 I'm going to come on to voice. Hopefully you should hear me. Ope. Ope. That was my bad. It's fixed. I was worried there for a second. Voices in your head? Yeah, yeah. I have to kill a video channel. Indeed, video voices in my head. Which that being said, and I will put this in chat as well, but we are also streaming this live to YouTube. So, and grab the link without making myself have a horrible echo. Okay. Here you go. Okay. I'm closing that. So today, and I will put this here too as well. Today we have with us Michael Bailey, Marcus Llewellyn in Second Life. Oops, I lost the second part of that. Who's going to present on screen capture and live streaming to YouTube, which is very meta because we are indeed streaming to YouTube. And a little bit about Michael. He's been working with technology for the past 24 years. Originally a programmer. He discovered Second Life in 2007 and then became invested in the Open Simulator project in 2009. Since then, he's acquired expertise in scripting and building virtual environments, as well as familiarity with the Open Simulator software and its configuration. And as an open source advocate, he makes heavy use of tools such as Blender and Open Broadcaster Studio, which he'll talk about today. He's streamed for the Open Simulator Community Conference, OSCC, since 2014, which is also coming up again. So I'm sure he'll chat a bit about that. He was instrumental in the OSCC 2016 live streaming setup, the coordination, training in the AV promotional materials. Currently he's a staff member at Avocon. He's dedicated to promoting projects for social good by means of video tutorials, presentations, or useful software and content creation. And to make it a little bit easier... Oh, and if you're going to follow along, because this is kind of workshop style if you want to do it today, you can download and install Open Broadcaster, and that's at obsproject.com. And in order to go through some of these steps, you'll have to have a verified YouTube account, and that's youtube.com. He'll go through that stuff too. And then lastly, for those who want to follow along, there is... His slides are available in World... I mean, sorry, outside of Second Life at that URL. And the workshop curriculum as well, which has a lot of the text. So if it's easier for you rather than kind of what I'm typing, you can also follow along there. And with that, I will turn it over to you, Michael. Alright, thank you. Thank you for having me here again. I think you need to probably unmute. Indeed. Yep, sounds good. Sorry. Yeah. That put me off kilter. Yeah, so thank you for having me here again. This will be the third time I've presented at Nonprofit Commons. So for some of you, this will be the third time you've seen it. And thank you again for coming again. But yes, I would like to welcome you all to this presentation workshop on Open Broadcaster Studio. Open Broadcaster, which is often simply referred to as OBS, is a tool that allows you to perform quite a few tasks with video and audio. Examples include desktop or window recordings, video device capture from sources like webcams or video cameras, and the ability to set up various types of sources in scenes that you can switch between, making it behave like your own miniature television studio. OBS is free. It's open source, and it is cross-platform with installation packages available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It has been under active development for a long time now, and it has a thriving community. And the developers are very responsive to the needs of their users and put out updates quite frequently. Although it has become most popular with people who stream video games, it has a lot more potential than that. You could use it to record in-world meetings, presentations, lectures, tutorials, much like we're doing now. And you could even use it to coordinate multiple cameras in a real-world setting like a classroom or a real-life presentation. You can add titles and text to your video. You can seamlessly transition to other sources, other inputs like if you need to show a video. You can seamlessly transition to YouTube or play an audio recording or show a website. Those are all part of OBS. You can do that all within that software. And you can record. You don't have to stream. You can simply record your presentation. You can stream. Of course, that's the broadcaster part of the name of the software. Or you can do both at the exact same time. But before I get into Open Broadcaster Studio itself, I would like to go over some useful information that is good to have on hand before you record or stream. There are some useful optional tools. And to augment OBS and get the most out of it, there's some extra hardware and software that you should be aware of. If you're going to stream from your desktop and plan on speaking, a good quality headset is a really good idea. Gaming headsets tend to have the best microphone quality. And the one I use is the Corsair Gaming H2100 headset. Gaming headsets can cost hundreds of dollars. And if you're budget conscious, this particular headset has a lower price point and great quality. It's a little bit older, so you may have to find it on clearance or something like that. But if you like what you're hearing right now, this is a good headset. Or of course, if you have lots of money to throw at a gaming headset, buy a better one. But if you want more of a radio voice sound, you want to sound very clear like a podcaster, then you might go with a dynamic microphone. These microphones can provide extremely good clarity when speaking. They're also quite sensitive and can pick up sounds from quite a distance, which can either be a pro or a con depending on what you're trying to accomplish. For example, my microphone can pick up sounds in other rooms of the house. So when I use it, I need to run around and tell everybody to be quiet or occasionally bother a cat. But that can be a good thing, for example, if you're using a microphone that you want to pick up sounds from the entire room. I personally use the Blue Snowball USB microphone, which again is a budget selection. But it's got great quality, pardon me, quality. And the Blue Brand has a number of microphones that you can choose from if you want something that's a little better, even than the Snowball. Can I jump in here for a second? Absolutely. Fidget asks if you are using a soundproof room. I am not using a soundproof room. No, no, I wish I had one. Basically what I tend to do is simply close all the doors. And there are, it's something I'll get into in a little bit. OBS does have some built-in utilities that let you, for example, filter out noise. So you can make use of that. So moving on, if you want to broadcast your real-world self, you'll want a webcam. Many of us probably already have one built into our laptops or all-in-one computers or have one with our desktop. But the quality of these can vary a great deal. And if you're not happy with yours, you might want