OBS Studio Tutorial for Beginners (Step by Step)

https://youtu.be/UlRxHmHg1M0?si=xg7MWQGJaxt3FKCG

0:00 · If you've tried OBS and gave up, this video is for you.

0:04 · OBS studio is one of the most powerful free tools available for recording your screen, your camera, or both at the same time.

0:12 · But the first time you open it, it does not exactly roll out the welcome mat.

0:16 · It kind of feels like there's panels everywhere, settings with names that sound like they belong in a server room, and no obvious place to just press, record and go.

0:25 · But by the end of this video, you're going to have OBS set up your screen and your camera will both be showing up.

0:32 · Your microphone will be working and your first recordings will be saved to your computer.

0:38 · We're going to do this together step by step.

0:41 · And I'm going to explain why we're doing each thing, not just tell you what to click.

0:46 · I am using OBS version 32.1.2, which is the current release as of when I'm recording this.

0:52 · The steps are going to be the same whether you're on a mac or windows PC, but any place where the two platforms look different, I'll call that out so you know exactly what to look for on your platform.

1:02 · Before we dive in, let's have a quick 30 second overview on what OBS actually is.

1:07 · Because understanding this will make the rest of the setup make more sense.

1:12 · OBS stands for Open Broadcaster Software.

1:15 · It was originally built for live streaming, which is why some of its language like scenes and sources sound like broadcast television, but it's just as powerful for recording, which is what we're focused on today.

1:28 · The reason creators use OBS over something like the built in screen recorder on your Mac or PC is simply flexibility.

1:36 · OBS lets you combine multiple imports into one, recording your screen, your camera, your microphone, even graphics and text overlays all at the same time.

1:46 · And it gives you real control over the quality of what you're recording.

1:50 · The best part?

1:51 · It's free, it's updated regularly, and it runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

1:56 · If you do not have OBS installed yet, head to https://obsproject.com, download the version for your operating system and run the installer.

2:03 · It's a straightforward install. Just click through the prompts.

2:06 · Come back here once it's open and sitting on your screen.

2:09 · When you open OBS for the first time, it will offer to run an Auto configuration wizard.

2:14 · You're going to see a prompt asking whether you want to optimize for streaming or recording.

2:18 · Go ahead and walk through it, but I want you to know what it's doing so you're not just clicking through blindly.

2:25 · You'll want to select optimize just for recording, not for streaming.

2:28 · Then click next.

2:30 · It's going to ask about your resolution and frame rate.

2:33 · For most people, recording tutorials or talking head content 1080p at 30 frames per second is a great starting point.

2:40 · I do most of my work in 4K 30 frames per second, But in this case, let's select 1920 by 1080 for ten ATP resolution.

2:49 · And we'll choose 30 frames per second.

2:51 · We'll click next and let the wizard run its test.

2:54 · Now this test may happen quickly, but what it's going to do in the background is going to check your computer hardware to figure out the best encoder settings for your machine.

3:02 · Specifically, once the test finishes, click Apply Settings.

3:05 · The wizard has now given you a reasonable starting configuration.

3:09 · We're going to review and improve on those settings in a moment, But running the wizard first means you're starting from a place that already works for your hardware, rather than a blank slate.

3:18 · Let me give you a 30 second tour of the OBS interface before we start adding anything else.

3:22 · This is the part that many beginner tutorials skip, and it's why people end up getting confused later.

3:27 · There are five main areas you need to know about.

3:30 · First, the big black area in the middle.

3:33 · That's your preview canvas.

3:34 · It shows you exactly what your recording will look like before you hit record.

3:38 · Think of it as a live preview monitor.

3:40 · Over to the left you'll see the scenes panel.

3:42 · A scene is like a layout preset.

3:44 · You might have one scene that shows just your screen, and another that shows your screen.

3:48 · With the camera in the lower right corner, you can switch between screens instantly.

3:52 · Right now you've got one default scene, and that's all we're going to need for today.

3:56 · Below scenes is your sources.

3:58 · Panel sources are the individual ingredients that go into your scene.

4:02 · Be your screen capture your camera feed, your microphone.

