You're probably well aware that Shroud returned to streaming on Twitch last week, but unless you're one of the thousands of people watching...Actually, how many people did watch his stream? 2.9 million people tuned in to watch his return to streaming on Twitch, you might not have seen that he announced a new feature for his stream, which is pretty creative.
This new feature allows Shroud to show an instant replay of the last 20 seconds of his stream so that he can rewatch the highlight and react to it live with his audience. Now you don't actually need to be a human aim boltlike Shroud to make use of this feature because you can use it to highlight absolutely anything you want from the stream, like those rage inducing moments where in Fall Guys, you swear the world is conspiring against you, preventing you from qualifying for the fifth game in a row. Well, in this video, you’re going to learn exactly how to set up the instant replay feature for your live streams, with some massive bonus aesthetic parts, like moving sources, retro style replay overlays, and blurred background gameplay so that you can forever impress your viewers with your high production value on your livestream.
Okay, so this tutorial is maybe going to be a little bit more complicated than my normal tutorials, just purely because we're going to be using some plugins for OBS studio. If you've never used a plugin before OBS studio, don’t worry, it's super simple to install and they just add a little bit more functionality to the software.
Now it's worth mentioning that these plugins do not work with Stream lab OBS, so they're only for OBS studio. So if you are using Stream labs OBS, and you've been thinking about switching over to OBS studio, this is one of the great benefits of OBS Studio, is that you can use this whole library of different plugins for the software. So for you to be able to implement this instant replay feature, there’s three different things that we're going to need.
Firstly, we're going to need the instant replay script. This new improved version will allow us to save an instant replay and then instantly use that new file within a media source to play back. Secondly, we're going to need the move transition plugin. Now this plugin allows us to do all those fancy transitions, where our camera eases into different positions and our replay pops up out of nowhere. Thirdly, we're going to need the stream fx plugin, which does a load of different things, but what we're going to be using it for is mirroring sources. And then using a blur filter on a source to blur our gameplay source behind our replay.
And I know I said that there were three things to download, but really there's a fourth if you wish to use it and that is a replay overlay that I've made for you guys, that you can put on top of your replay footage to give it that retro video aesthetic. So I've put the download links to all four files down in the day description below.
So pop that open, download the four files and then we'll get into to install them. So for the plugins, there’s actually the included EXE installers, if you just to run them. Alternatively, you can just unzip them and drag the data and the OBS plugins folders across to the directory where OBS is installed, which is typically your C drive, Program Files, and then OBS Studio, and then select to overwrite any files if required.
So do that for both the move plugin and stream effects plugins. And then the last thing is the instant replay script, that is a .LUA file, and that needs to be placed into the scripts directory, which is typically Program Files, obs-studio, data, obs-plugins, frontend-tools, script, and then replace the file that already exists there. The replay overlay file, you can really put that wherever you want on your hard drive. I have a screen graphics folder where I keep all of my overlays so I'm just going to place mine there.
Okay, so boring installation stuff out of the way, let’s open back up OBS Studio and actually get to setting up this replay feature. So you can see here, I have a super simple setup for my OBS Studio. Just an in-game scene, which is some example gameplay with my webcam and webcam border on top of it, the second scene there, is just my nested scene of my camera and my camera border, which I include in any scenes that I wish to.
The first thing that we're going to do is make a new scene and I'd recommend naming this Instant Replay and then nested scene. So I put my nested scenes just NS in square brackets. So within this new scene, we want to add a new media source and I'd recommend naming this something like instant replay media source.
Now, here you just want to set it up to choose any kind of local video file that you have in your computer. It really doesn't matter what you select here, you just want to have something in place whilst you arrange your scenes. This will be replaced with the actual replay that you create whilst your live on stream. So find a video file. Anything we'll do. Set it to loop and then press Ok. If you want to use the replay overlay that I've made, you’ll want to add this as well. So add another media source, name this a replay overlay, and then browse to wherever you saved the replay overlay. Again, set this one to loop and then press okay.
So here you can see in our instant replay nested scene, we have a video file, which we're going to be replacing and then our overlay over the top. So this is actually what we're going to want to display on our other scenes.
Next, we want to set up the instant replay script. So to do that, you come up to Tools, down the Scripts, and then we want to add a new script. Actually browse to the directory which it should open up by default to this directory,’ cause it's where we put our instant-replay.lua, find it, click Open. And then if you highlight it, you’ll have a few options here on the right-hand side.
The only option that we actually need to change is the media source option. We need to tell it which media source in OBS we want to replace with the newly created replays. So for us, that is the instant replay media source that we just created. You can leave the interval and max attempts at their defaults; they've worked absolutely fine for me.
Okay, so we've got our instant replay nested scene set up and our instant replay script set up, but we actually need to configure the replay buffer in OBS Studio settings. So open up the settings and head to the Output tab. And then we want to head across to the Recording tab just to make sure that our video settings here are correct because the replay buffer is going to use whatever settings you have set here in Recording.