to consider the Logitech HD Pro C920. And actually, or any Logitech HD Pro newer than that. And it works great under most lighting conditions. Even, we actually used one recently in a real-life event. And it works, you know, it's not the world's greatest camera, but it works surprisingly well in a low-lit real-life environment. And with USB extension cords, I could even easily see these being used as multiple cameras in a classroom or a small lecture area on the cheap. It has a wide field of view. It does 1080p video. And like I said, it works great under most lighting conditions. Having two or more monitors is a real boon when live streaming, because this allows you to have your viewer on one monitor fully maximized and OBS or any other related utilities on another monitor. And while you can certainly use OBS with one monitor by setting OBS to stream in a record and then putting it into the background, you won't be able to as easily monitor the live stream or make changes to it. And when using the full studio mode of OBS, where you can switch between scenes and sources, two monitors is practically a must. So if you're doing something that's especially important and you have an extra monitor on the house, go steal it from someone else. Something that is a definite extra but is great to have if you're doing in-world recording or streaming is a 3D mouse. And probably the most familiar one to many of us is the 3D connection space navigator, as the viewer has support for it baked in. Using this to control your fly cam allows you to have a nice smooth movement or even something that can resemble a crane shot or something even more fancy. At Virtual World's Best Practices in Education in 2016, I was filming John Pathfinder Lester's keynote presentation and he's such a pleasant, wonderful, joyful spirit. And of course, he came dressed as a mesh penguin. But not just one, he could and did summon a whole huddle of penguins to follow him around as he ran all over the stage. He threw fish at the audience and, you know, when he dismissed his waddle of penguins, they flew up into the sky. So it was a real, it was a great joy to film. It was a lot of fun to film. But wow, the 3D mouse sure came in handy when I was doing that keynote. And finally, on the tool front, getting yourself a camera hud can be a lot of help. A camera hud allows you to switch your viewer's camera to preset positions quickly and on the fly. If, for example, you have a panel of people on stage, something like we have here, you could do a preset for a close-up of each person, as well as a preset that showed the entire panel or maybe another preset for the slides and maybe another preset for the audience. There are a number of good camera huds on the Second Life Marketplace and they're definitely worth taking a look at. But if you'd like a free one, and it's a pretty basic one, but it works just fine, we also have one available here for you to grab a copy of. And this one is the progeny of the hud that we've been using at the Open Simulator Community Conference for the last four years. The original creator was Eswaldo Vellada and James Etloud, also known as James Lloyd, made further modifications and improvements to it over the years. And the version we have here contains my contributions that add more features and optimizations. It is Creative Commons licensed, so if you'll be able to take it, modify it and give it away. And to get it, all you need to do is make sure you just click in that big gray box that's sitting out on the stage here, which, and that will get you a folder that has the camera hud and also a note card with a list of resources. The slide screen is not cooperating with, there we go. So, we want to get the best quality for our audience to have the best possible experience in viewing our live stream. And one of the most important aspects of this is our upload bandwidth speed. Upload bandwidth is not the same as download. Download bandwidth is a speed usually advertised by internet service providers. Upload speed is different. When you're streaming, you're pushing data out, and that's upload. So, to get the best results, you're going to want to have at least 2.5 megabits per second of upload speed. This will allow you to have a 720p video stream at a reasonable quality. And if you're unable to determine what your upload speed is, some ISPs make it really hard to discover that number. A good way to find out is just to use a speed test online. www.speedtest.net has a test that can be a pretty good way to figure out just how much upload bandwidth you have. If you have less than 2.5 megabits per second, don't worry, you can still stream, but you're going to have to stream at a lower resolution like 480p. And the higher resolution you stream at, the more upload speed you will need. For a 1080p stream, for example, you'd likely want at least 4 megabits per second. And of course, more is always better, although I wouldn't bother going much higher than 8 megabits per second. At that point, you're just not going to get any more quality unless you're actually trying to stream at like 4K resolution, which probably most of you aren't ever going to do at least not anytime soon. And depending on the computer you'll be using to stream a record, you'll want to keep in mind that OBS can eat up a lot of your computer's resources. Just running OBS and your viewer at the same time on an average laptop can eat up a lot of your CPU cycles and memories. So make sure that you close any programs that are immediately necessary for the task at hand. This includes web browsers, Adobe or Autodesk applications, or anything else that might kick in and steal your computer's resources. Obviously, the more powerful your computer, the more programs you can keep running, but fewer is better. And finally, on this slide we'll talk about... I want to recommend that you use a wired Ethernet connection with your computer. While you can stream over a Wi-Fi, it's not a great idea. It's going to be a less dependable way to go. Wireless connections often drop network traffic and this can have adverse effects on a live stream. It can stutter, it will drop frames, and your audience will not get as good of an experience. And that's everything on your side of the Internet. And if you only want to record for archival purposes and later editing, this slide won't have as much relevance for you because now we're going to move on and talk about streaming services. OBS comes with presets for many popular live streaming services. And a lot of these services have been created with gamers and eSport events and that kind of thing in mind. And they often want payment for various comforts such as having no advertising or having an unlimited audience or being able to stream at high definition. And for this reason, this presentation is going to focus mainly on using YouTube as a streaming platform. Twitch, which is very popular, Smashcast, which has recently been rebranded from Hitbox, and Mixer, formerly known