 Hey there everybody, it's OBS session one really excited to be here with Meredith So this is our first OBS session so we're gonna have a few of these Going on, but we really have to kind of right away dig into what this tool is why we're talking about it Meredith, do you want to maybe kind of talk a little bit about what the tool is in general and then I can kind of go into some like Specific examples of seeing it used. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I will preface I am a complete newbie with OBS. So I'm excited to be in the first session And OBS is a open source recording and streaming software that lets you Configure your screen to show yourself Your your screen input and other camera anything like that and it's more of like a behind-the-scenes producing application And it's really cool to see so I'm excited to I've seen it in like the examples kind of we're gonna talk about And that's more kind of like my experience with seeing it So kind of getting in the behind the scenes is gonna be really cool and to see like how it all actually works Yeah, I've been I've been kind of fascinated with OBS for a little while because I've been aware of it for a long time using it for like maybe Four or five years for mostly hobbyist things and then I would say in the last year or two Some stuff in my last job and and a lot of stuff at reclaim using it a lot and getting more I'm not I'm not like a super advanced user of OBS But I am pretty comfortable with a lot of the basic things that we're gonna do in this course in terms of like Showing folks how they can make a recording where they share their screen and maybe their webcam in the corner Customizing how that looks Setting it up to stream to different places things like that. It's also just really interesting to see how like So like a big a big hobby of mine is also like video games and gaming And it's really interesting to see how like this tool kind of was Born out of that basically like there were there were You can track the rise of OBS with the rise of like twitch streaming pretty Pretty close together basically when these services came online And and then like later YouTube added live streaming, you know where folks can do this on the service end for free There was a need for tools to do this on your computer and Most of the tools at the time were expensive and really complicated in many cases, too and so OBS was kind of an answer to that and It has grown from the the free option the open source option to kind of the main Player in the space. There are definitely other tools that exist to do things like this. There are Paid options are and and I don't pretend to know anything about like broadcast television. Like I'm sure they're using way different stuff, right? Absolutely, but it is crazy to see like if you're watching a Like a YouTube or twitch live stream or you're watching recording It was odds are good that they're using OBS to capture or record it in some way And it's really kind of cool. Um, so Looking at the the OBS website here They're I don't love this screenshot to be honest with you because I have once the screenshots they have it once It does show the application, but it also is a little bit Maybe not real easy to wrap your mind around But this is kind of an example of the types of things you can do with OBS you can have a Scene and the scene is just what the viewer is seeing on screen basically And you can combine multiple elements into it just like you're saying right at you can have you know Your your screen you could have other things captured and and you can also do audio stuff in OBS as well The Some examples if just going to like my peer tube the streams I do for reclaim where it's just me Usually I'm doing an OBS And so this is just a real simple, you know example of like hey It's capturing my screen. I'm in the corner It may be a little hard to pick up on this video just because it's gonna be a little small but I like to do dumb things like round the corners on my My screen capture and add a little drop shadow just to make it look kind of nice and professional No, I can you can definitely see the rounded corners within the video like I like now on the white screen That's really cool. Yeah, and it's it's a small thing But like I think it adds a lot of professionality And so we're not gonna get into all of that of this flex course, although I can Direct folks to the video I looked at on how to make like drop shadows and stuff like that kind of fancier things But but you will have this the skill set to do all that stuff basically throughout the course The other thing with OBS is you can have multiple scenes So you can switch you can set these things up ahead of time to look however you want and switch between them on the fly while you're recording or streaming so like here I've got a gift from Jurassic Park and some text and That's what's showing and then when I was ready to you know start the stream proper I switched to my like My what I call my display scene which is showing my my display right display capture You can also have scenes that show just your webcam, right? So that's that's that here and being able to flip between them on the fly. That's what OBS is kind of about So we're gonna be able to do all of that by the end of this course An example of where you can go one one thing I really love is there's this charity speed-running video game speed-running thing that goes a week long in January and in the summer They do it twice a year and they it's a charity. They raise money for either the prevent cancer foundation or Doctors without borders in the summer and they do literally a full five-day marathon and they bring people in Virtually and physically they're playing games on stream. They're showing donations and things on stream and they produce all of that just with OBS So I mean I'm sure there's other back-end tools, but the video is produced with OBS This is possible in the tool. I do not know how to do this to be clear But I love that this is possible inside of this OBS tool That is amazing to me. In fact, if anyone's interested They actually have a like they're because it's all volunteer based They actually have their like training video on how to run their setup on their YouTube So you can just watch it if you're interested. I find that fascinating. I think most people maybe won't But whatever I think it's cool that it's possible