, then you could share that library with multiple people. Maybe you've got multiple people producing similar video in an organizational setting. So that's kind of cool. The other thing is you can back up these scene collections. So this scene collection menu at the top here, this is a collection of these scenes down here. If I go to this menu and go to new and call this test or something, I'll start from scratch. But I can switch back to my default one, which is called Untitled. You can rename them, of course, too. And that's super handy if you've got multiple different kind of projects that you want to bounce between. I actually started over fresh with my OBS install for this course. But before this, I had like seven scene collections. One of them, which was like my basic setup for streaming. One of them, which was like what we used back in May for the Domains 101-201 workshop. When we were on campus at St. Orbert, all kinds of scene collections like that. And I kept them around because it's nice to reference them. You can also export them. So you can go in here and I did do that. So when we're done with the course, I'm going to rework them. But I can actually go and export this. And what it will do is it will just save a text file, a JSON file, but it's just text that describes the scene everything in it and where it's laid out. Super handy way to back up your OBS stuff. And that's also why OBS needs to know the file path. Correct. Because the files aren't in this backup. This is just a text file describing where things are. Right? Yeah. So if you were to say set up a scene or a bunch of scenes in OBS that you wanted to bring to a new computer, what you would do is you would export your scene collection and then you'd take your files. Hopefully you put them all in the same folder and they're not all littered all over your computer because otherwise you're going to have a hard time finding them all. Yeah. And then when you fire up OBS, you'd import this scene collection and then it would say, I don't know where these files are. And you would hit that search directory button, give it a directory and it would be like, okay, cool. I found all 10 of them or whatever. And so if you have a place like outcry drive or GitHub or something where you can keep these consistent, this becomes a pretty easy process. In fact, I have a scene collections folder. Where I keep these. I have one that's my default setup on my personal computer and one I use for recording Dungeons and Dragons like virtual tabletop stuff. I actually have my work scene collection in a different place for reasons that aren't interesting. But yeah. So have a home base for your OBS stuff. Even if you don't want to do anything cloud based with it, then fine, just make a folder in your home folder documents or something. Call it OBS, put your OBS stuff there. It's going to make your life easier down the road when you want to move to a new computer or if you have to, if you mess something up, I regularly make a point of exporting my scene collection just in case I do something I didn't like and I want to revert. Could I redo it? Of course, but it saves me a bunch of time to just import. So that's a cool thing. And again, kind of more advanced, right? We did cover some basic stuff with scenes today, but also some pretty advanced stuff. So I would say if you're watching this video and you're going, okay, now what do I do? And we'll have this in the blog post too. Make a camera scene, make a screen scene for your desktop. Make a scene that has your screen and your camera. Like we're looking at now. You don't have to do fancy rounded corners and stuff you don't want to. But just have both on screen and make one getting started screen with an image or a GIF and some text. Once you've done that, you've got pretty much all the skills you need to do almost anything in OBS. I'm also going to say, particularly for the getting started stuff, I would love to see what people make in that capacity. Like the thing that you made, which was very fun. I enjoyed seeing that. So people sharing screenshots of what they do in Discord would be great. I sort of want to take a half second to share my OBS, which I opened up, just because I'm very proud of my extremely silly technical difficulties thing, which I've never, ever gotten to use because you hope you don't get technical difficulties. And this is what it looks like. Yep, there you go. Thank you. That's it. That's the whole thing. Again, jokes that are only funny to me, but I really like it. Well, and it's a maybe unnecessary thing, but we mentioned last time that you can use OBS for recording and streaming, but also as a virtual webcam. So you technically could, and I have made scenes that are like, my camera's off, I'm eating. And it literally says that on screen. And again, is that obnoxious? Yes, but you can. And I think it's really fun to play with this stuff. And to be perfectly honest with you, I use this stuff in regular video calls to keep my skills sharp with it. And I know that sounds stupid, but using a tool regularly gets you more comfortable with it. That is the truth. And I think I'm comfortable enough with that stuff now. I don't do it as much, but it's a small little thing that's kind of nice and definitely has brought some maybe pity laughs to meetings. So if nothing else, you can do that. I like it. So yeah, now you are. If you've been able to watch this video and then go and make a couple different scenes, I would consider you a at least intermediate level OBS to advanced, because like I said, we've done some kind of more complicated scene compositing. I think this is cool how relatively easy OBS does make this stuff. So even if this stuff can be kind of goofy, like you're using it in say just a video call. You're still sure? Yeah. Yeah. I do think that it is kind of cool how relatively easy this stuff is to do an OBS. You can figure it out messing around with a little bit of guidance. The tools are so much more accessible to do this now than they ever were really. So if you have something cool that you make, please share it in Discord, share a video clip or even just a screenshot. And love to see you're getting started or whatever scenes. Yeah. I really do. Taylor, you're saying like it's just for you. I really do like your, particularly the snacking one, honestly. I find the snacking one very charming. I use that one and I don't know. I think it's funny because it gets around the thing of like, hey, I'm going to keep my camera because I'm eating right now. It's like, I just set that. It's like, yep, there you go. Now you can see it. It literally, I should put like a picture, like a gift of someone eating, like a sandwich. That's just, I feel like that defeats the whole purpose. Yeah, yeah. But someone else. You're passing the blame off to somebody else, yeah. Yeah. And it'll probably be distracting too, but whatever. Who's this new person on the call? What did Taylor know? All right. So thanks for joining me, Pilot. And thanks to everyone watching this. And we'll see you all next week with our last OBS session. So, see ya. Bye-bye.