 I guess I'll get started and thank you all so much for coming to my first workshop. It's my first workshop. It is the first workshop that OSCC has done via Zoom like this. And what we're hoping is that, you know, share knowledge basically. That's what we really want to accomplish here. So in this case, I'm here to give you all an introductory presentation to Open Broadcaster Studio, which is most commonly just referred to by its initials, OBS. And OBS is a tool that allows you to perform quite a few tasks with video and audio. Examples include you can record or stream your desktop or even just a single window on your desktop. You can stream or record from devices like a web camera or a video camera. Or if you happen to have a desktop that has or even a laptop, I guess, that has a capture device for HDMI or something, you can capture that as well. And if you get really fancy with it, you can even kind of turn it into your own miniature television, television studio. OBS is free. It is cross-platform. You will find it, download links for it for Windows and Mac and Linux. It has been under active development for quite a long time now. And it has a thriving community. They're really good with support. They're very responsive with fixing problems and they're constantly adding features. And even though it's probably been most popular with gamers, of course, there's definitely a possibility to use it in your classroom. Or if you want to do, let's say you're in Second Life or Open Simulator and you want to do a news broadcast, you can seamlessly transition between like a YouTube video or a website or even audio sources. And of course, you can record, you can just record, you can just stream or you can record and stream at the same time. Now before I get into the Open Broadcasters software itself, I'd just like to run down some useful information that's good to have on hand before you record or stream. And one of the things you're going to want is a good headset, right? And a good microphone. And of course these days, most headsets have a microphone and thanks to, you know, the COVID pandemic and Zoom and things like that being such a big part of so many of our lives, video conferencing in general, fortunately a lot of manufacturers have stepped up and improved their microphones and headsets. One alternative to that is you can get something like a Blue Snowball USB microphone that is extremely inexpensive, but it's also a, it's a microphone that has really good clarity. It's what's called a dynamic microphone. And that will give you like radio voice, right? Like you want to sound like a podcaster, that that'll do it for you, it'll do it for you at a budget price. There are other ones worth looking at too. The same manufacturer that makes the Blue Snowball microphone also makes a yeti line of microphones. They're a little more, they have some more features and of course the price goes up a little bit accordingly, but they're wonderful microphones. And if you want to broadcast your real life self, you know, all your beauty, you're going to want a webcam or another, you know, or a video camera. And many of us already have one of those built into our laptops or all the one computers. Or again, COVID made us all go out and get one. But if you don't have one or you're not happy with the one you have, the one I'm using right here is a Logitech HD Pro C920. It's a little bit older now, but when I first got it, it was a huge favorite among streamers and bloggers, and it does have some good advantages in that. It's capable of providing a very, I've got it cropped here, but it's capable of providing a pretty wide field of view. And it also works pretty darn well in low light conditions. We even had one taken to, we were, we went to the arena stage in Washington, D.C., and we filmed them using nothing but a Logitech C920 webcam, and it turned out pretty well. It's going to be a little bit noisy, little bit noisy, no matter how well you light, but you're always going to get a good picture with it. And like I said, it's, it's inexpensive. I could even see if, let's say you had a classroom or a small lecture hall. You could even use a webcam like that with a USB extension cable for multiple cameras. It would totally work for that. So another thing to consider, and it should be on this slide. I don't know why it's not multiple monitors is it's not compulsory, but it's really useful to have if you're going to do any streaming or recording, because that way you can have the main thing you're going to broadcast on your main monitor. And then you can have OBS and any related utilities, you know, maybe have Discord goings for back chat or something. You can have all that on the second stream screen. And although you don't need to do that, you can, you can just, you know, if you heavily have one monitor, you can have OBS and start streaming and recording and then send it to the background and then do you need to do. It's just that you won't be able to monitor OBS as easily that way. And let's see here. So moving on to my next slide. Quality. How do you get the best quality out of your stream or your recording? And for streaming, your upload bandwidth is extremely important. We usually think in terms of download speed, which is data coming into us and upload speed is data coming out. And of course, if we're streaming to people, of course, we're uploading. And unfortunately, a lot of Internet service providers have a tendency to only advertise or download speed. It could be they make it ridiculously hard sometimes to find what their actual upload speed is. So if you're in doubt and you don't know, you can just use something like speedtest.net to get, you know, get a good feeling for what your maximum upload speed is. And by default, OBS starts out at about 25 megabits or 2.5, I should say. Sorry, not 25, 2.5 megabits per second. And for a lot of use cases, that's a good starting point right there. Higher screen resolutions require more bandwidth. So if you're going to use 2.5 megabits per second, you probably want to stream at like 720p, like a 720p television. If you have at least four megabits per second available to you, 1080p, like a 1080p television, that's a good choice. If it turns