So Um, so that's just some examples where we're gonna get where you could go if you really wanted to And and what you can do with it So to kind of kick things off here the first thing we're gonna need to do is Set up OBS itself So I'm gonna kind of we're gonna kind of flip back and forth here Meredith has some slides I'm gonna do some demoing and Yeah, if you're watching feel free to You know if you're watching live and taking notes, that's cool if you want to pause the video while you're installing things I would definitely encourage that Yeah, absolutely, so we're gonna start out with a downloaded copy of OBS and With all of the system preferences to give the correct permissions like screen recording your video camera or any camera inputs and microphone permissions to make sure that the computer will be able to recognize all of that good stuff and Today we'll be going through getting started and setting up in particular The auto configuration wizard and then additional inputs as well, so what we're picking up the setup from this auto configuration wizard page And then we can start adding our own inputs and all that good stuff Yeah, and so basically you're just gonna go to the website listed here OBS project comms Slash download you'll download it you'll install it It's it's pretty easy to install the first time you launched like Meredith said It's going to prompt you on I think on Mac OS only to grant Permissions to do screen recording microphone stuff like that But it does a pretty good job of walking you through and saying you've done this you've done this done this Then on the first launch, it's gonna pop up this auto configuration wizard this thing is A little annoying to me because it presents itself as important and it it kind of isn't actually like it doesn't do as much As you might think It says it'll do things like optimize for your internet connection But we're actually not really gonna worry too much about that the default settings built in the OBS are pretty Good for most use cases. So what I would recommend here is to just click optimize just for recording I will not be streaming even though we will be streaming And and you can just hit next and accept the defaults. It's gonna default to doing a 1080p video, which is gonna be Pretty good like quality wise for most folks Sometimes I do higher resolution stuff because I have a larger monitor and higher resolution monitor But usually 1080p is going to be what you're gonna want to be recording and most computers are not gonna have too hard a time Doing that and most internet connections as long as you have like faster than Then if as long as you have a decent internet connection to be okay for streaming just to be clear That this you know this tool, I guess I mean we've talked about it, but maybe Maybe to be clear. This is a tool that runs cold fully on your computer, right? So if you do have a very old computer You may have trouble with some of this, but I will say I've used OBS on six year old machines for basic stuff and not had too much trouble but If you do have trouble in the discord post screenshots ask questions, I'm Pretty comfortable helping folks troubleshoot that stuff and there are actually tools built in the OBS that can tell you Like what your computer is having trouble with if or if your computer is having trouble like CPU wise or network wise It actually lets you it'll actually tell you what what is the problem, which is nice And then finally if you are in a spot where your internet connection is not very good You don't have to stream to use OBS like a recording is Just as valid a use case if not more so in a lot for a lot of folks so Everything we're going to be doing. We're going to do Streams and recording just to demo what that looks like But if you don't want to do streaming with it, you do not have to you can just record locally your computer so Switching over to The the next slide here The first thing we're going to do is compositing is is kind of what the term is for it And so that's really going to be just setting up multiple things on screen for our video. So We're going to set up a single scene for right now where we add our microphone and our video Just for right now just our camera and and Then we will Do more with it from there basically so I'm going to switch over to my my screen here and I'm actually I had never heard of the word compositing until we started preparing for this session So this is like it's like a new new world for me to see like how that that term comes to life with the With the inputs and setting up your scene on that side. So that's pretty cool. Yeah You know what? I'm going to need to do here and I may have to stop my screen But I'm actually going to change the resolution of my monitor so that you all can see this a little bit larger It's it's going to be a little small unless I do this. So We may have to I may have to reshare my screen here, but we'll see maybe not There we go. It's like that just works. Okay, cool Sweet. Yeah, so I just blew up everything looks huge on my screen, but that's it's gonna make for a better video So, yeah, so I've got OBS open. I've already of course installed it I've got the permissions granted and it will like I said, it'll walk you through that And I've already gone through that auto config wizard thing that I just mentioned in the previous slide This is the main interface. So There's a bunch of things going on here this black square up on top is a preview of what our video is going to look like we've got scenes which Again a scene is the visual layout that we've made for our video and we can have multiple scenes This lets us choose between those Sources this is the stuff that goes into a scene. We're going to deal with that in a second Audio mixer lets us see our audio setup. You can see I already have My microphone is already being picked up, but I'll show you how to set that up in a second In scene transitions lets you pick how when you move between scenes how it's going to is it gonna fade between them? Nicely, is it going to be hard cut? There are also other types of transitions you can do I believe I've never done anything but fade and cut personally But everything other than that is a little bit cheesy a lot of the time So I haven't messed with it too much But yeah, you could add in like the cool like powerpoint transitions where it like bounces the image throughout the screen