4:05 · Every time you want to add something new to your recording, you add it here as a source below the main preview panel is the audio mixer.

4:14 · This shows you the audio levels for every sound source in your scene in real time.

4:18 · If you see the bars moving when you speak, your microphone is being picked up.

4:22 · If nothing's moving, then something is wrong with your audio input.

4:25 · And we need to fix it before you record.

4:27 · And In the bottom right is your controls panel.

4:30 · That is where your start recording button lives, along with start streaming.

4:33 · If you ever go that route, Start recording is the button we'll be pressing at the end of the setup.

4:38 · But before we add any sources, let's go into settings and make sure your output is configured correctly.

4:44 · We'll click on file then settings.

4:47 · This is where we tell OBS what format to save your recordings in and how much quality to use.

4:52 · We're going to click on the output tab, and At the very top you'll see output mode.

4:57 · Change that from Simple to advanced.

4:59 · Advanced gives us more control without being significantly more complicated.

5:03 · Once you know what you're looking at, Make sure you're on the recording tab within output. The first thing to set is your recording format.

5:10 · This is the file type. Your recording will be saved as.

5:12 · Now here is where we start to experience some differences between Mac and Windows versions of OBS.

5:18 · On Mac, you can change the recording format from MKV or MP4 to MOV.

5:23 · MOV is Apple's Container format, and it unlocks the best encoder options available to you on Mac, with one caveat the MOV format, and depending on which encoder you use, can chew up massive amounts of hard drive space on your computer.

5:38 · If you're working on something like a laptop with limited hard drive space and you're making videos longer than 4 or 5 minutes, I would not recommend using MOV.

5:46 · I would stick with MKV.

5:48 · The advantage with MKV is if something happens during your recording, all is not lost.

5:53 · Usually you can recover from an MKV recording, but if you record from MOV or MP4, the files don't get written until the end of the recording and you may lose important data.

6:05 · So unless you need the utmost in high quality, I would choose MKV and I would choose MKV on both Windows and Mac.

6:13 · On windows MKV is a solid choice.

6:15 · It's crash resistant, meaning if OBS closes unexpectedly, you're recording up to that point is still saved, MP4 is also fine if you prefer it.

6:25 · Now, let us look at the encoder setting.

6:27 · This determines how OBS compresses your video as it records.

6:30 · The right choice here depends on your machine and operating system.

6:34 · On a Mac, select Apple VT H.264 hardware encoder.

6:38 · If you want the highest possible quality and storage space to spare, Apple ProRes hardware recorder is even better, but be aware ProRes files are large for most beginners, H264 hardware is the right call on windows.

6:55 · look for Nvidia NVENC H.264 if you have an Nvidia graphics card, or AMD HW h.264 for AMD cards.

7:03 · If neither appears, select x264 is your fallback hardware encoders put less strain on your CPU while recording.

7:10 · for rate control, select CRF if available, or CBR or constant QP if available.

7:17 · In this case, we're going to set it to constant QP, but you can use CBR as a fallback.

7:22 · If you're using CRF, Set the CRF value somewhere between 16 and 20.

7:26 · For a good balance of quality and file size.

7:29 · Lower numbers mean higher quality and larger files for 1080P content, 18 is a good starting point.

7:35 · I'll leave the constant QP at 20 for this tutorial.

7:38 · one more thing in output.

7:40 · Check your recording path.

7:41 · This is the folder on your computer where OBS will save your recordings.

7:44 · Click browse and set it somewhere where you actually find it, like your desktop or a dedicated recordings folder.

7:49 · OBS will default to a system folder that's often easy to lose things in.

7:54 · Still, inside the settings tab, click on the video tab.

7:56 · There are three things to set here, and they're all straightforward.

7:59 · the base canvas resolution.

8:01 · This should match your monitors resolution.

8:03 · If you're on a standard 1080p monitor, set this to 1920 by 1080.

8:08 · I record in 4K on a 4K monitor, but I also shoot in 4K on a wide screen non 4K monitor.

8:15 · This takes a little creative thinking to resize the windows, but with practice you'll get it.