out, though, that let's say you're in a rural area and you have you're just stuck with the DSL that they give you, which which happens to have, you know, terrible upload, you probably still can stream, but you won't be able to stream in high definition. You'll probably have to drop down to a resolution like 480p, which is more or less equivalent to an old style, you know, CRT television. Good enough for people to see things. Probably not good if you need to do like teeny tiny text or anything like that, but it'll it'll be good enough for for some things. Remember that in the other thing with bandwidth is if you're going to if you're going to stream in particular, but also recording, it's not a bad idea. You probably want to only run those applications you absolutely need. There are other applications that cater that are that are designed to mostly use your upload bandwidth. So anything like your your your Second Life or OpenSim Viewer. Cloud storage services are a big one. Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, all of those need upload bandwidth. And worse, I mean, we're so used to those just sitting, you know, you don't even normally think about them. They're just there and they do their thing when they need to do their thing. And you don't want them suddenly hogging all of your upload bandwidth while you're in the middle of a stream. So it's a good idea to go through and see, OK, do I have Google Drive or OneDrive and just just for your streaming session? Just turn those off. And depending on the computer you're using, you'll also want to keep in mind that OBS can eat up a lot of your computer's resources. So just running OBS and your viewer at the same time on your average laptop can eat up a lot of CPU cycles in memory. So you want to make sure to close any other programs that aren't immediately necessary for the task at hand. So maybe you're a regular Adobe user and but you're not using Photoshop or Premiere at that. You know, while you're streaming, so you want to close those down. Excel, you know, any major Microsoft Office apps that are aren't on the cloud, you probably want to shut those down. And obviously, the more powerful your computer, the more programs you can keep running. And then just to return to the subject of bandwidth really quickly, you'll get the best quality if you use wired ethernet to your computer that's going to be doing the streaming. You certainly can stream over Wi-Fi, but it's going to be a less dependable way to go. And wireless connections have a tendency to drop. Drop packets is the technical term. It just little bits of information can literally fall out of Wi-Fi and that will affect your stream. So, Marcus, I have a question here. From R.D. saying, does OBS use as much as, say, Camtasia does? I have not used Camtasia in a very long time. I would say that in terms of resources, it's probably around the same, honestly. I mean, they both have to encode video and encoding video is what eats up resources for the most part. All right. He replies cool. Awesome. So let's see. So streaming services, there are tons of them out there. And probably the big three are YouTube, Facebook and Twitch. Twitch, of course, is famous for, you know, being focused on gaming and eSports and a few other things. One thing to keep in mind with Twitch, Valerie is asking, upload speed is usually, she's asking, did you say that upload speed is usually less than download speed? What is a good target for upload speed? So, yes, it usually is less, significantly less, unless you're fortunate enough to have, like, fiber internet. Usually that's usually your upspeed is about as fast as your downspeed with fiber. If you're using cable or any kind of DSL service, chances are your upload speed is going to be much less than your download speed. A good target is the 2.5 megabits per second upload speed. If you can get at least that, then you're going to be able to do a decent 720p stream. And like I said, you can go lower and I'll give you a few tips on that as well later. But, you know, obviously the higher your bandwidth or the higher your bit rate on OBS, the better quality your stream will be. For reference, anybody who watched the Open Simulator Community Conference, at least one or two of our streamers were using just 2.5 megabits. So if you thought it looked good on our live stream, that's how yours will probably look similar. So, yeah, streaming services. Twitch is interesting because they are anti-second life. They're very gaming focused. And if they see that you're streaming from second life or Open Simulator as well, because they look at that and they're just the same thing from their point of view. They're like, this is in the game. We don't want this on our platform. So people have been banned in the past for using Twitch for second life in Open Sim. So that's just something to keep in mind. Facebook is obviously an attractive option to stream to because simply because it's just hard to beat the potential size of the audience that you can bring in, right? I haven't myself done much streaming to Facebook. I tend to prefer YouTube. And I'll get into YouTube in a little bit, but I do also, I just want to highlight, Restream.io is an interesting service in that it's not like a conventional streaming service like YouTube or Twitch or Facebook. What Restream does is it allows you to basically rebroadcast to multiple services. So you broadcast to Restream and then Restream in turn refeeds your stream out to say YouTube and Facebook simultaneously. So it's a good one to have in your tool belt or at least know about. And in this presentation, we are going to focus on YouTube because it is possible to have an absolutely free experience. If you don't monetize your channel, you won't have ads. So you don't have to worry about that. There's no limit on things like audience size. You can stream all the way up to 4K if you need to. Unlike some other services out there, YouTube does not charge you extra for little perks like a higher quality stream. So YouTube is just a great starting place, I feel. Now, YouTube does require that you validate your account before you can live stream. And I've got the link here on this slide. It's the second link there at the