as Beam, are all gamer services. And the only one of these that I might consider taking a look at is Mixer because the interesting thing about Mixer is it's currently free and doesn't advertise and it has a unique and useful feature in that it's very low latency. In other words, it allows for great user interaction. What you stream has a very, very short delay. So if you move your mouse cursor, your audience will see that mouse cursor move maybe a second after you do. So they can follow along on a tutorial with you live much easier. Usually when you use the streaming service, the video your audience is watching will be anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds behind what has just happened to you. And this makes interacting with people who are watching a real challenge. So for those times when audience interaction is important, Mixer might be worth a look. And OBS does currently have built-in support for that feature of Mixer. So it's something that's just worth thinking about. And Facebook may also be a very attractive option for many. It's really hard to beat the size of the potential audience that it can bring in. I'm not as familiar with Facebook as I should be. Like I said, it has such a large audience but I've tried to avoid Facebook because it's so heavy on advertising. And Restream.io is the final one I'll touch on because it isn't itself actually a streaming service in the traditional sense. What it does is it acts as a middleman. It allows you to stream to several streaming services at once. So if you'd like to be on, for example, YouTube and Facebook at the same time, this service makes that possible at the cost of even more latency. So for example, if your stream lags as much as 30 seconds on YouTube, it's going to have to go through Restream.io. That's probably going to add another 30 seconds. So what your audience sees will probably be a minute or more behind what you're actually doing. So if that's important, it's something to keep in mind. We're going to use YouTube because it is absolutely free and it will not advertise on channels that don't have monetization enabled. Your audience size has no limits and if you have the right equipment, you can stream all the way up to 4K. YouTube does require that you verify your account. So you can find the link for that on this slide. This is the very last link if you haven't already verified your account and that's a help document that will tell you how to verify your account on YouTube. So finally, we can move on to Open Broadcaster Studio itself. And if you haven't already done so, you can acquire the software at obsproject.com. I think this slide is actually a little out of date. I think the website actually looks a little bit different now, but it's still very similar and it still has a very prominent download button. It makes it very easy to get the software and the right package for your operating system. OBS also has an auto update feature built into it, which is nice since the software gets bug fixes and enhancements on a pretty regular basis. So once you've installed and started up OBS, you should see something that looks like this slide here. But before we get into the main interface, we kind of need to slog through some settings to make sure you're set up to record and stream. And this is going to be the more arduous part of this workshop and presentation because we have to go through a lot of settings and these are important because these are the settings that make sure you get a good quality stream that is appropriate for your audience. So you'll see a row of buttons on the lower right hand side of the window and one of the buttons is named settings. So for those of you following along, go ahead and click on that one now. And a new window will pop up and it will naturally enough start off with a general settings tab on the left. And this entire window is really rather similar to the preferences window and the viewer we use where there are a bunch of tabs down the left and then settings on the right. And the general tab, there's really only three settings here that I'd like to draw your attention to. The very first option allows you to choose your native language. And there's a decent list to choose from in there including German, Dutch, Spanish, and French, a few others I believe. And the second option to draw your attention to is just below that and comes down to personal preference. OBS is a light theme by default but it also has the option to change to a dark theme. And personally, I really like the dark theme which is why I mentioned this option. I find this easier in my eyes but more importantly it moves the focus to the content and those of us who have used modern versions of image, video, or 3D software will have noticed that they've all moved to dark user interfaces for this very reason. And the final option to note on this and the general tab is a check box called automatically record when streaming. Live streaming can be a real handful and it is so easy to forget to hit both the streaming record button so this option eliminates that worry. So let's move on and moving down the left let's click on the stream settings on the left side. And this settings page is where we decide what service we want to stream to, if any. If you're only going to record, this stream doesn't, you can just ignore this one. But if you want to stream, this is where you decide what streaming service you want to use and all you have to do is select the service you would like and then enter a stream key. And for this workshop, we're going to choose YouTube and YouTube has a page that has a live dashboard for streaming. And you'll find that under your creator studio. And when you go to that live streaming dashboard and go all the way to the bottom of the page, you'll see a streaming key. And all you'll need to do is just copy and paste that streaming key into OBS and you'll be authorized to broadcast to your YouTube channel. Be aware that anybody that has this key can also stream to your channel so you'll want to keep it safe or only share it with trusted users. And if you need to, this key will normally never change, but if you need to, you can have YouTube generate a new key for you on the dashboard. And this streaming key thing is how almost all streaming services work. So moving on, we have our output tab on the left tab. And these settings determine the quality of your recording a stream as well as your computer's performance while accomplishing these tasks. At the very top, you'll see a dropdown called output mode. And by default, this is set to simple. And I recommend that you leave it there unless you have some experience with how video encoders work because the settings offered by the simple mode will offer very good results. Now, beneath that, you will see a frame called streaming and it has some settings associated with it. And perhaps the most important of these is your video bit rate. And this depends on how much upload bandwidth you have. If you have