Yeah, and and you can do like wipe like left to right or right to left wipes and stuff if you want You know like like original trilogy Star Wars, you know And you can there there are also really advanced transitions You can do that personally I haven't dealt with but I know are possible So you can do things like tell OBS to Display an image or animation over the top of your two scenes while you're transitioning That's how you see a lot of these really advanced transitions work as they will make us like a one second video that basically plays That is also possible in OBS. I have never done with that. That's a little bit more than I'm willing to deal with But it's possible and I like I like pointing out that these things are possible because I don't know I just I find it fascinating that the OBS is not a super simple tool, right? That's why we're doing a course on it But it is relatively simple like you can wrap your head around it But I love when a tool like this can go from almost anyone can pretty much anyone can learn this to Professionals could use this. That's awesome. Like yeah, absolutely Okay, so the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna set up our audio so we're gonna have to go right to settings and then audio on the left side here and There's a there's like sample rate and we're not really worried about that What we do want is in global audio devices your mic or auxiliary audio is gonna be set to probably default You can leave it on default. That's gonna use your system default microphone And that's okay, but if you've ever had trouble with Video calls and like audio devices, you know that sometimes things can change those for you I personally like to manually set it to something So if you're you can set it manually to like your laptops microphone or if you've got like a headset You could select that I personally don't really recommend Bluetooth for Doing recording or streaming because you'll have like occasional connection issues and things can get like garbled and bad sounding basically Voice calling tools like zoom and jitsi and Google meet those do a little better job at dealing with Bluetooth because they know People are gonna use them things like OBS are kind of not designed with that in mind They're thinking you've got a wired or built-in mic. So If you have no other mic use the one built in your laptop, that'll be totally fine for this I have a whole audio like I have a microphone and a whole audio setup You don't need that to do this. I'm gonna use it because it's what I have but But you don't need a super fancy setup to do it So what I'm gonna do is select my microphone I've got as you can see like a just stupid amount of microphones my my main one though is called mix B Which is weird, but but you you also could select you like on my case I'm on a Mac your MacBook Pro microphone That would be what I would suggest people pick if they don't have anything else So pick that we're not gonna do anything else, but just to note here. You can have multiple audio devices Multiple USB microphones all that kind of stuff. You can set up in OBS We're not really gonna do that in this tutorial, but or in this course I should say but but it is possible So what scenarios would you use for multiple microphones? Like if you were doing like a podcast setup or something like that. It's a little tricky. So Yes, yeah, the answer is yes, but there's also some less than ideal things about that because Typically with a podcast podcasts are not always but often edited right where you at least want the ability to edit it And in those cases you normally want to be recording Somewhere where all the files can be split by person You can have a file that says Taylor and a file that says Meredith and then I can go in and like throw them into Logic which is like an audio editing application or a garage band or audacity However, if you're gonna do like a live video podcast and you're like, well, nope We're not gonna get the chance to edit it. Then yeah, you could totally do something like this The the world of audio is complicated though And so there are also a lot of tools that will let you like combine audio sources and feed them multiple places We have an advanced Session in this course where we're gonna kind of chat about like Tools that are related to OBS, but aren't that we like to use Or that I like to use I can't remember if that one is what yeah, that's Jim and I so Jim does some of this stuff too So personally I never run more than audio one audio device into OBS, but There are reasons to The other major reason to might be like if you were doing something like capturing video from like you're doing game streaming We're not gonna really cover a game streaming in this course, but Those folks use capture cards and you would want your game sound in the recording too So that would be another reason you do this So yeah, in my case like I use a Like a camera like not a webcam. I use like a real Camera from as my webcam and in my case All right, I am having issues with my mouse because of my resolution here In my case, I could use my camera audio as well. So that's listed here as shadow cast Of my capture device, but so there are reasons and you could have like backup audio Mm-hmm. There's there's a lot of crazy advanced things But most of time if it's just you on the recording, you really only need the one device So so I'm gonna hit okay here These global audio devices are what they say in that they apply to every scene so there are concepts of Audio devices that only apply to one scene Usually you're not they're less common, but I just want to point this out the reason we're setting this up in settings This will apply to every scene. You don't have to manually do this when we make more later The things that wouldn't be we're like you can have a video play and it could have sound That would only apply to a scene that that video is on so But now you can see in our audio mixer that this shows up right here. It says Mike ox You can actually rename you can right-click on it and rename it so I could I could put like my Microphone or if you were doing multiple people like you just mentioned you could say hey, this is Taylor And label them like that There are also All kinds of effects and things we can do with audio. We're not going to do that today, but there are There's a lot of capability here in audio Okay, so the other thing we're