support.google.com link. And let's see here. I'm going to share my screen real quick here. And hopefully everybody can see it. And then this is the page you're looking for. And we will also have all of these links in... This is also being simultaneously live streamed to YouTube right now. So after this is done, we will get to work on making sure that the summary for the video has links like this in there. Plus, I'll also have links to my slides and things like that. So all the resources you're going to need. But yeah, this is the page you need to go to to get verified. It tells you how. And then... So switching back to my slides, I'm going to stop sharing for a little bit here. And the other thing you need is your YouTube dashboard. You're going to need to get to that. And I will actually show you, walk you through that a little bit later. But there's a link you're going to need to actually stream. But we'll get into that later. We'll get into that later. So finally, we can move on to Open Broadcaster itself. And if you haven't yet downloaded it, this is where you get it. It's just obsproject.com. And it looks just like the picture there. So you have big download button links for Windows, Mac, and Linux right there. It's a signed binary installer. So you just download it, install, and it will be there for you. So let's see. We're not ready for that yet. So once you have Open Broadcaster installed, you should see I'm going to share my screen again. And we're going to be spending a lot of time on my screen share from this point on. Because I'm going to be sharing this Open Broadcaster right here. And this is, I hope, I think more or less, how it looks out of the box vanilla. And so it's like, and I'm just going to basically go through and describe the interface a little bit here. Let's see here. So once even a long time since I used it vanilla, so I don't think I remember either. I don't either. And I can't, unfortunately, I can't like uninstall and reinstall because I would just wipe out all of my, all the stuff I've so carefully built up over the years. But hopefully this is pretty darn close. And you'll see, you'll see it. Once you've opened up OBS, you'll see a screen that looks very much like this. And before we get into too much of the meat of it, what we need to do is go through your settings. And this is the boring part. This is the long boring part right here because I'm going to walk you through a bunch of settings. And there's going to be a ton of them that we're not going to talk about because you really don't need them to do a basic recording or stream. So basically I'm just going to walk you through some of the highlights of the setting. So once you probably definitely need to use or at least want to know about. That sounds great, Mike. Thank you. Could you, could you change your camera from the virtual camera in OBS to your webcam or at least go full, full video image? Oh, did I share the wrong one? Well, sharing is perfect, but what's coming into your webcam has the, you know, the tall, the very small image of you. Oh, is that what I'm sharing? Okay, there we go. That's it. That's all right. All right. Thank you. So yeah, learning experience. Yay. So if you, if you happen to have OBS installed and you're following along, I want you to look over onto the right side of OBS here and you'll see there's a whole row of buttons. And the second from the top is settings. So we just click on that. And then a new window will pop up. And for those of us who use the open simulator or second life viewer, this is actually, this will feel a little bit familiar because it actually is a lot like our preferences windows in our viewers. So we've got a bunch of categories over on the left here. And then each of those categories has settings over on the right. And in the general tab, there's only really a couple things here that you need to worry about. I mean, you look at this and you're like, oh my God, what is all this? And you're like, most of this you don't need out of the, just to get started. The first thing I'm going to highlight is that OBS has magnificent translations. It's got, you know, all the big languages, you know, German, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, they're here. Farsi, Hebrew, it's here. So if you're not a native English speaker, OBS has you covered, which is really fantastic. The other thing here that can be, that can be useful is in the output section here. And there's two options here. And the first one, and it's the most important one, if you're a streamer, in my opinion, is automatically start recording when streaming. I do not, it's shameful how many times I've started streaming and then realized, oh my God, I forgot to hit that record button. And this just, this, this, if you have this checked, when you start streaming, you will automatically start recording. You don't even have to think about it. There's an option right after that that's all, that will also keep recording after your stream ends. So let's say you, you're live streaming something, and you want to record something after that life, you want to kind of keep it going as a recording after your live stream ends, you can do that. You could just stop streaming, but then it'll keep recording so that you can have, you know, that record there. So now this is where it gets fun. We're going to move on to, the tabs on the side over on the left, and we're going to move to stream. And YouTube, or I'm sorry, OBS has streaming, a bunch of streaming servers all built in. You see here you got Twitch and YouTube, Facebook, Restream, Twitter, all the ones I mentioned are here. And if you go even further in, if you could show all, they've got ones I've never even heard of here. I don't even know what most of these are, but they're there if you need it. But we, for purposes of this tutorial, are going to want to make sure that we've chosen YouTube. There we go. And then after that it has a server property. You could just leave that alone. Don't need to mess with that. But what else is important here is the stream key. So once you've validated with, you've validated your YouTube account. And then you just need to go to, let's see here. You just need to go to the YouTube, locked