OBS Studio: Beginner's Guide to Scenes & Sources

if you want to record or stream on your computer obs can capture just about anything but how do you set all that up i'm eposvox the stream professor and this video is dedicated to everything scenes and sources let's break down what they are and how you can best use them to create a fun stream or recording first what are scenes and sources let's start with sources and build up to scenes sources are the individual elements the things you literally see in the frame this can be anything from an image to your webcam monitor capture text or an entirely different video stream you can add and layer these sources together to create a final image that the viewer sees at any given time in your video or stream just like layers in a photoshop edit or on a scrapbook page scenes are individual views built by the different sources these are usually designed to convey different things much like turning to a new page in your scrapbook some typical scenes in a twitch layout could be a just chatting

scene that prominently features a webcam with chat off to the side and a couple graphics or a gameplay scene with a game capture source filling the frame and a webcam in the corner for education you could have a presentation scene with powerpoint taking up most the frame and a camera angle to the side a podcast might have a mix between single and dual host views to keep things more engaging so what kind of sources are available to you let's dig into them audio sources

are typically managed through the settings audio menu to make them globally available to all scenes you almost always want this for your microphone but you can still add specific audio devices to specific scenes using the audio input capture and audio output capture perhaps you have music playing out of a specific device that you only want playing on certain scenes or voice chat while in game to only be heard while on your game scene instead of manually managing this in the audio mixer each time you could just manage those devices per scene entirely if you do add audio devices manually per scene make sure you have set these specific devices in settings audio to disabled or but they will show up twice and echo color source is a pretty basic

tool it allows you to create a solid color of your choosing and either fill the screen or manually choose the size for it useful for backgrounds custom outlines or tests display capture hooks everything that

your system outputs to your monitor this is super useful when capturing general purpose screencasts or showing tutorials and how to's etc it's the most versatile capture option in terms of use cases you can choose between all of your displays if you have multiple connected and you can choose whether your cursor shows or not if you're doing software walkthroughs you would want a cursor on but for skipping through a powerpoint for example you'd probably want the cursor hidden as to not be distracting there's now a checkbox in the general settings menu that allows you to hide obs window from display capture sources meaning that you can have obs pulled up but your viewers don't see it this is pretty nice game capture sources hook

your video games full screen or windowed this hooks directly into the game output to provide the smoothest possible feed of your gameplay you also have the ability to hide your cursor here though you'll generally want it on if your gameplay isn't showing up you may need to try display capture or window capture instead but these will perform worse for gameplay capture purposes image and

image slideshow sources do as the name implies and allow you to add individual images to your scene in just about any format or cycle between a slideshow of images transparency is supported so you can use this for overlays webcam frames logos etc media sources allow you to play audio or video files on your stream this could be used for literally just showing a video or for animated overlays for your stream if you're using overlays you want to check loop in the properties or it will disappear when the video ends you also want to check enable hardware acceleration for just about any media source to make sure that they play back smoothly on your system if you have the vlc media player software installed on

your system you'll also have access to the vlc video source this functions similarly to the media source though without hardware acceleration and allows you to queue up and shuffle between many different files folders of files pre-built playlists etc it's great for music libraries or showing your random stream clips that you've saved those kinds of things video capture device is

what you'd use to capture any external video device connected to your system so that's webcams and capture cards mainly capture cards are devices that connect over usb or slot into an expansion slot inside your computer to bring in a video feed from a camera a game console another pc etc typically via hdmi you can change resolution and frame rate options for these sources though typically the defaults are probably fine window capture is fun but not always the

right tool you use this to capture a specific window on your computer instead of the whole desktop the downside to this method is that the menus aren't often captured but the upside is that it captures the window regardless of where it is on your monitor even behind other windows some fun uses there some sources may come with audio when you add them to your scene such as a webcam you can either adjust those levels or mute them entirely in the audio mixer panel at the bottom of the screen there's two final sources that we've skipped over however the browser source is basically an embedded web

browser as a standalone source on your stream you'd use this for adding something like stream alerts the little pop-ups that show when someone follows or subscribes to your stream you could also use this for adding any number of graphics overlays or even interactive elements like game shows or something it gets pretty wild lastly we have scene yes you can add

another scene as a source to your scene this is useful if you want to apply different filters to multiple copies of a source in the same scene or apply filters to a source in one scene but not the other it's very important to consider the order that your sources are in much like any video or image editor or laying pieces on a table your sources are displayed in order from the topmost source being at the front to the bottom of back if you want something to cover up something else it must be above it you can reorder your sources by dragging them in the list or by clicking one of them and using the arrows scenes can also be ordered and rearranged but they are only displayed when you click on them so the order is mostly just for your own organization and convenience once you've figured out all the sources that you want to use to produce your stream or recording you can start setting up different scenes with different views as we talked about earlier in this video scenes might seem like a needless complication at first but they can make your life a lot easier by being able to just switch scenes when you need to say run to the bathroom or make your camera full screen instead of juggling and changing sources on the fly we'll talk about managing your scenes and organizing obs more in future videos i do hope you found this video helpful if you did consider subscribing to stay up to date with all the latest lbs updates and tips and tricks if you're looking for something else to watch or feel stuck consider checking out our previous video on getting up and running with obs in three minutes see ya