gonna do is we're gonna add our camera to a scene So in the sources panel, we have this just one scene right now. It's called scene I'm actually gonna rename this right off the bat So again, I can just right-click on it go to rename and let's just call this camera And then in our sources we there's a bunch of different things we can add to scenes Like I already mentioned you can have individual audio things You can just put a color on the screen You can put images you can do slideshow built-in that will like flip between images You can play video you can You can actually embed scenes into other scenes. That is a super advanced thing I don't know what siphon is. I don't know. Do you even get the siphon client as an option? Is that It does show up on mine. Yeah, okay. I'm not really sure what that is. I have to look that up You can put text on screen VLC video sources Just a different way to play video basically And then video capture device is what we're gonna use that's for cameras and stuff So if I hit video capture device It's gonna say hey you want to create a new one. We can give it a name. I'm gonna call this I'm gonna give this a name other than video capture device one thing It's a little annoying about OBS is every single element of every single source and scene have to have a unique name So I can't just call this camera because I have a scene called camera. So I'm gonna call it You know webcam, I guess And then we'll want to make source visible will be checked. We will want that So you can hit okay And from here we can select what the device is so again You'll should get a list if you click on device of all of the cameras available to you and I have a few But FaceTime HD camera if I do that that's gonna be my laptop's webcam So my laptop's over there as you can see Shadowcast is my main camera. So I'm gonna select that and Then normally I don't really have to mess with the presets, but there you can There are some cameras that will require you to do that But usually you can just leave it alone But if you do have a camera that looks like squished or weird You can try some of these other resolutions and see if that fixes it for you And then we just hit okay So it's now on our scene and if I if I just Pull this Down a little bit or I should say if I click on this you can see that this is my camera I can actually click on it and move it around It has nice little guides like if you've used Photoshop or a tool like Photoshop You kind of like that where you can see how it's positioned on screen. We can resize it by Dragging the corner of it. I wouldn't one of the things I like about OBS is it doesn't let you Incorrectly resize things by like dragging it too wide. I just like that because like who wants that? And then you can also do things like this you can also right click on a source and Go to transform and I use this all the time There's a bunch of things like rotate it and stuff honestly. I'm never really using that But you can do right click transform fit to screen. I Use that all the time if I'm resizing things Or or do things like hey center it stuff like that I just like to point out that that transform menu when you right click on a source is super handy Okay, so so I do have a question before we move on to other stuff that the top portion here Where we just put our camera in is that what you're recording? That's the view your your Final recording will look like is that is that yes. Yes. This is what the audience will see there is Occasions where that's not a hundred percent true And I'm gonna I'm gonna just mention it right off the bat There is a thing called studio mode that if you clicked on that over here then that you have the ability to the right side or The one that says program camera That is what the audience sees and preview is where you can make changes and then you can push them to live So this is more of an advanced thing. I don't I don't really personally use this But what this lets you do the studio mode and it is good to know about is you can make changes So so like imagine if I was recording this and I noticed that I had Let's say there are two cameras and I wanted to change the alignment like I had something a little bit misaligned It looks strange if I'm recording actively like people are watching it and I'm moving this people are gonna see it moving Right like and that's a little bit distracting So studio mode lets you make changes And then hit this transition button and push them to the live view So it's good to know about we're not really gonna use it a lot in this course because I actually think studio mode Kind of complicates things. I think that's something that's better for someone who's Super comfy with with OBS, but it's good to know about but yeah This is a preview of what you're recording will be now. We're not recording yet. So, you know There's nothing happening But if I was recording this is what it would look like and this audio down here is what people would be hearing be putting into the video So let's kind of go back to our slides for a second. So we've already done Our microphone done our video. We set up our scene The next step is recording So there's There there are some settings that we can mess with I'm gonna show them But mostly we're going to just be hitting the start recording button So I'm actually gonna we're gonna start right with that. So this is our scene if I hit start recording You'll be recording That's kind of it. There's sort of no fuss. You'll notice at the bottom right that there's a little list of Hey, are you live? That's for streaming and then recording is for recording. So we've been recording for 15 seconds now You'll notice a CPU counter over here and 60 FPS. So this just is saying hey your CPU is only at 5% so, you know Not being used too much and 60 FPS is the Frames per second of the recording if you're struggling if your computer was struggling to keep up with whatever you're doing You may see that dip below 60 FPS The there's two sort of formats formats isn't really the right word But typically for video stuff, we're doing 30 or 60 FPS Those are the two most common things to be recording at I'm using 30 FPS right now And my CPU is fine, but I believe that that kid that can be changed Before you start recording if you want to if you want to have a higher frame rate than then just the 38 default Yeah, and and we're gonna get right into that right now. So