into your account. From there you go to your account icon in the upper right hand corner, and you click on that, which will open up a YouTube menu. And then you just go to YouTube Studio. So after clicking on that, you want to look over to the upper right hand corner, and there's a create button here. So if you click on that, there's two options, upload videos and go live. Personally, I think that the go live option is what we're looking for here. I think it's a little bit misleading because when you click on that, it makes it sound like you're going to go instantly live. This is not the case. Do not worry. You can go ahead and click on that. What it will do is it will take you to the streaming settings. And hopefully it starts out with this one here at the top, which is the stream one, but there's a couple of other ones here for other things. But we want the one up here that says stream when you hover over it. And the only thing we're looking for here at the moment is our stream key right here. And it's normally hidden. I'm not going to show you mine. But all you got to do is click copy, right? And then you just need to go back to OBS. And then you just paste in your streaming key. And that's it. You're good to go. And that's all you need to do here. If you've done that, you're pretty much set up to stream on YouTube. So we're going to move on to another section of the settings called output. And by default, at the very top, you see that there's an output mode. And this should be at simple. For 95% of people, simple is going to be all you need. It's going to give you automatically deal with all the settings you need to deal with. There is an advanced mode. And if you're familiar with things like, you know, tweaking video encoders and things like that, advanced mode can be useful. But that's, if you were even in doubt about that, don't mess with it. You'll probably just cause yourself pain. So in the output mode, or in the simple output mode, we see that there are two sections here. There's streaming and then there's recording. And we're going to start with the streaming. And by default, I believe OBS starts out with 2,500 kilobits per second, which is 2.5 megabits per second. We're just moving a decimal point. Mark, Michael. Yes, sir. Sidearm asked a question that's relevant. Does OBS do an auto config bit rate test? It does not. However, the OBS website has a wizard of sorts on it that can help you get a handle on, you know, if you feed it certain information like what your bandwidth is and et cetera, et cetera, it can give you recommendations on settings. But it's not built into OBS itself. So, yeah, you want a bit rate. 2,500 is a good initial target. If you happen to have more bandwidth than that, by all means crank it up. Again, for reference, when I streamed the conference out to YouTube, I was using about 4,000 kilobits per second. And that allowed me to get a decent 1080p stream out onto YouTube. And the higher the better. Although I probably wouldn't bother going much over 8,000. Over 8,000, you're just not going to see much return on investment, so to speak. It's not going to get much better. Unless, of course, you're streaming at something like 4K, which is ridiculous. Anybody streams at 4K except for like extreme gamers. 1080p is good enough for practically everybody. And yeah, if you're going to stream at 1080p, 4,000 is a good baseline for 720p, 2,500 is a good baseline. And if you're stuck on like I said before, like an old DSL line, you might want to bring that down to like 1,000 or even like just 768. It's not great, but it will let you stream. So next here, under your video bitrate, we have our encoder. And by default, this is usually set to software X264. And let's see here. And X264 uses your CPU to encode your video. And this encoder provides really great, really impressive quality. But if your computer isn't very powerful, if you've got run of the mill into a laptop per se, trying to use your CPU to encode video is probably not the best way to go. Fortunately, most recent CPUs have built-in video encoders in them. So if you look at this screen and you click here, you'll get a dropdown. And X264 will always be there. If you have an Intel processor, it's quite likely you have something called Quick Sync, which is also pretty good quality. If you have Quick Sync, I'd highly recommend using it. If you have a discrete NVIDIA or AMD graphics cards, those also have encoders built in. As you can see here, I happen to have an NVIDIA card. So I have that as an option. So that's what I use. That takes all of the stress off of your CPU, frees up things so that if you're streaming... So your viewer has more resources on your CPU and things like that. And it's definitely... If you can use a hardware encoder, definitely use a hardware encoder. Yeah, and just to clarify, Dave asks, do you know for hardware encoding is QSV, better than NVNC? I would say... I've never used the NV encoder, so I cannot comment on that one. In my experience, QSV, which is Quick Sync, is a little better quality than the NVIDIA. Although NVIDIA has improved, basically the newer your card, the better the quality is going to be with the NVIDIA encoder. So under that, we have our audio bit rate. And that is, I believe, at default, that's 160, which is a good general-purpose bit rate. With that, you can do music, you can do voices. It's going to be fine. It's going to let you crank that all the way up to 320 if you want. And you can if you have the bandwidth. So that 160 value is also a bit rate that stacks right on top of your video. It's in addition to your video bit rate. So if you're trying to squeeze into your bandwidth, lower is better. And you can go down as low... 96 is fine if all you have is people speaking. And you can probably get... if all you have is like one person speaking, 64. You can get away with 64. I won't recommend it. But again, if you're starved for that upload bandwidth, 64 will work. You do not want to use 64 or 96 if you're playing music. However, you're going to wind up with a lot of distortions in your audio or any kind of dynamic audio that's constantly changing pitch and whatnot. A higher bit rate is better for that. For the most part, you won't have