8:20 · Make sure output scaled resolution is set to match your base canvas resolution for most recording purposes, 1920 by 1080 works here as well or 4K if you're recording in 4K.

8:31 · If you ever need to reduce file size significantly, you could scale down to 1280 by 720, but for now, start at 1080p and common FPS values will set this to 30.

8:42 · That's 30 frames per second.

8:43 · It's the standard for screen recording and tutorial content.

8:46 · Now, if you plan on recording fast motion or gaming, then 60 is better.

8:50 · But for what most of you are doing, 30 is the right choice and it will help keep your file sizes manageable.

8:56 · Click apply then okay to close settings.

8:58 · Now we're back at the main OBS window and it's time to actually add our sources.

9:02 · We're going to add two things your screen and your camera.

9:05 · Let's start with the screen in the sources panel.

9:08 · At the bottom left click the plus button.

9:11 · You'll see a list of source types.

9:13 · We want display capture on a mac.

9:15 · You may see a permissions prompt the first time.

9:18 · Go to System Settings Privacy and Security Screen Recording and make sure OBS is toggled on.

9:23 · You may need to restart OBS after granting this on windows.

9:27 · Display capture should work immediately without any extra permission.

9:30 · Step A dialog box will appear.

9:32 · Give this source a name, something like Screen or Display and then click okay.

9:38 · Another window will immediately open, letting you choose which display to capture.

9:42 · If you have more than one monitor, select the display you want to record and click okay.

9:52 · You should now see your screen appear in the OBS preview canvas.

9:56 · if it looks slightly too big or too small, you can click on the percentage button in the lower left corner of the preview canvas to shrink the window down.

10:04 · In this case, the red bounding box is showing us what the entire display looks like, and you can obviously see it doesn't fit into the preview window.

10:13 · But if I shrink this down now, you can see it fits in there completely and I will zoom back in now.

10:20 · So what you see here is exactly what we'll be recording.

10:24 · Now let's add our camera.

10:25 · Click on the plus button in the sources again.

10:27 · This time select Video Capture Device.

10:29 · Give it a name.

10:30 · Camera is fine.

10:32 · In the properties window that opens, click the device dropdown and You'll see a list of all the cameras that OBS can detect on your computer.

10:38 · Select your camera from that list.

10:40 · If you're using a dedicated camera connector through a capture card like a Canon R6 Mark II through an Elgato Camlink 4K, it will appear in this list as Camlink 4K.

10:50 · If you're using a standard webcam, it'll show up by its manufacturer's name, so select whichever one your camera is and click okay.

10:56 · In this case, I'm using the EOS webcam utility with a canon EOS 70 D connect to it.

11:01 · So it's detecting the EOS webcam utility software.

11:04 · So I'll just click okay.

11:06 · And now your camera feed appears on top of your screen in the preview canvas.

11:10 · It's probably covering your entire screen or a portion of your screen right now, which is not what we want.

11:15 · So we need to resize and position it.

11:17 · So in this case we'll click on the camera source.

11:20 · In the preview canvas We see our red handles appear around the edge.

11:24 · We can hold alt and drag an edge to crop, or you can simply drag a corner and resize the screen.

11:30 · I'm going to drag the whole image to reposition it first.

11:34 · Now I want this to be in the lower right corner.

11:36 · So I'm going to grab this corner, and I'm going to shrink it down to make it smaller.

11:40 · And then position it in the lower right corner of the screen.

11:43 · Now in the lower right corner you can see we've got our live camera screen.

11:47 · When I put my hand in front of the lens, you can see that we've got that recording now in the lower right corner.

11:52 · This is a great way to be present enough on a tutorial video that you're maintaining eye contact with your viewer, but you're kind of out of the way and the focus is on the actual tutorial itself.

12:04 · Next we need to get a microphone set up I'm going to switch over to a different screen.

12:08 · Now I'm going to show you another OBS screen because it's a little bit easier to show you on my other computer.

12:13 · So if you look in the middle of the screen you're going to see two audio outputs here. You're going to see a mac OS screen capture and you're going to see a Vocaster Two The Vocaster Two is actually connected to a Shure SM7B microphone.