So really you can set this up however you want. I recommend using the new and NVENC encoder if you can, and MKV video format, as well as here are the quality options that I'm using. But really the main things that you want to note down are the recording path. This is actually where our replay buffer is going to save.
Once you're happy with the recording settings, you can come across to the replay buffer tab and just enable the replay buffer. The only thing you really want to change here maybe is to set the maximum replay time to something of your choosing. So this is actually how long the buffer saves for, so how long each video is going to be whenever you save the replay buffer. I’m going to leave the mindset 30 seconds, but feel free to change this to 20 or 40, whatever you want. Just bear in mind that it is using the computer's memory, so you don't really want to go above a minute if you can avoid it.
Whilst we're in settings, there’s a couple of other things we can change. I’d recommend enabling this option hereto automatically start the replay buffer when streaming, that just means that you'll never forget to start it. And then secondly, I'd recommend setting a hotkey to actually save the instant replay so that you're not having to bring back the OBS window and actually click the little save button. Save it to hotkey, you can do any combination with your keyboard. I’m going to use my stream deck to actually use a key too.
Next we can close down our settings and actually start the replay buffer. What you want to do here is to run the replay buffer for at least as long as you set the replay buffer to run for. So for us, that was 30 seconds. You actually want to create a replay file here that is at least 30 seconds long, so don't worry if that sounds too confusing, just start the replay buffer, wait 30 seconds. And then click the hotkey that you just set up for this little Save Replay button here.
Now that we have a replay actually saved, we want to go back to our nested instant replay scene and actually replace this media source with the one we just created. So click up Properties, change the browse path to wherever it was that you just saved your first replay. You can see here, I've just saved a replay, which was the one I created. I click OK, you can see the replay is now updated to me about a minute ago, talking about how you need to set up a replay buffer, and that is now set up for you.
Okay, so just to reiterate where we are, because I've realized that this is a complicated tutorial, we’re about halfway through. So far, we have our in-game scene, which has our gameplay and our webcam, and anything else that you normally have in your main scene. And we've created our instant replay nested scene, which has our most recently created replay videos well as our VHS style overlay over the top.
So the next thing you want to actually duplicate the scene where you want to show replays. So for me, that's my in-game scene. I’m going to duplicate it and I'm going to name this In-Game and then square brackets With Replay.
Now, if I drag this up to be directly below my in-game scene and I switch between them, you can see there's absolutely no difference between them because they are duplicates of one another. What we want to do is actually have the instant replay within this In-Game with Replay scene. So come across here, click Add, go up to Scene and choose our instant replay nested scene. Now, you can see right now that this is taking up the whole of the scene, so I want to actually rescale it. Going to lock the game capture to make sure we don't drag that. And then just resize this to roughly about two thirds of my screen, and then position it in the middle.
So what we have right now is we have our live gameplay in the background, our replay in the middle here on the right-hand side, and you can see our actual camera is hidden behind. So I'm going to move our camera across, just disable that scene really quick, resize this to be roughly a little bit bigger, something along that line. I’m just going to crop this in a little bit, just to make sure that we're not wasting any space. And then re enable the instant replay. And you can see here that we roughly have something in place now.
So let's just recap again. We have our in-game scene, so we're playing a game, we’ve created a sick highlight. We swap to our in-game replay. And the idea is the video here is going to update with the newly created replay. We still have a live webcam so we can react to the replay happening there. And we still have our gameplay happening live in the background, which we're going to blur out. So if we switch between our in-game and our in-game with replay scenes right now, it doesn't look great, does it? Because it's just a sharp cut between the two scenes. So what we actually want to do now is use that move transition plugin that we installed at the beginning to make this a sort of move across and look a lot more aesthetic.
So what we need to do is actually add the move transition to our transitions list here, so you probably have cut fade. Maybe you've added a stinger before. We need to add a new one, which we should see here is Move if we've installed the plugin correctly. So select add a move transition, you can name it whatever you want or leave it set as Move. And once that's set up, you should get a new box here with a lot of different options.
There are three real main settings that you want to change. These are the matched items, the appearing items, and the disappearing items settings. Now, when they're talking about matched items, they’re actually talking about the sources that exist between the two scenes. So let's break this down.
If we have two different scenes, let’s say scene A and scene B, matched items is talking about all the items that exist in both scene A transitioning to scene B. Appearing items is talking about all the new sources that appear in scene B when you're transitioning from scene A. And disappearing items is the exact opposite, all the sources that don't exist anymore. So if you want to copy the exact settings that I've used, there’s only a couple of things that you need to change. You can leave match items completely as it is by default, and then preparing items and disappearing items you want to leave easing set to ease in and out, the easing function to cubic, zoom ticked, and then position, we can change that to none, and transition we can change that to fade.
Now you can leave the curve as it is and do the exact same for disappearing items. So position to none, transition to fade, and then we can click Know by default. I think the duration for the move transitions at the default OBS, which is 300 milliseconds, which I think is too quick. I’d recommend setting this somewhere between 500 and a thousand milliseconds, but feel free to set something and play around.