let's hit stop recording actually now that we've done that And so now we're gonna dig into where these settings actually are if you do want to make changes to them So if I go to settings and then Out to output Our output mode is simple. I would recommend keeping it there There's advanced mode that lets you tweak like all kinds of real in-depth video stuff that I Personally don't really know much about so I'm not gonna make recommendations on and in my experience These settings Change frequently so there are all kinds of new things coming being built in the OBS all the time That allow things to work more efficiently be easier for your computer to use and keeping that on simple will kind of keep you on the Recommended things from the developer, which I think is gonna be a smart move for most people So bit rate, this is automatically set to two fifth to twenty five hundred kilobits per second We're just gonna leave that there. That's fine audio bit rate We'll leave that there to encoder all of that stuff. We're gonna leave as normal One thing I wanted to mention here though is this is the path where recordings are gonna go to so we made a recording But you might be wondering where did where did it go? And it's gonna go to users Taylor movies in my case, but you can change this I Usually just leave it there, but it's good to know that if you forget you can come back here and find where those recordings are And then you can also change what the What the formats for everything gets saved out as So MKV is the default and it's a little bit you may not have heard of that, but it is a relatively popular format MP4 is probably one that most people have heard of the Disadvantage with this with MP4 is if for some reason you're recording in your computer crashes your recording is no good Like it's all lost So I don't actually recommend recording in that the default is MKV. That's Where we're gonna leave it and the cool thing about OBS is it does warn you of this there MKV is still accepted by most things and OBS actually has a built-in tool to Convert from MKV to up to MP4. So we'll show that in a second So if that's a problem like your video editing tool or something doesn't support MKV real easy fix Yeah, you can use another tool like handbrake or something like that to convert if needed Yeah, you can use handbrake and the the advantage of what I'm gonna show in a little bit is it's It's a it's a really weird and esoteric kind of video thing but MKV is sort of a container for for all types of video and MP4 is a container that only supports one type of video Basically, OBS has a way to convert really quickly between the two So you if you've ever converted something in handbrake it takes like, you know, say you have an hour-long video It may take 20 minutes to convert it or 30 minutes. This will take like seconds for an hour-long video It's doing less work basically so Yeah, we'll show that in a second, but certainly you can use other tools if there's other specific needs you have All right, we've already been in audio video, so this is where we can go and mess with the frame rate and resolution so The this these are important. So there's a base canvas resolution and an output resolution Basically There are what I what I typically recommend to folks is to keep these either the same and Keep them at 1080p Or if there are advanced things that you're trying to do you could set the base resolution to whatever your monitor Resolution is this is what I tend to do And basically what this lets me do is it can get it can let my Canvas and this preview over here is the canvas Match my monitor and then it lets me change via this output the quality or resolution I'm gonna go to this is more of an advanced thing I think for almost anybody getting started just set these both to 1080p and don't think about it again If you are doing something like streaming to twitch and twitch only supports I think 720p for certain accounts Then you could set both of these to 720p The reason why you would ever really want to mess with that advanced thing I was talking about is when you change this resolution It's going to resize that preview and you will have to rearrange your your sources So if I do this just as a demo Don't actually do this right now, but I'm gonna change both these a 720p and You'll notice that my camera is all misaligned and I have to resize it, right? Yeah, so that's the whole reason why there's a canvas resolution So basically Most of time set these the same set them both the 1080p and that's that's gonna be what most people are gonna want and or need All right, so I'm gonna go back in there and video. The other one is a frame rate. So minus set to 60 30 is probably Often what you want Frankly that most of the stuff I make for like reclaim where I'm making a screen captures 30 is what I use it it's just 30 is like More close to what you see on television most of the time with the exception of sports sports are normally broadcasts 60 FPS and In the OBS world Game streaming usually you do at 60 FPS. It basically just makes things look more. You don't know what frame rate is Just set it to 30 and be done. But if you're curious FPS higher the number the sort of smoother it looks to the to the human eye basically and It will be more taxing on your computer to do a higher number because it has to it's literally frames per second Right, so it has to make an image 60 times a second. That's twice as hard as making an image 30 times per second So my recommendation here would actually be to change this one unless you're doing something specific where you know You need it set these to 1080p set this to 30 for most folks And we'll have a lot of these recommendations put in the blog post as well. Just If you're if you're following along that way too So for now, we're we're done in here We that's really most of the the things we have to worry about we'll come back there later for streaming, but Yeah, so now that we know where our recordings go I'm actually gonna look at that. I'm gonna open up my file browser it was users Taylor movies on Mac OS that should be what it is. It'll be your user use Users your username movies. So basically your home folder in the movies folder. I have a bunch of stuff in here But if I sort by Modified I should have my most recent reporting in here and I can open it up So there there it is. I mentioned before that it makes an MKV video if