three megabits per second upload, that works out to about 3,000 kilobits per second. We're just moving a decimal point over a few places. So 2,500 is the default in OBS and will work fine for you and provide room for anything else that requires additional bandwidth. For example, if you're using Skype or something like that, or voice. If the speed test told you that you have something less than that, let's say it tells you you only have one megabit per second for your upload. You're going to want to lower that number down to something like 768. And at that value, you won't be able to stream at a high definition, but you can stream at a 480p definition. And that's about equivalent to an old style television set. So it's just good enough to get reasonably sized text clearly visible to your audience. If you have a lot of upload bandwidth, you can feel free to push that number higher. And again, I wouldn't bother going any higher than about 8,000 though. The next setting is called encoder. And this is what will compress your video before it is sent to the streaming service. And by default, this is set to software x264. And this encoder will make use of your CPU to encode your video. This encoder can provide great quality. Usually it provides the best quality, but if your computer isn't very powerful, it can seriously degrade the performance of both your stream and your computer. So you need to be careful, but you can click on that pull down menu and see if there are other options available. Newer Intel CPUs have encoder built right into them, and it's called Quick Sync. And this will take a lot of the work off of your CPU and make for a much smoother stream. If you have an NVIDIA or AMD graphics card, these may also have built-in encoders and if they show up in the list, you can try using those as well. The last streaming setting we'll talk about here is audio bitrate. And by default, the audio bitrate will be 160. And that should be fine for most people. But if it is very important for you to conserve your upload bandwidth, you can knock this down to 96 or even 64. And a low audio bitrate like that is just fine if all you want to do is broadcast speech. But keep in mind that if your stream contains music or other more dynamic types of audio, it's going to experience distortions and chirps, and it just won't sound very well. Or very good. Below the streaming options, we have another frame called Recording. And the first option under there is a recording path. And this is where all video recordings will be stored. By default, this is the video folder that your operating system defaults to for each user that logged into it. And you'll want to be sure that you have plenty of free disk drive space available at that location. If it is located on a small drive without much room, you may want to change that location to another drive that has much more room. And under that, we have Recording Quality. And by default, it'll record at the same quality as your stream. And if you set your stream to a relatively high bitrate to 2,500 or higher, that's probably good enough. But if you want something that's, if you want your recording to be even nicer quality, you might choose either high quality, medium file size. And that'll give you a pretty reasonable file size or indistinguishable quality, large file size, which will of course be quite good quality, but a very large file. And then, unless you have a whole lot of disk space, and I mean a whole lot, or need a absolutely pixel-perfect version of your recording for video editing, I would not recommend that you use lossless quality, because that will eat up this space so fast your head will spin. Finally, there's the Recording Format. This default, oh, pardon me, I apologize. This defaults to something called FLV. But I recommend you use MP4 for this setting. This, that format, that video format is pretty ubiquitously supported by software, editing software and such, and by most online services. But you might happen, for example, to have video editing software that only supports QuickTime. So you might choose to use MOV instead. And I'd like to point out that you'll see it on this slide, and if you're following along, you'll see it if you've changed this. When you choose MP4, you'll get a scary warning on the bottom. That warning is, it's not untrue, but I have never had a recording break with MP4 ever. But you should just use whatever format works for you, and for me, that's MP4. So let's move on to the Audio Settings tab. And for these settings, we only need to worry about the ones you're labeled as devices. And when you look at those devices, you'll see that there are two output devices, and up to three input devices. By default, Open Broadcaster will choose your default playback and recording devices. And this stat typically is any built-in speakers or microphone on your computer. But if, for example, you wanted to capture and record or stream in World Voice, and you want to use a headset for that, you might change the desktop audio device to your headset speakers. That way, that's the only sound that gets recorded by your stream. Bings or bongs from Skype or other notifications, only voice will go over your stream. And if you want to speak on your stream as well, you're going to want to change the mic auxiliary device to your headset microphone. To be on the safe side, it's good practice to set any of these that you won't be using to disabled. That way, straight audio won't end up in your video. And finally, for the last settings tab, we're going to talk about the video settings. And there are just four settings here, and we only need to concern ourselves with two of them. The first is Output Scaled Resolution. This will set what resolution your final video, whether recorded or streamed, will be. And by default, it's going to be 1280 by 720, which is also known as 720p. And if you're streaming with a bitrate between 2500 and 3000, this should be a good choice. If you're streaming at a bitrate of 4000 or more, you might decide to change this to 1920 by 1080 or 1080p. If you don't have much upload bandwidth, going to a lower resolution is recommended. Although the image will not be as sharp, you'll have a higher quality overall. And in this situation, consider using a resolution that's as close to 480p as possible. If you don't have a lot of bandwidth and you try to stream at a higher resolution, your stream is just going to drop frames and stutter and look like a horrible slideshow. It's going to freeze and lock up a lot. The next setting we'll look at is the last one on this screen, and that lets you set your frame rate, also known as frames per second. Or simply FPS. By default, the FPS value will be 30, and this is what most streaming services expect. But again, if you have a lot of upload bandwidth and are struggling to get a good stream, I'm sorry, if you don't have much upload bandwidth and are struggling to get a good stream, you might try lowering this value to 20 or at a minimum 