So now let's have a look at what happens when we change between in-game and our in-game replay scene. So what's actually happening is the webcam, which exists in both scenes is moving across. You can see that easing and resizing. And the instant replay, which only exists in scene two, is coming up from the very center, which is exactly how we have set this up.
Okay, so we're nearly there. There’s a couple of things that we're going to do to make this look more aesthetically pleasing. And the first of those is to blur our live gameplay that’s happening in the background. So to do that, we're going to use the stream effects plugin. First thing we need to do is actually delete the current game capture that we have in the background. So yes, delete that, and now we can see we've got a black background. Instead, we're going to add a source mirror with the same name. So go to an ad source mirror, and then we're going to call it the exact same. So game capture is what the original source was called, but we're going to add the word mirror to the end. And we're going to actually find that source within the list.
So you can see here, game capture source, and it's probably too big. So let me just resize that and then drag it to the bottom. So it looks exactly the same right now. What we're going to be able to do though, is because this is a mirror of the original, we’re going to be able to apply a different filter to it. And the filter we're going to apply is the blur filter.
So come down to Effect Filters, select the blur filter and just add a blur. Now there's a few different types of blues that you can use here. And some of them may be familiar to you if you've used any video software, but you want to keep the resource relatively light on your computer and adding one of the more expensive blurs here will really tax your computer heavily. So I would recommend setting a dual filtering blur, roughly five or six, you can see here in the preview. That looks really good now, and now we can see we have a blurred background.
But you may think we can just swap between our scenes now and one will be blurred, and one won’t because we've used our source mirror. And you'd be right, but interestingly, the move plugin we'll treat them as two separate sources. So you can see them zooming in and out, which isn't exactly what we want to do. We really just want to choose between this and the second source.
Thankfully, they thought about that when designing the plugin. So if you've come back across to our move scene transition and go to the properties, you can see one of the top options here is to match the source name, and then you can choose between three different options.
Now, if you remember rightly, we named the mirror source exactly the same, but with the word mirror at the end. If we enable this level option here, which matches if the source name with the last word removed matches the other source name, which it does, and click Owe can now swap between our two sources and you can see that it just blurs one in and blows the other out, which is exactly what we want to happen. It treats the sources as exactly the same, even though they're technically two different sources.
So we are actually pretty much done with the tutorial here. You can, at any point in your in-game scene, save a replay with the hotkey and then swap across to your replay, and it's going to show that recently replay that you've saved with the overlay on top of it, with the blurred background of your live gameplay. And it all looks really smooth, and the transition is awesome, but you can actually make this a little bit easier for you to manage.
So rather than having to click so many different buttons, you could set up a multi-action with the stream deck or something like Touch Portal to save a replay, swap scenes, and then swap back again after a certain amount of time. So you can do it all with one key press, rather than having to fiddle around and press three or four different keys.
So here I am in the elgato stream software, and you can see I've created three different hotkeys. One is just a very simple hotkey to actually save the replay. So this is the hotkey that I set up within OBS studio. Just a hotkey button within the stream deck software so I can click that and save a replay at any time, but it's not going to swap scenes or anything like that. Next to have a multi-action, which is going to save and then swap to watch the replay. So if we actually take a look at what happens within this multi-action, you can see that it presses the save replay hotkey, so actually saves a new replay. It then waits one second and then swaps to our with replay scene to actually play back the replay. Then wait 20 seconds for the replay to roughly finish and then swaps back to our main in game scene.
So you don't have to do these last two steps if you want to control the time yourself. But again, you're just making it even easier for yourself with one click to swap to your replay and swap back again. And the final one that I have is reload and watch replay. So this is if you want to save a replay at some point and then watch it back later. So rather than saving and instantly swapping to it, let’s say you get a really great action. You can click this key and then when you want to review that clip that you've saved, you can press this one. So it's just going to swap to view the most recently saved replay. Watch it for 20 seconds and then swap back again.
So really I would position them more like this because you're going to be using these two in conjunction with each other whenever you want to watch the replay. And then this one does it all in one go, effectively. Obviously, if you want to go the extra steplike Shroud did and have a second scene, which zooms in even further on this replay into the middle of his crosshair, it’s really simple to do. You would just create a new scene with this instant replay nested scene within, and then just have it even bigger. So zoomed up full screen or even larger like he does. Really, the creativity is down to you guys now as to how you want to set up your replay scenes to make them look as aesthetic as possible.
Hopefully this video has been super helpful, and you now have an instant replay feature set up for your live streams. If you have watched and followed along, please do give the video a thumbs up, that massively helps me out. And of course, check out the rest of the content on the Gaming Careers YouTube channel. I’d love to see your creative spins on this idea. So if you do end up putting an instant replay feature into your live streams, do share it with me on Twitter or Instagram or Discord or something like that. I’d definitely be sharing some of my favorites with the community as well, thanks as always for watching, and I'll catch you in the next video, peace!