you want to turn that into mp4 We just go to file then remux recordings and then we just have to Click on this little dot here to open up our file browser. You select your video so in this case, it's the one that I had right there and It went away. Oh Um Okay, that was weird So then here I can just hit remux and that's it. It's done. It's converted to mp4. So if I go into My finder again and go back to movies. There's mp4 version of my video So it's really fast right like obviously this is a small video, but it's Extremely fast that way. Um, I've never oh, that's kind of cool, too. I didn't even notice that There's also a shortcut. You can just go file show recordings and I'll just pop up the recordings folder for OBS That's actually super handy. I didn't I didn't know about that one So that's recording we made a recording and Going back to our slides here. The next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna do stream So again, this is if you're following along with this. This is sort of optional. I want to show how this is done But you don't have a place to stream to or don't want to set up a place to stream to you Don't really have to but I do think it's good to know how it works We are gonna use owncast for streaming and we're gonna deploy it on reclaim cloud And that's mainly because owncast is super fast to get set up with The there are other services that are supported in OBS in fact pretty much if something can't If OBS can't stream to it as far as I'm concerned. It's not really a streaming platform like pretty much everything supports OBS the major streaming platforms too so Let's Switch back to my screen here. And so I'm gonna actually go over to my reclaim cloud Oh, I must have closed that window. Whoops Let me pull it back up so I had just deployed an owncast install and It's very very simple to do if you haven't done this before you can just go to marketplace search for owncast It install Give it an environment name and hit install and that's it And it will have some instructions for you afterwards about how to map a custom domain if you'd like to do that and What your default password is? I'm gonna just check. I'm not gonna even map a custom domain today I'm also just going to log in with the default password for now So the username will be admin by default and the default password for all owncast installs is abc 123 I'm gonna go in and change that right away because we don't want to keep it there. I Will say too. I'll plug the last the I Totally trying to find on the last course we ran did go over setting up owncast too So if you want to learn more detail about that definitely go check that one out. Yeah, for sure The open media ecosystems course covers peer tube as well, which you could also stream to We did Cover the use of owncast although I will say the setting up is very different because since we made that session I made this installer for owncast so You don't have to go through everything that we we talk more about owncast in that session And then we have a link to Jim's blog post on setting it up But this is now what I would recommend is just go to the marketplace hit that owncast button Yeah, and I think we'll have a doc on it pretty soon too. So alright, so I went to I logged in I went to configuration server setup. I'm gonna set a new stream key. I'm actually just gonna use one password to generate a long Thing So if I just go here password generator, you could put this is whatever you want by the way I just want to make something random and So I've set a stream key When I hit save or when I sorry when I hit update this will become my oh, I didn't even notice You can just generate it from here. Oh, that's awesome. Okay. Yeah use this generate button So then copy it copy it because it also becomes your own cast Login or your own cast password And then update it. So I do have that copied so let me log back in just to Okay, cool, that's working and then we need to set it up in OBS so If I go back In sorry if I go back into admin on the home tab it actually has Hey, use your broadcasting software. Here's the URL and here's the stream key. So if I go over to OBS again and I don't have a lot of room to maneuver windows at the moment But that's okay if I go into OBS again, I can go to settings and then stream and You'll notice there's a bunch of services listed in here So it has sort of built-in support for twitch where you can just hit connect account and it will like have you log in and Do that kind of thing it does something similar for YouTube, which is super cool I've never used Facebook live. So it looks like it doesn't do that with Facebook live You need a stream key. I've never used restream IO, but it does have a Login and then I forget Twitter just like streaming but okay But what we're gonna do is custom and this allows us to manually specify a server in the stream key Which is what we need for our own cast. So I'm gonna go to custom and hit copy and By the way, I mean I'm gonna put I guess, you know what we're gonna publish this stream key And if anyone wants to use this during the course of this feel free to stream to it If two people are doing this at the same time, it's gonna give one of you an error though Just just note that but But that is totally fine But I will say if you want to mess around with it You can make a trial account and reclaim cloud and use it for two weeks and pay literally nothing Or if you already have a reclaim a cloud account own cast is very inexpensive to run So you can just turn it off when you're not using it and it will cost you basically nothing so Yeah, so I'm gonna paste in my server and stream key hit okay, and I'm gonna hit start streaming It's important to note that we can stream and record at the same time So I would recommend doing that so own cast in particular does not have any ability to save your Streams after they're done so that they're just gone afterwards So you will probably want to do that But even if you're using a tool that does Having a recording that you're making locally is a good way to have a backup in case you have some kind of internet issue So usually I like to do these things at the same time So Resources on your computer versus the other like if that's a concern that's a perfect. That's a really good question. So it won't if We have things set up the way we do here. So basically in the simple view You're gonna be recording with the