to mess with the other default settings that you're streaming are going to be fine. You probably don't want to mess with any of those. So I'm going to move on to the recording section here. And probably the most important thing here is your recording path. And all this is where your recording is going to be stored. And for the most part, you just want to make sure... For example, if you look at... Oops, let's see, not that. Oh my God. Here we go. So for example, if you look at all the drives I have, C is obviously a little bit full. I do not want to store my videos on C, but my data drive D here, that's got plenty of room. If I wanted to, I could store my videos on there. And that's really the big thing when you're choosing a path for where your recordings are. You just want enough space because the videos can become pretty large pretty quickly. An hour recording can easily be a gigabyte in size. And for reference, the entire... An entire days recording of OSCC is about 15 gigabytes. So you just want to make sure, again, you just have this somewhere where you got lots of space and where you know you're going to find it, right? And if that happens to be your desktop, great. If you don't have room on your C drive like I do, you're probably going to want to put it somewhere else. And you just want to make sure you know where that folder is. The one you want to make sure that recording quality is set to same as stream. And the next thing we're going to move on here, this is... I'm afraid to bring this up because this is going to confuse some people. Recording format. By default, OBS uses FLV. FLV is an extremely old video format that was used for flash videos and things like that. For the most part, you're not going to be able to just upload an FLV file to YouTube or Facebook or something. So FLV is actually a very poor choice. MP4. This is the one I use most of the time. It is supported by practically everything, whether you're talking Adobe Premiere, Final Cut, Sony Vegas, all the big video editors are going to support it. All the big video hosting services like YouTube or Facebook or Twitter, anywhere you want to put a video, they're going to support MP4. So MP4 is a very nice choice. The only caveat with MP4 is that there is a possibility that your file can become corrupted. And as you can see, OBS is warning me about that. It says recordings cannot be paused if the recording quality is... Well, that's the wrong one. But you can wind up with unrecoverable files with MP4. Now, I've been streaming for years now since 2014. I have come across one file that I was not able to recover. That was just messed up. But if you... I don't know, your video is mission critical. You absolutely cannot afford for it to be screwed up. The option then is to choose MKV. MKV is extremely robust that way. It's very hard to break an MKV file. Even if some of the data in it is a little bit garbage, it'll just treat it as a blip and keep going. The downside there is that unlike MP4, MKVs are not as well supported in software and in upload services. So chances are, you would have to take your recording, your MKV recording, and find a utility online and convert it over to an MP4 before you can video edit or put it online. So there's a trade-off. Again, I prefer MP4, but I just want to make sure you know what your options are. And that's really all you need to do here in the output section of the settings. So I'm going to move on to audio. And let's see. By default, the only... Well, the only things you really need to probably look here are your desktop audio in the global audio devices section and the first microphone one that's listed here. As you can see, you can have up to four microphones and two input ones. And there's even other ways to get audio into OBS, but we're just going to keep it simple, right? So by default, OBS will simply use default, which is the device. In this case, this is... You're probably going to be your desktop speakers. It's the default audio device that your operating system thinks expects audio to come out of. And again, by default, that's your speakers. You're probably your computer speakers, your monitor speakers or something like that. But if you click on that, you'll get a dropdown. And I have a ridiculous number of audio devices here. But I often tend to choose my headset speakers. So that way I have a lot of control. So like if I'm recording from Skype, for example, audio from Skype, I only hear from Skype and I only record what I hear. So setting that desktop audio to my headset makes that happen. Of course, if you want to use your default speakers, what I would recommend, like for me, these are my default speakers. And I highly recommend that you specify them here. Because if you leave it at the... I'm sorry, if you leave it at default, you're at the mercy of your operating system choosing your audio device. And Windows... I don't know really about Mac or Linux, but Windows in particular has a habit of surprising you by thinking that it knows better than you about what audio device you want. So if this is default and you want to be absolutely sure that you're using the right audio, make sure to explicitly select it here, whether it's your speakers or your headset, right? And then the other thing you need to worry about, if you're going to be speaking in your recording or stream and you want other people to hear you, you need a microphone. And again, that'll start out at default, which again is what the operating system knows is your default microphone. And again, so you're at the mercy of your operating system. So again, I recommend explicitly saying what your microphone is, so that might be the one on your headset. It might be your... If you have like, I have here a blue snowball here. That's what I tend to use because it's got great quality. So you want to explicitly set that there. And unless you're getting really fancy, you can pretty much ignore the rest of this. You can just leave all the other ones disabled. You don't have to mess with your sample rate or your channels. The rest of this really isn't important. So then we move over on the left again to the audio, or the, I'm sorry, the video section. And there's only a few things here. There's the base canvas resolution. And what this is going to correspond to is the resolution of the monitor that you're using to broadcast from. I'm betting most of us have 1080p monitors. So you would probably want to set that. You can see here, these choices are going to vary according to what your computer screen resolution is. I happen to have a 4K monitor, for example, so I could choose that. I'd be crazy, but I could. But 1080p is what probably most of us have, or something very close to that, like 1400. 