15. Traditional hand-drawn animation was only 15 frames per second, and this is just enough to provide a relatively smooth experience. But if you can, 30 is the ideal setting for this streaming. So finally, we are done with the settings. So you can click on the OK button, and these settings will go into effect. They'll also be there the next time you start OBS, and that was a long journey through a lot of options. But now that they're set, you should need to worry about touching them again. We can now just move on to what OBS was meant for, which is recording and or streaming. So let's go over an overview of the interface and its elements. At the top, you'll see a large black area, and this is your preview area. Once we've begun to capture something, it'll show up here, and what you'll see in that area is also what your audience will see. Now below that, we're going to go from left to right across the interface. And first, we have a list box named Scenes. By default, it will already have a blank scene listed, and just to the right of that, there is a similar list box named Sources. Both of these have a plus and minus sign on the bottom that you can click on to add or remove items. Those two list boxes have an important relationship. A scene is a collection of sources, and a source is something that you will capture to record or stream. When a scene is selected and you add sources, those sources will all belong to that single scene. If you were to create a new scene and switch to that scene, the sources box would start out blank again, waiting for you to fill it with new sources such as video or images or something along those lines. So in a review, a scene is just a way of grouping sources together. A source can be many things. You can capture your viewer, and that's what we're going to focus on today. But you can also use any single window on your desktop as a source. You can add text, images, video, and audio as sources. And you can rearrange and adjust each source in the preview area. And then after sources, we also have the audio mixer. All of the audio devices that you enabled in the audio settings will show up here. And any audio sources that... oh, and each device has a volume slider. A mute button that looks like a little speaker. And there's a little gear icon that has filters. And I'm not going to go into those too much. Other than to mention they exist because they can be handy. Fidget earlier asked about Do I Noise? Please prove my room. No, I don't. But I do apply filters to minimize noise. And each device will also have a little meter with a green bar. And that'll show you just how loud your volume is for that device. And to the right of the audio mixer, we have scene transitions. And this will determine how switching between scenes will look. And there are only two transitions right now, and those are cut and fade. When switching between scenes, the cut transition will simply instantly switch from one to another without any special effect or interruption. The fade effect, on the other hand, will gently blend from one scene to the next. And finally, on the right side on the window, there's the row of buttons. You start or stop a stream or recording with the first two, and they'll toggle between those two states. So if you hit, for example, Start Recording, the text on it will change to Stop Recording. Then the next button down enables Studio Mode, which I'm hoping will try to have time to get into later in the presentation as it can really help make the magic happen if you're streaming any sort of live event or other complicated event. Can I stop you for a sec? Absolutely. Joey asks, what does it mean when you try to set a window capture but don't see what is in that window? So I guess seeing the black, oh boy. This is something I'll get into. I should be getting into that later in the presentation. I'll actually get into that when I'll address that. Sounds good. Let's see where was I. Studio Mode, which is awesome. Oh, and we've already been up to our noses in the settings button. We're all tired of the settings. So you know what that does, and I don't think I need to explain what the exit button does. That one's pretty self-explanatory. Finally, we get to do something more than listening to me yabber on about settings and details and hardware. We get to set up a source that we can stream. And we're going to keep things simple to get started. And we already have a scene that OBS has already created, and we'll go ahead and use that to add a source. So over in the sources box, down at the bottom, click on the plus sign. And a menu will pop up, showing you sources that you can choose from. There are three choices here for capturing the viewer, and which one you use will depend on your hardware and operating system. Some work under some combinations, while others won't. If you're using a Windows operating system, Game Capture is a good option. It'll give you the fastest and cleanest result, but it may not work with all hardware, especially laptops. The next one, and this is the one I'm going to encourage you to use for this workshop, is the Window Capture source. This source is available in all our operating systems, and will usually, except for Joey, usually work with any combination of hardware. And if both of these fail for you, your next option is to use desktop capture. And this is my least favorite, as it will capture everything that pops up on your screen, including notifications from apps, or a window that unexpectedly pops up and takes focus, but it will do the job if the other two won't. So as we go through the next steps, first try Window Capture. If that does not work, then try Game Capture. If that does not work, then try Desktop Capture. The settings for all of them are fairly similar, so you should be able to follow along, no matter which one you choose. So go ahead and try Window Capture, and a new window will pop up, and in this slide, that's the window on the left. And this window just wants to know what you want to name your source. You can name it something as generic as Viewer, although any name you want will work fine. And when you press OK at the bottom of that button, another window will appear, and on this slide, that's the window on the right. And this one wants to know what window you'd like to capture. If you're using Game Capture, it will want to know what application you want to capture. And if you're using Desktop, it will want to know, if you have multiple monitors, it's going to want to know which monitor you're going to want to capture. And at the top of this window is a preview area. So you can be sure you're getting the window that you want. If that stays black, chances are that capture source isn't working for you, and you're going to want to try one of the other ones. Now, I lost my place. Below the preview, there's a dropdown called Window. And what you want to do is click on this dropdown and look for your viewer in the list. And once you've clicked on your viewer, it should