same Quality as your stream and so your computer does not have to do twice the work if that makes sense It's using it's making essentially one video but putting it to places. It's probably over simplifying it But that's basically what it's doing In the advanced mode you can have it record at a high quality and stream at a different quality if you want to That would be for Taxing so I wouldn't recommend doing that. But if we're on output mode simple It it really won't be a significant impact It will be a slight one, but it won't be a significant impact as you can see here I've got my CPU is only at 11% So it's not too bad. You'll also notice here that there is Kilobits per second over in the corner. That's the stream. That's my network bandwidth going out I've got a timer here for how long I've been live and how long I've been recording And then this little green Square will show us The health of the stream basically and that's a combination of like hey is your CPU Or your network not doing so well Then you'll turn see that turn from green to yellow to orange to red as the video is getting choppy and bad Moving back over to owncast here for a moment. I kind of love this about owncast It gives you this nice little view here so you can see the stream started at 10.02. It's been going for two minutes Nobody's watching which makes sense. I'm not even watching it yet You can see that this is the quality it's at so We're not really going to go into owncast settings in this thing But owncast by default has a relatively low quality stream. It sets out You might remember that we have ours set to 2,500 kilobits per second and 24 and 30 FPS For the best quality you may want to actually match these up in the owncast settings to what we have in OBS Go to configuration and then I believe video and change it there. Of course not during a stream But I'm not really going to mess with that for this You also can see here. It's kind of cool. It'll actually show you what it's receiving So you can see that hey OBS output module. That's OBS. It's getting 2,500 kilobits per second 30 FPS at 1080p So if I go over to my main owncast page Immute this because otherwise I'll hear myself But I can hit play on this and there's my stream. It's going to be a little bit behind Anytime you're streaming. There's usually a leg between like 10 and 30 sometimes more 10 and 30 seconds or more That's just the time that the server needs to buffer the video to be able to properly send it out to everybody So that that's always going to be sort of part of it It's not going to be live like a zoom or Google meet thing And that's because these types of tools prioritize quality and smoothness over You know fast Video if that makes sense But here we go we're streaming I really love how kind of simple OBS makes or sorry owncast makes this is just you know I'm going to put this up in the second. There's a little chat here You're you're you're going it's it's that that's that's kind of all there is to a basic stream I'm gonna hit stop on these right now Meredith I don't know how much I know you've been following along, but I don't know where you're at Would you want to try if I send you the stream key? Yeah, totally. I'd be I'd be down to give that a try Okay, I've got myself set up in the source and Audio mixer as well And then I can get the stream set up Yeah, I will I know I kind of put you on the spot there But no, it's okay about this but I think it'd be kind of a neat demo So I'm putting in our private chat here in stream yard The first thing is the server and the second thing is the stream key this awesome Just as a refresher you'll go to settings stream and Service will be custom and then the server will go in there and the stream key goes in there perfect Alright That should be good to go. So I'll start streaming and then start recording as well Got an error really quick for okay, oh I Adjusted my recording path. So let me change that super fast Okay, it does look like the streams are already going out though. So that's cool. Okay, cool. I Usually I said it I can just change in the settings. I I more of my organizational side of things I made an extra folder for any recordings. Oh So I didn't make the folder in the In my computer really. Oh, I didn't exist yet basically I get you. Yeah. Yeah, but We have we have liftoff with OBS We are now streaming so Yeah, I I guess I hadn't really thought of this before playing the course But definitely if anyone is watching this during the you know our planned session time here Basically the month of January a little bit in February. I will have this on cast up. So feel free to stream to it I'll put the stream key publicly in on a blog post, which is maybe not an amazing idea, but that's okay and Feel free to stream to it and check out if it's working for you You can throw it in discord or like I said if you want to spin up your own own cast It's very simple to do as as you just saw me do So you can also do that But yeah, I'm excited. This is This is a cool first session and we're gonna go into more stuff next week next next next week will I'll be with pilot and We'll be going through Setting up desktop capture. So you're showing your display Setting up desktop audio, which is a little bit different between Mac OS and Windows. So we'll talk about that and Doing a picture-in-picture camera like we had shown before and making a starting soon Page basically, so we're gonna be setting up more scenes next week And then just we've mentioned this a little bit but in week three. We're gonna talk about advanced stuff. So like audio and lighting and Green screening and and all the possibilities we're gonna we're gonna get into more advanced stuff, but Thanks so much Meredith. Yeah for joining me on this one One one other thing that I totally forgot we got to mention is everything we've done Just feeling back curtains. I just made a mistake and forgot we're gonna talk about this everything we've done as far as recording and streaming can also be sent to Other applications as a virtual camera This isn't gonna make a lot of sense for what we just did because what we've set up so far is just our camera But as you do more advanced things like have your desktop shown in a picture-in-picture in different scenes Next week. We'll also show this you can do things like Output your OBS to another application. So as an example of what that looks like I'm gonna