1400p. And those are 1080p or 1400, depending on what your computer has. Those are both good values. And then there's the output scaled resolution. And what this means is that, let's say you only have enough bandwidth to do a 720p stream. So you can still capture your 1080p screen. But then what OBS will do here is scale it down to 720p and then output a 720p stream. But if you have the bandwidth, let's say you've got, you're rocking a good 4000 up. You can go ahead and raise that up to, say, 1080p. And that'll work fine. And if you're stuck on a horrible little DSL line, that's when you can go down to like, here I have it as 852 by 480. And anything close to 480, whether it's 540 would work, 432 would also work. But 480 is just a nice common number for this kind of thing. So 480, if this will give you, people will be able to see what you're doing. They'll be like, they'll see your face. It will be blurry. I wouldn't do it for things like small text or something. But like I said, it's equivalent to an old television set. So it's like just good enough. But I am going to leave this at 720 for now. And then the other thing here is your frame rate. And by default, that should be 30. And 30 is a good recommended choice. It's what most streaming services expect as a frame rate. And it's pretty close to what most video editing software, technically it's not exactly 30, but it's really darn close. So 30 is good for video editing or for streaming into a service or for uploading to YouTube. But again, if you are really trying to squeeze into some bandwidth, you can lower that. You can lower it down to a value of 20. It's still going to look pretty good on the extreme end. And I wouldn't recommend it. But if you have to, you can go as low as 15 frames per second. For example, traditional hand-drawn animation, like an old version of The Simpsons, right? An old episode of The Simpsons. Those were all hand-drawn animations. And those were done at 15 frames per second. And so it won't be as smooth as 30 frames per second. But if you're really just trying to squeeze into that bandwidth, 15 will work, 20 is better, 30 is the ideal. You can go faster. Some services do support like 60 frames per second resolution. But those are going to eat up a lot more resources. And unless, I don't know, that's really more of a gamer thing. I think that for most of us, 30 frames per second is more than enough. It's going to do you just fine. And that's all of our settings right there. I know that's a huge annoying slog to go through all of that rigmarole. But those are the basic settings you need. And now you can just go ahead and click on OK or Apply. And those settings will stick. And if you shut down OBS and restart it again, they'll come right back. So let's see here. So yes, we're finally done with settings. And we've clicked on that OK button. And now we can finally move on to doing something with OBS, right? And let's start by just taking a little bit of a tour of the interface. And at the top, you'll see this big black square. And what that is, is that's your preview area. Once we have something that we want to record or stream, we'll be able to see it there. And now I'm just going to go across the bottom from left to right. And we're going to start with scenes. And by default, you'll already have an untitled scene there. It might just be called scene. And right next to that, you also have sources. Those two boxes have an important relationship. A scene is a collection of sources. And the source is something that you will capture to record a stream. So let's say I have this scene here and I can right click on it. I can choose rename. And I can call this scene one, right? We still don't see anything yet, though. And this is where the sources come in. So I can click add. And there's a bunch of sources we can choose from here. We're going to use an easy one, which is text. So I'm just going to, you can name that whatever you want. So I'm going to just name that my text. Or you can just leave it alone. Click OK. And then it wants you to set up your text. And I'm just going to keep this real easy and do a hello world. And then I can put that on. And now we have, if we were to start recording a broadcasting, that is what we would record a broadcast. And we can add a new scene. We can call that scene to if I can type. And now you see it went blank again. That scene became active. And so the other scene went away. But when I click on that scene, it reappears. So if I click on two, it goes away. Scene one, we're back at scene one. And let's see, I can add something over here. Like, oh, say an image. I'll just leave that image and I'll browse and I'll open up. The image I used to make my slide. And now I have an image. So I can now switch between those two scenes. Right. And I can even, of course, have multiple sources. So in this first scene, in addition to text, I could also add. Oh, I don't know. I could add a video. I can totally do that. And I could, let's see, I'm going to add a video from files. And let's do one of this, one of my resources or one of the roles I use for. For open sim. And you can see there's a video playing in that scene. If I switch to two, it goes back to the image. I come back to scene one and the video is playing. Now, the text is hidden right now because it's behind the video source. So if I can, I can drag this video source down underneath text and suddenly text is in front. So now we have a hello world on top of a video. And then we can switch to our other scene, et cetera. And then if we want to get rid of stuff, I don't want this video anymore. I just go down here and just make sure that my video source is selected. There's a minus button on the bottom here. I hit