OBS Live Streaming Tips Part 2: OBS Scene Collections and Profiles – DIY in 5 Ep 153

Опубликовано 20 августа 2021, 20:00

This is the 2nd part in our series about customizing OBS, this time focusing on scene collection and profiles. You can watch part 1 here: youtube.com/watch?v=k2TG_2vt9S...

Alerts
Many commenters asked how to add Alerts for things like new followers. You can use a number of free services like Streamlabs or Streamelements to set this up, customize what you’d like your alerts to look or sound like, and copy and paste the generated URL into your OBS as a browser source, to be resized or rearranged as you like. In Streamlabs OBS alerts and notifications are a built-in feature. Look for OBS plugins for any additional features you may want.

Scene Collections
If you want a different Starting Screen or Overlay for each game you stream - or maybe you produce a variety of types of content and want a different look and feel for each show or platform you stream to you can use Scene Collections. This keeps the overhead low by loading up too many assets and sources at once and can keep things organized. The Scene Collection drop down menu at the top gives you the option to start a new scene collection, copy one you are already using if you don’t want to start from scratch, rename it, or import scenes. For Streamlabs OBS users see the included scene collection templates to more easily get started.

Profiles
While Scene collections are more focused on what goes out to your viewers, Profiles are how your content gets there. Like Scene collections, you can have various profiles for different streaming platforms if you like - say YouTube, Twitch, Amazon Live, Facebook and so on. You can also use different profiles for various quality setting, say between streaming for YouTube vs local recordings. Here is how to setup a basic profile for YouTube streaming in OBS Studio. When you click “Create a new Profile” you’ll see an option to use the Auto-configuration wizard or use the Tools menu. Click that, then specify what you’d like your recording to be optimized for - streaming, recording or just the virtual camera. Then choose the base resolution and preferred FPS settings. Note, the base resolution is not necessarily the same resolution you will stream at, just what is being captured. After hitting next, you’ll see a dropdown menu asking which service to stream to. Some of these have direct logins through OBS, like Twitch or Restream, which make this setup process even easier, but for now, let’s stick with YouTube. You’ll be asked for your stream key. This can be found within your YouTube studio settings and luckily, OBS studio has a handy dandy “Get Stream Key” button right here that will take you directly to the part of your YouTube settings where you can copy and paste that stream key right into your OBS settings. This is the key that will let anyone stream to your channel, so do not to share this or show it on stream. Choose primary YouTube ingest server as your main server. Now you’ll see a section where you can choose video bitrate. In video streaming, bitrate refers to the amount of bits processed in a specific amount of time - usually bits per second or in this case kilobits per second. The more information you send per second, the higher quality your stream will appear, but also the tougher it will be on your system and internet and server bandwidth so keep that in mind. Google recommends a bitrate of 4500-9000 for 1080p/60 content, so put in your desired kb/s and click next. After testing is complete, the wizard will give you the option to apply the settings to your new profile and you are set up to go!

Testing
Once you are all set up, some platforms will even let you conduct a test stream to see if your setup can handle and output a high quality stream before you go live. This looks a little different depending what platform you are on, but for Twitch, you can go into your stream settings, click the box that says “Enable Bandwidth Test Mode” and go live, except your stream won’t actually show anywhere. You can then go to inspector.twitch.tv to monitor the quality of your stream in real time - all before ever actually going live.

Go Live
Once you’ve tested and things look okay, you are good to go live. There’s a lot of moving parts to any livestream and there’s always a possibility that something will suddenly stop working or work in a different way then it did when you tested or any myriad of issues, and it happens to everyone. If you find yourself in a live troubleshooting situation, just remain calm and do your best to troubleshoot - maybe your chat will even help you out. Also, if you have to stop streaming to reboot, no one will fault you. We hope this video helped you on your early streaming journey and please feel free to leave any additional questions below.