do a little preview for what we're gonna do next week. So let me put my screen back on This won't take very long, but if I go to our jitsie install And I'm just gonna go into This little test room. I already have whoop my browser crash. That's awesome I Specifically intentionally use a different browser for Streamyard the tool we're in so that this never happens But I wonder if there's an issue if I've got Kind of issue, but okay, that's that's good. I don't know why that happened before but so basically I'm not even gonna really go in the call because you'll see from here, but this is a preview of my camera and In jitsie is a video calling tool kind of like zoom or Google meet And if I click on this little preview here, you can see all of my cameras that are available This is my laptop camera. This is my main camera and that's fine But now that we have OBS installed there's also an OBS virtual camera, which is what we're seeing here And if I cancel out of this go back to OBS the third button down is start virtual camera If I click on that It will start up over here So we can see what my OBS output is in Jitsie and that will be my camera. They might say why would you do that? It's literally just your camera right now? Well, yeah, that doesn't make sense until we add more scenes. So if I make a scene and call it display And again, we'll go into more detail on this next week, but I can add my screen here and now I've got in You know, I'm actually going to capture a different screen so I don't have like a Hall of Mirrors Effect here. So this is my laptops display and I'll put over there I don't know we'll put my We'll put that over there that's a web browser over there And so I can actually resize this To fit properly and keep in mind you can also just right-click transform fit to screen It will just kind of do it for you and now my camera is actually my what OBS is Seeing and that's what other folks would see in the call, which is super handy You can do kind of more advanced things like Flip back and forth like if you've ever shared your screen Only to show something quickly, you'll know that it's a huge pain But I can actually just flip back and forth in a flash like this. You also notice that it's flipped Most video capture Sorry, most video conferencing tools will flip it so that you see it at the right perspective When you show your display, it's gonna look weird Just note that this only looks like that for you anyone who's on the other end of the call He's gonna see it the correct direction. So you don't have to worry too much about that But yeah, that's another capability of OBS is that virtual camera stuff So and we'll get more into scenes and things like that in the future, but So some before we kind of wrap there's a couple other things that I wanted to mention Some resources Meredith put in here linked to the OBS documentation. Yeah, totally worth checking out The in fact, it's kind of interesting because I didn't even think to link to this because when I first started using OBS their documentation was like almost non-existent But now it's actually pretty sophisticated. There's a lot in there and It goes into some advanced stuff But there's also some good docs on just like how to use certain features and things like that That's kind of cool the one tricky thing with it is that there is a mixture of like documentation for using it and documentation for developing it, which is obviously Super different use case and not really something I'm concerned or we're concerned about really but that is just another thing in there, too but the other one I wanted to mention is this this OBS masterclass and it's from the channel Epos Vox on YouTube and I'm just gonna pull it up here and then we'll show it but Basically this channel the the guy is pretty focused on like General content creation stuff like individuals who want to use OBS, but He does a ton of different videos But he has this playlist called OBS studio masterclass and you can watch it as one five hour long video if you want to or you can go through and find individual Little couple minutes long clips And it is a couple years old at this point. However, the content is really good So he does a pretty good job of covering sort of more evergreen concepts in OBS and also just getting into like some things that are more Just intrinsic to video and audio production. So like there's a whole section I believe on yeah audio devices and just like how to make audio good and some of it talks about equipment that you may or may not have but I do think a lot of the concepts are Really, like if you really want to get into this, this is where I would go next But this is this is a lot of it is more advanced topic. So if you're feeling Like You're at your limit with what we're talking about right now. I would I would save this for later So if you're coming to this and you already know some of the stuff we're talking about you really want to get really specific This is a good resource to check out too. So Absolutely, I'm definitely gonna check that out Yeah, it's it's and the channel in general is really interesting that he does a lot of like like reviews of gear and Like I got this microphone based off of a set of Basically, I obsessed over microphones for like a week watched a ton of videos found his channel and eventually landed on this thing. So but Yeah, so There's a lot to know. I mean anyone that has and If you've ever dealt with video before and I'm I know Meredith You've probably done like a little bit of video editing and stuff. I know You know that this world goes there's a lot to know, right? It goes deep So it is a little tricky sometimes to kind of Know where to stop if that makes sense So I like to point out that hey, there are these more advanced resources We're not gonna get into like the real crazy like Audio especially the audio production stuff in this course Other than I want audio to work for you So but if you're looking for that, there are really good resources out there and then again throw questions in the discord I'm happy to point folks in more directions if they have more specific questions. So yeah, absolutely I will be be in there chatting with y'all too. So definitely Let us know how it goes getting set up with OBS and then we'll dive into the next week with the Was setting up some more scenes and all that good stuff Yeah, all right. Thanks Meredith. Absolutely