that. It'll ask me if I'm sure I say yes, and it's gone. Same. I can do that with with all the other ones too. Just get rid of all of them. Okay. So let's see here. And right next to your sources, you have your audio mixer. And you can see I have, I have a desktop audio slider here, which will connect my speakers and this is, this will affect the audio going out to your viewers. So if you want them to hear just, let's say you're playing some music and you want it to be really quiet, you can turn it down. If you want to blast their ears out, you can turn it way up. You can also just hit this. You can see here there's a speaker icon. One of them is red. One of them isn't. The red one is muted. So let's say I wanted to mute my desktop audio. Click that. I wanted to unmute my mic. I click that. And you can see now that that's, that's taking my microphone input. So you can see that it's showing that. And fortunately I'm not, well, see now look, I just blew it out. It just went completely red. And so I might want to turn this down just a little bit. So I'm not blowing out people's speakers. Next to that, we have seen transitions. So if I'm going to, oh, I shouldn't have laid out a little scene, other scene. So let's just do, I'm going to set up another really quick set of sources here. They're both going to be texts. So I can, oops. Hello world. And click okay. And then I'm going to add another one here. It's going to be text again. Click okay. And we're just going to call, we're just going to stay in this one. Hello zoom people. Right. Okay. So when I switch between these, you'll notice it fades a little bit. There's just a little bit of a transition in between each one where for just a fraction, just like a little over a quarter of a second, they overlap for just a little bit. This is an effect I tend to like. And I probably abuse it a bit. There are a few other ones you can choose from cut. Cut is just going to instantly bam, change just bam. No fancy effects. Cut is basically just new scene. There are other ones here you can play with. For example, I'll just show you swipe. If you switch between when using swipe, it'll just, it literally just kind of slides over. Right. And there's some other ones here. I encourage you to play with them slides. Stinger fade to color. Some of these are a little more advanced to probably the ones you use most or cut fade and swipe probably. Maybe slide to. I mostly stick to fade and cut. I don't tend to get much more fancy than that, but that's all about personal preference, right? So I'm going to keep that at cut for now. And let's do something practical now. Let's, I'm going to go ahead and delete this and let's get our open, let's get our, my open simulator viewer in here. Right. So to do that, I'm going to make sure my scene is selected. And then come over to sources and I'm going to add a source. There's three ways to capture your viewer. The first and the best way is to use game capture. Game capture is going to be the most reliable. It's going to give the best performance. I don't think it's available. However, on every platform, Linux and Mac may not have game capture as an option. And if they don't, then you can use window capture. Window capture is actually what we're going to use today. And it's a really great choice because like I said, it should work on all kinds of hardware. I mean, the graphics kept, the game capture one can get really funky. Like if you have a gaming desktop or a gaming laptop, gaming laptops can be a little bit funky with OBS because of the way they have to do some special things to get their graphics going. So game capture just might not work at all. In which case you can just use window capture. Window capture is very reliable this way. But there are, every once in a while, you'll run into a situation just because of the combination of your hardware or your operating system or your devices. You might, it's conceivable and I've seen it once or twice. Window capture won't work either. In that case, the backup option there is just to do a desktop capture, which is display capture, I should say, and then you'll be able to choose an entire monitor screen that you can share. That's definitely not my favorite way to do things. Because, oh goodness, I have all my notes and I've been just abluting this whole time. I've noticed that things can pop up on display capture you might not want. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, it's my least favorite one. And yeah, the problem with it is that it does, it'll capture everything that pops up. Notifications from apps, a window that suddenly wants focus, maybe McAfee security just decides, it needs to pop up from front of you right now. You know, unfortunately that will end up on your recording or your stream. But if neither game capture or window capture work, it's a compulent option. But we are going to use window capture here. And game capture and window capture, the settings look pretty darn similar. And when you add a window capture source, it'll ask you to name it. In this case, I think I'll name mine Firestorm. You could name it Viewer, you could name it Second Life or OpenSim, whatever feels most memorable for you. I'm going to go ahead and call it Firestorm and click OK. And then it's going to open up a new window. And this also has a preview area. And that's here at the top. Right under that preview area, there's a dropdown called Window. And this, it looks a little bit crazy at first. But basically all you want to do is look through this for the window that you want to stream. And in our case, that is, oh my goodness, I know I had Firestorm running. Why is, no, there it is. I'm probably just blind. So let's see here. The car storm should be here somewhere. I'm not seeing it. No, I don't see it either. I don't either. I don't know why. So although I'm encouraging you all to do window capture, I'm going to try it with game capture. So I'm just going to get rid of that one and then add a game. I blame Zoom. It's possible. And so I'm going to capture a specific window and I'm going to capture, it's not here. Oh, there it is. There it is. There it is. So now you can see that I've selected that window and game kept in window capture will work in