appear in the preview area at the top. And there is one more thing to consider on this window that all the sources should have. And that is whether or not you want to capture your mouse cursor. And I usually disable the cursor checkbox unless I'm doing something where the mouse is actually useful as a pointer for things like tutorials or something like that. But for recording and screaming a live event or a meeting or a news show or especially Machinima, your mouse cursor is only going to be a distracting element to your audience. People don't want to just see your mouse cursor sipping all over the place. So if you've set up a source and you successfully see your viewer in the preview area, you can go ahead and click OK and it'll return to the main OBS interface. The slideshow is not co- Oh, well it helps if I actually click in the viewer. I've got so many windows open and they're all of the viewer. All right, so it brings you right back to the main OBS screen and hopefully it'll look something like this slide. And if it does, that's fantastic because you now have something you can record or stream. Technically at this point, if you set all your settings correctly, you could start streaming and or start recording and people and it will record what you see in that preview area. But if you look at your preview, you'll probably notice that there might be some issues depending on your use case. There may be an empty space on one or more sides of the viewer. You may not want your window borders, viewer menus or your viewer windows to show up or other clutter like that. So there are a couple of ways to deal with this. And the simplest way to get a clean view is to use the keyboard shortcut, the keyboard shortcut, CTRL, SHIFT, F1. On some viewers, this shortcut, for example, Singularity and Alchemy, I believe, this shortcut will be CTRL, ALT, F1. And on a Mac, this key combination should be CTRL, OPTION, F1. And when you hit this key combination, absolutely everything, except your view of the world, will disappear. This includes all of the viewer user interface elements, avatar name tags, menus, favorite bars, windows, those will all go away. If you use the same shortcut, it'll bring them all back. Huds will still show up, so any HUD that you don't need while you're streaming and recording should be detached. And that's an easy way to do it, and I use that quite often, but it also cuts off your ability to do something like communicate in a world. So you can also choose to simply use your viewer preferences to turn off things individually, like name tags, voice indicators, hever text, floating chat and whatnot. Close any viewer windows that you don't need. You know, if you probably don't need your minimap, you may not need your radar. But if you do want to keep a window, for example, you might want to keep your chat window so that you can monitor in-world chat or participate in it while you're streaming. Or even show that in-world chat to your audience. But if you're going to do that, I recommend keeping that window as slim and off to the side as possible. And I recommend moving any windows you need to keep open all the way to the right side of the screen. That's the side of the viewer where most of the toasts or dialogue boxes or other pop-ups of the viewer are going to pop up on you unexpectedly. Me and the slideshow are not getting along today. Seriously? This is the slide I wanted. So whatever methods you choose to make your view as pretty as you like, once you're happy with it, you can further adjust that video source. First of all, the easiest thing is you can easily move the viewer window source by simply holding the left mouse button down on it and dragging it. So you can just drag it around and that's helpful for making sure that whatever source you have is centered or in the location you want it. And if you look at the source in your preview area, you will see that there's a red border all around it and small red handles on each corner on the top and bottom on the left and right. I don't know why they're so tiny. I should probably complain to them on the forums because those are tiny little handles. So it can take a little bit of finesse to get ahold of one. So if you look at those handles, if you left click and hold the mouse button on a handle, it'll scale or resize the source. You can make it very small or very large or you can even completely distort it if you want. And more powerful yet, and probably the most useful thing if you want to hide chat windows or huds, is the ability to crop this source. If you hold down your alt key and hold down your left mouse button on the top, bottom, left or right handles, you can drag that border in and crop it. And you can tell that it's cropping successfully because that border will turn green. And the goal at the moment is to use all of those tools to make sure that no improper parts of the viewer show up, that there are no black bars on any side, and that you have it reasonably centered. And it's okay if some of the source borders go outside of the preview area just as long as everything you want to see is visible. And once you've done this, you are ready to stream a record. Can I jump in here for a second? Okay, sorry. Yeah, Joey brought up the, he was asking the question about the whole full screen, the preferences between full screen versus say the whole cropping and doing the portion of a screen. And then he was wondering how you deal with the bottom area where your icons or software are. I mean, you can certainly use that for cropping. I want another example that we, the cropping was useful for, and you can probably speak to this more so, Marcus. Marcus, the idea of when we did OSCC and the camera HUD. Yeah. Well, if you're, if your test bar is showing on the bottom, so that means you're using desktop capture. And of course, you can simply crop that out, like, like Yannin said. And because I've never been forced to use desktop capture, usually window capture or game capture have always worked for me. And there is a way to get rid of the title bar on the viewer using an optional tool that I won't go into and isn't part of the presentation. But if you Google for something called borderless gaming, it will turn the viewer into a basically what looks like a full screen application, but all the window borders and decorations have been removed. You can find that either on the Steam store, and it has a price there if you'd like to support the developer, or you can download it for free off of the developer's GitHub site. Does that, does that answer the question? He says it's in game mode when he gets the black bar at the bottom. Oh, right. So yeah, if you're in game mode and you have a black bar at the bottom, all you pretty much want to probably do is scale. Just just scale it out a bit so that it's, you know, the bottom, you know, it meets the bottom of the preview. The bottom of your source meets the bottom of your preview area. And like I said, if some of it is hanging off