12:28 · And that's what you're seeing happening right here.

12:30 · You're seeing my audio from the microphone going up and down in the Vocaster Two mixer screen.

12:36 · The Mac OS capture is recording any sounds that come through the computer itself.

12:41 · And you'll notice there's no sounds coming through there.

12:43 · So the audio mixer is not doing anything on that screen.

12:45 · So typically when you set it up, you're going to see 1 or 2 audio tracks listed here automatically.

12:50 · OBS will typically auto detect the default system microphone when it launches.

12:54 · And when you speak out loud, you should see the audio mixer and the levels moving up and down into the green as you talk.

13:01 · If they're not moving, the mix not being picked up and we need to fix that.

13:04 · If they are moving and hitting the red zone, then your gains too high and you'll get clipping in your recording.

13:09 · You want your voice to peak comfortably in that yellow and green range.

13:13 · If your microphone is not showing up or the wrong device is selected, go to settings and then audio.

13:19 · And then under Mic/Auxiliary Audio.

13:24 · Click the dropdown and select your microphone from the list.

13:26 · Again this is on a Mac. And so I've got a lot of options there.

13:29 · In this case I would choose the Vocaster Two USB to get it to appear in the list.

13:35 · You might see something like a USB microphone, a built in microphone, a headset microphone, Select whichever matches your setup and then click apply and click okay.

13:44 · you'll probably want to make sure that desktop audio is also configured.

13:47 · If you want to capture system sounds, meaning any audio playing for your computer like video clips or notification sounds.

13:53 · If you're recording a pure tutorial with just your voice, You can set desktop audio to disable to keep your recording clean.

14:01 · Before you commit to recording anything important, do a short test look at your preview canvas and confirm two things that your screen is visible and that your camera is visible, and that the mixer is appearing in the bottom of the screen.

14:14 · Confirm your microphone levels are moving.

14:16 · When you speak now, you would click Start Recording in the control panel at the bottom right.

14:22 · Say a few sentences out loud, move your mouse around, maybe open a browser window, give it about 30s and then click stop recording.

14:30 · OBS will save the file to that recording path we set earlier.

14:34 · Go find that file and play it back and check that your screen was captured, that your camera was in frame, and that your voice sounds nice and clean without distortion or clipping, If everything looks and sounds right, then you're ready to record for real.

14:48 · But if something's off, maybe your camera is not showing.

14:50 · Your audio is distorted. Don't skip past it.

14:53 · Go back to the relevant section and fix it before recording your actual content.

14:57 · A two minute fix now will save you a full rerecord later.

15:02 · I want to briefly explain scenes before we wrap up, because once you understand this concept, OBS starts to feel a lot more logical.

15:10 · Right now you've got one scene with two sources inside of it, your screen and your camera.

15:16 · That is your recording layout.

15:17 · You can create additional scenes for different layouts.

15:21 · For example, you might want a full screen camera scene that only shows your face with no screen, which is useful for capturing intros and outros, or a screen only scene with no camera overlay when you want the viewer fully focused on what is on the scene.

15:35 · To create a new scene, click on the plus under the scenes panel.

15:39 · And give it a name.

15:44 · Click okay.

15:45 · Add whatever sources you want inside that scene.

15:48 · Then you can switch between scenes instantly during a recording by just clicking on them in the scenes panel.

15:53 · This is powerful when you're doing more complex productions, but for getting started, one scene is really all you need.

16:00 · That is OBS set up and ready to record.

16:02 · You have your screen captured, your camera in the corner, your microphone working, and you know your recordings are being saved.

16:08 · That's generally everything you need to start recording quality content today.

16:12 · Now there is a lot more that OBS can do scene transitions, browser sources, advanced audio filters, and live streaming configuration.

16:19 · And I can cover those in a future video.

16:21 · But the foundation you have right now is solid.

16:24 · It's time to go make something.

16:26 · And if this video helped you, hit the subscribe button so you don't miss the next one, and drop a comment below.

16:31 · Tell me what you're planning to record.

16:33 · I try to read every comment and respond to as many of them as I can.

16:37 · For now, I'll see you in the next video.