a very similar way. And this is an example of the window capture in my case, not working nicely. So I had to fall back to game capture. So this is why it's important to keep the remember you have three ways to do this. So I'm capturing a specific window. I'm capturing my viewer. You really don't the only other thing here I would really worry about is there is one option here called capture cursor. And that whether or not you have that checked is completely reliant upon your use case. For example, during the conference. I'm constantly moving my mouse all over the place and the audience does not want to see me moving my mouse over the presenter slides or the presenter themselves. Right. So during the conference, I uncheck that. But for this here, if I was doing this, you know, a workshop style thing over OBS, I probably want to keep my capture my cursor visible so I can use it as a pointer, just like I'm doing here. So we're going to go ahead and keep that and we're just going to hit OK. And as you can see, our viewer is now in our preview window and if we were to start recording or streaming, what we see here is what would go out minus the border around it. And that is where we move on to I'm going to move back to my slides here. And this is where some of the fancier stuff kicks in. So first of all, do you want to keep streaming sharing because we can't read the. Oh, you can't really read the slide. I'm so sorry about that. That's all right. But yeah, so you're looking at this now and it's it's okay. It's a good start, but there's a few issues here. The biggest one being that there's there's a big black bar across the bottom, right? We don't want to stream a big black bar across the bottom. So the first thing you can do is simply left click on here and you can just drag it around and get it where you want it to go. The other thing you'll notice here is that the corners, all four corners, left, right, top and bottom, there's these little square handles. And if you just left click and drag on those, it'll scale things out. And in this case, probably the easiest thing to do is just kind of stretch your viewer out, center things so that nothing you don't want seeing, want people to see a scene. And then of course you've got the mini map in our way. So I'll just go into my viewer and close the mini map. This is the easiest thing you can do. But we can also get a little bit fancier. I can also crop. So if I hold down my alt key on my Windows machine, I'm sorry, I don't know what it is on Mac. But I hold down my alt key and then I hold this handle on the bottom and drag up that border turns green. And I can crop out, for example, that bottom toolbar in my viewer and I can do the same thing. Let's say I don't want the top menu showing either. I can do the same thing. Alt, left click, drag down and that border will turn green. And it's been cropped. And if you want, you can do the same thing on the sides. But what I might do instead is just position this and scale it out and center it. And then just keep in mind when you're looking at your viewer that the sides are kind of cut off, but people won't see those. But as you can see, this is a really nice view right here. So if I go into my viewer and I turn on my fancy fly cam, you can see that that's all working wonderfully. And if you're more familiar with, for example, the camera controls, you can certainly use those. Or if you're familiar with using your keyboard, you can also mouse around with your keyboard and mouse and zoom in on various things. And at this point, if you've gotten a nice view, you've set up our streaming key. What I can do is let's say I want to start streaming and I can do that. So I can hit start streaming and I mess something up because of my recording. So let me fix that real quick. Oh, okay. So it is streaming. And if we look over on YouTube, you can see that there's a preview here of my live stream. So I have, I am successfully streaming to the world on YouTube right now. And then at any time, you can simply disconnect, stop broadcasting or run your YouTube. So you can also end the streams there. So I could say end there. And then if I switch back to OBS, I just hit stop streaming there. And let's see. Oh my goodness, we're a little bit over time. So, but that, this is it. If you've been able to follow everything so far, I'm going to switch back to my cameras here and stop sharing for now. And that's not what I want. There we go. So that's it. These are the basics. If you can do this much, you can stream and record anything to your heart's content. There's a lot more you can do here. There's so much more you could explore. Like you saw all those different types of sources you can have. So you can do videos, you can do audio, you could pull in extra mics, you could pull in images. You could have, you know, text along the bottom for URLs. And there's a studio mode. You'll notice that we have an OBS, a button called studio mode so that you can do things like, oops, that's not studio mode, that's settings. If you click on studio mode, you suddenly get two previews. And one of those, the one on the left, allows you to, for example, switch to a different scene and edit that behind the scenes. And then when you're ready for it to go live, that's when you hit the transition. And then it goes live. These are all things you can explore on your own. There's a lot of more tutorials. I'm also going to include a document that describes things like, how do you studio mode and things like that. And once we're done with this and I'm able to go back and edit the summary over on our YouTube video, it's going to have a list of resources and things there as well. So including a link to a Google Doc with a little more information. So I think that's great, Mark. And I think what I'd like to do at this point, we are at time, and time's not that critical, but I think I'd like to stop the YouTube stream. And so I want to thank all of our guests who are watching on YouTube. And then people who are here in the Zoom meeting are free. We could take some few questions, if you would like. That would be great. All right. All right. So thank you to everybody on YouTube. And we will see you on the internet. Thank you guys so much.