the preview area, that's fine. You just need to remember that only the area that's visible in the preview area is what your audience will see. And I think we can kind of go on. So if you've played with these tools and gotten used to them, yeah, you're ready to stream or record. All you need to do is hit on start streaming or start recording or both. And you're all set. And when you've finished streaming or recording, you just click on those same buttons again to stop your stream or recording. And now I'm going to move on to one of the tools that I mentioned earlier. And this is the camera HUD. And if you haven't grabbed it, let's say you decided you didn't want to install OBS and follow along. You can still follow along with this part. Go ahead and grab the camera HUD. Technically, it's useful for more. You can use it for more than just streaming. We'll get into that later, maybe during the Q&A or something, but if we have time. But this part everybody can follow along on. And the camera HUD is really valuable when streaming or recording because it allows you to preset various camera angles and switch between them instantly. We're giving away this basic but functional HUD today and it'll come with a note card that contains some directions. You'll find the note card inside the HUD contents. And again, just click on that big gray box to get it. And once you've obtained it, you just need to find it in your inventory and wear it. And by default, it'll attach to the very top of your viewer. But if you're comfortable adjusting HUD positions, you can move this wherever you'd like. It will also pop up a dialogue asking for your permission to take control of the camera. And this will be more obvious on some viewers than others. On some viewers, it may come up as a big blue dialogue saying would you like to let it take control of your HUD and you click OK. On others, it might, depending on how your viewers set up and your viewers settings, it might just show up as a toast down like in a corner or something. So make sure you find that dialogue and accept the permission otherwise the HUD will not work for you. And when you do attach it and grant permissions, at first all you'll see is a small black square with a circle in it. And you can think of that as just the on and off button. And it starts out as off. But if we click on that circle, the HUD will activate and spread open and it'll show you all of its buttons. And you can see that there's a row of numbers and currently they're all dark gray in color for you. And that color indicates that no camera position has been assigned to a number. So let's start by setting one. So using whatever camera controls you prefer, whether it's your camera, little camera window, control window or your mouse and keyboard or a space navigator, move your view into position that you like. In our case, the presentation speakers, for example, might be a good choice. And once you've got your camera where you want it, all you need to do is click on the set position text over on the right. And lines will appear above and below all of the numbers. And this indicates that the HUD is waiting for you to pick a number. So let's just choose the very first one, zero and click on that. Once you've clicked on a number, it'll turn white indicating that you've stored your camera position. And if you move your camera again and select that number, it'll get a border all around it indicating that it's the active preset. If you press the escape key on your keyboard, the HUD will take control of your camera and snap to that preset. If you want the HUD to control what you see, it's important to remember the escape key. The HUD will only take control when you've pressed it. So if you've taken control of your camera manually, and you can do that at any time, you know, with your 3D mouse or what have you, you can go ahead and choose a camera preset, but it won't snap back until you press the escape key. Now we've 20 presets for you to use, and that's quite a few. So, slide slide slide, thank you. If you stored a lot of presets, you're going to need some way to aid your memory to recall just which preset assigned to which position. And in some future version of this, I'd really like to have actual text labels. But for now, what I've done is given you a way to assign a color to each button. And so hopefully that'll make it easier to remember just which preset is on which camera position. And so if we start by clicking on the set color over on the right, again, you'll see lines appear both above and below, indicating that a number is waiting to be assigned a color. So if you were to click on that zero, or if you chose another number, you choose that. The HUD will change into what is essentially just a color picker. And all you need to do is click on one of those colors. And let's say you want it to be light green. You can click on light green. And the HUD will select that color and turn that number into that color. And at this point, you can assign or reassign presets however you like. And while the viewer is control of your camera, you only need to click on a preset and the camera will snap to the position that you choose. That's my place. So many times I just start talking. I've done this so much that I actually have parts of it memorized, so I have to then I forget where I am. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, okay. So yeah, you can assign or reassign presets however you like. Just remember that, again, the escape key is very important. If you manually move the camera, the HUD isn't going to be in control anymore. So you need to press the escape key in order for the HUD to take control. And you can clear a position the same way that you've set one. So you can hit the clear position button. Again, you'll get the lines on the top and the bottom. You can click on a number and it'll turn dark gray. And just as before, dark gray indicates that nothing has been set for that button. And if you'd like to wipe the HUD completely clean, there's a clear all option. And if you click that, it's going to ask you, are you sure? Because it'll remove all of your presets. And there will be a little green check mark and a big red X. And if you're sure, click on the green check mark. And I put this in there because of course nobody wants their presets accidentally deleted. That would be horrible. One thing to note about the HUD is that it is region specific. So if you set up your presets in one region for your HUD, that same HUD will not work correctly if you teleport to another region. And that's easy to fix by simply creating a new copy of the HUD for each region you'd like to create camera presets for. You also don't have to worry about where you're sitting when you create the presets for a region. The camera views will stay the same no matter where you are in that region, as long as you're somewhere in that region that you created specifically for that HUD. And finally, be aware that the script in the HUD will reset. Or if the script in that HUD is reset, for any reason, you will lose all of your camera presets. And the HUD will go back to its blank state. So finally today, so much going on. We are going to learn about studio mode. Let's see, how much time do we have? Do I still have plenty of time, Joyce? We're technically kind of at the time, but I mean if you can probably either, I guess, finish this up quick, or I don't know if, yeah, probably a few more minutes if you can finish it up fairly quickly. I'll try to speed through this one. Studio mode is just really awesome because what it lets you do is if you press that studio mode button, as you can see in the slide, it opens up two preview areas. And the one on the left is the one on the right. The one on the right is what your audience will see. The one on the left is kind of backstage. You can create new scenes, add sources, all of that on the fly on the preview area on the right. And it won't go live until you hit that transition button that's in the middle. In essence, that's studio mode. So you can do things like, let's say you need to set up an impromptu subtitle or add some text or something like that. You can do that while you're streaming or recording or make changes while you're streaming or recording. For example, I sometimes have two viewers open. So I'll have two scenes and I'll have one scene for one viewer, one scene for the other viewer. So I can simply change to one viewer. And that's what will be broadcasted. And while that one's being broadcasted, go back to the other viewer, set my camera however I want it. Maybe I'll add another source for an image for the slides up in the corner. And then if I hit transition, it'll switch back to that other viewer. And this is where the magic really, really happens. And I'm rushing this. I'm rushing this. I'm going way off script because I normally explain this much more in detail. But that essentially is what studio mode does. And if you have questions about that, I'm happy to follow up. Please feel free to hit me up. And I can help you find that. And Shelly was asking a question about chroma key if you want to add names or underneath things or whatever. Yeah, it does have, OBS will allow you to, the sources have filters. So you can do things like chroma key or alpha masking. There are filters for straight color key or chroma key. It all depends on your use case. Great. And I think the slide before this was the one that had the resources listed, which is also in the note card, right? Yeah, that's in the note card. Yeah, I apparently have, yeah, if you need the list of resources that is in the note card that's in the gray box, apparently I've lost the slide for that one. I don't know how that happened. But yeah, there's a note card that's full of resources on basically where to find all the streaming services, some guides and tutorials, things like that. So any other questions before I wrap this up and let you guys move on to more NPC stuff? And I would like to say too, I talked to Marcus before this. I mean, obviously this is a lot in one kind of workshop sort of format that he's happy to go over this more like step-by-step if anybody reaches out to him. So please connect with him if you want more like hands-on tutorial or training. Yes, absolutely. I mean, that's why I've kept this slide up right there. I mean, make note of my email address. Feel free to use it. Hit me up in SL or I may have the exact same name on lots of grids over on Open Simulator, which is where I normally am. And I'd also like to plug something while I'm here. And that is part of the reason I do these is I do have a sinister ulterior motive. The Open Simulator Community Conference is coming up and it's scheduled for December 9th and 10th. And we are currently taking volunteers. And we like volunteers. If you guys, any of you are interested and if you haven't already volunteered, I think at least one or two of you have. Please do volunteer. We have openings for moderators, for greeters, and of course, streaming volunteers. And streaming volunteers tend to be one of the harder ones to get. If streaming is something you enjoy doing or something you would like to practice doing more of, by all means, please volunteer at OSCC to be a streamer. We'd love to have you. So yes, and that's another way to also help to practice this and not to be sort of afraid even though it is a technical thing. Besides what he went through today, he walks people through and does very one-on-one training for the OSCC volunteers in regards to streaming. So that's another way if you want to help out, you can learn that. It's really as long as your bandwidth is okay and you're able to kind of be walked through the steps, you're usually pretty good as a streamer. And there are folks who had no experience, like Beth Ghost-Raven, who once she started and got the training has been doing it for the last couple of years. So you don't have to be super techie in order to learn once you kind of get walked through it, I think. Absolutely. That has turned out to be one of my favorite streamers. So I encourage folks to kind of try that out. And then these skills are super useful, as he said before. You can use it to record just machinima stuff. If you want to document your educational nonprofit work, you can use the same thing. If you want to do an event in Second Life Open Simulator or even just stream your desktop of some webinar to stream it all directly to YouTube, all the same stuff applies. So it's super useful stuff to learn if any of that is interesting to you. So we should probably wrap up with my goal and the streaming tutorial. But thank you again for coming. And I know obviously it's a lot. Well, and it's always a pleasure to be here. And, you know, thanks again to those people who have listened to this for the third time. I can't believe you stayed for the whole thing. So yeah, I'll just say thank you. And just also mention that this, again, this is being recorded and streamed. So you'll be able to find this on the Avocon channel if you'd like to review it at any time. So thank you. Yeah, on YouTube. Yep. Thank you. And yeah, we will end things up here. But yes, conference.opensimulated.org is where you can go to for finding out information about that. And then the Search Avocon on YouTube. And I'll put a link into chat for that too once he finishes up that the other nice thing is sort of streaming like that. It goes right to YouTube and then it's set up where it auto records it and holds it there. So once you're done, it takes a little bit of time for YouTube to finish rendering it and then it's up and available live. So there's not even having to worry about uploading it. It just happens all together, which is nice. So then it's an archive video waiting for you to share with others afterwards. Okay. Thanks again, Michael. Absolutely. Thank you. And you know, feel free if you want to stop the recording for this, but thank you again. And we can probably move to an open mic real, real quick.