Streamlabs OBS For Brand New Streamers (Creating Scenes, Adding Widgets, and MORE)

Getting everything set up in streamlabs obs can be pretty confusing and streaming isn't meant to  be confusing it is meant to be fun right? today you'll go from having absolutely nothing set up to having this awesome overlay setup as well as understanding how to add, customize and edit every single thing you need and want inside streamlabs obs, let's go!

Not only are you gonna go from an absolute beginner who knows nothing about streamlabs over yesterday and become an absolute pro but i'm also going to sneak in a bunch of small little tips that you probably don't know about that are going to blow your mind, i'll be covering every single step you need but most importantly i'll also be referencing a playlist that is in my description.

You see streamlabs obs is incredibly complex at the end of the day and if you want to learn how to deep dive into things like stream labels, alerts and all those things well don't worry you'll get a beginner's understanding today and then when you're ready to deep dive you can check out the playlist in the description, there are also time codes in the description so you can skip ahead to whatever section you're specifically trying to set up and get it running, so let's get into the nitty gritty of setting up streamlabs obs for an absolute beginner.

When you first install streamlabs you'll most likely have either a blank slate or you may have already taken a few steps ahead and installed a template overlay, for this i want to make sure that everyone is working from a blank slate so what we're going to do is come down to the bottom left click this little drop down as shown on screen, click manage all and then once it opens click create new, this will add a whole new blank stream lab setup, now don't worry if you did set up a template it is not completely gone, if you want to swap back go to the same process but don't click new instead click the overlay that you were on originally.

Okay let's give you a quick tour of streamlabs obs and then i'll deep dive into everything but first you need to know your way around, in the middle you have your display window this is what you'd be broadcasting to twitch if you were live or if you were recording this is what you'd be recording if we look below our display we also have our event feed, this shows when people follow sub or any other actions such as raids, hosts or if you have streamlabs donations set up this is also where those will appear, below that we have three boxes on the far left we have scenes you'll set up  different scenes for different reasons for example you'll need a scene for gaming a scene for going  to be right back or a scene for just chatting to your viewers.

If we had those three scenes i just mentioned already set up and we clicked between them then we would actually be transitioning between the scenes in the middle we have sources, these are the assets you have added to the scene you've got selected on the left and on the right we have the mixer, these are your audio sources that will be transmitted out, you can also control and edit the audio of those sources from here.

Now don't worry i know that sounds like a lot to take in, i'll be deep diving into every single one of  these boxes throughout the video, first you just need to know what is what so you can actually find  them when i mention them, if we go further to the right and then up to the middle you can click on this little arrow here which opens up your chat meaning you're able to read anything that comes into your twitch chat while you are live or just in general while you have this open.

So now you know where everything on the basic tour is, i will also mention though that if you're struggling to learn how to get your settings correct and make sure your stream is crystal clear and not laggy then i really recommend the playlist in the description because it has a video there all about streaming settings and all about how to diagnose why you might be lagging or why you might not have the perfect quality for your stream.

So i'm going to show you how to install this entire overlay in less than six clicks but first we need to start at the very basics so you guys can understand how to edit and customize things by yourself, later as i said on the left we have our scene list i also mentioned that you'll be making scenes for different purposes, for example let's start out with a game scene, now you should already have a default scene set up you can right click it and rename it to the game scene.

Now i might be setting up a game scene but i'll cover everything you need to know to build any scene you want, now that we've renamed this to game scene in the middle we have our sources, sources are all the media that are inside this particular scene, right now it is empty but if we click this plus sign here at the top we can add sources such as a game capture, you'll need a game capture in  your gaming scene because that lets you actually capture your game and display it in streamlabs obs, there are other types of capture such as window and desktop but most of the time you're best starting out and learning how game capture works anything you want to add you'll do it with this plus sign, this could be video graphics or it could be still images or it could be any of the dozens of built-in widgets that come with streamlabs obs.

For example we also want to add alerts so if someone follows while you're live and alert plays on screen so we hit the plus and add an alert box, your alert box will come with default alerts or if you've already installed something those will be what shows up here but if you want to learn  how to make alerts and how to use the alert box perfectly i have that playlist in the description which actually has a full deep dive in how to set up streamlabs alerts.

Your game team will also need a webcam most likely, maybe some support bars for latest followers or subscriber and potentially you'll want to add your chat on screen as well so let's start by adding a webcam, we click on the plus and we click video capture device, we'll select our webcam and if we make sure we have it selected in the source scene we'll be able to resize it down, now the source list isn't actually a random order it is actually a list from top to bottom imagine the bottom of that list is actually behind everything else in 3d space so if we were to drag our webcam down below our game capture it would then be hidden.

This means that anything you want to be at the top above everything else should be dragged higher in the list, now i want to add support bars so that when someone follows me their name is on screen as my latest follower, this means that people might follow just to have their name on screen for a little bit longer, we're going to do this by adding support bar graphics, all of the graphics i show in today's video are completely free from the stream scheme discord, all you have to do head down the description, Join, verify yourself and you can start downloading them and follow along exactly the same as what i do.

So how do we add things to our sources, well we go up here and we click the plus sign, now i can  either click add image if my support bar graphic isn't animated or i can click a media source if my  support bars are an animation my support bars are in fact animated so i will click media source i'll  find my animated bars from my computer and i will add them in since they are animated, i also need  to make sure i double click my support bar source so the settings open up and i click on loop or else it will stop playing after the animation is finished.

Any animation that you want to continue playing on your screen needs to have loop turned on that process i just showed you a flicking plus and adding something is the same process you'll use to add any media source or any image you want to your screen so let's go ahead and add our webcam frame in and get that all lined up with our webcam.

Next obviously we need our support bars to actually have the follower name on them and we also need to have the latest follower there so people know what the name is about, what we're going to do is we're going to head up here to the plus again and we're gonna add a stream label, once  the stream label opens i will click on the drop down i will search for recent follower here i can  change the size the font and i can edit pretty much everything i want, now i'm gonna increase the font size to max and then size down my new stream label so it fits inside my bar the reason i choose to go to max in font size and scale down is because it will be a lot less pixelated, i see a lot of people dragging to stretch things up rather than increasing the font size, always increase your font size and scale down rather than have a low font size and scale up.

Stream labels are simple to add but incredibly complex and powerful when you get into the nitty-gritty  that's why if you want to in the playlist i have mentioned in the description multiple times now, there is a video that is seven minutes long which will take you from beginner with stream labels to a complete and auto pro, this video would go on for far too long if i deep dived into everything to do with stream labels.

Now let's also add in the text to show people what that name is because right now it just has my latest followers name, we're going to do is we're going to head back to that plus add a source and add a text gdi plus and i'm going to type in i want to say new follower, i'll increase the font size again and scale it down to fit next to it and voila we have got our new follower and we also have our follower name appearing in our bar.

Now what if i don't like my support bars being at the top of my screen and i actually wanted to be at the bottom of my screen, well i could individually click them and drag them all down and align them again but that is a bit of a pain so instead if i wanted to i could come down to my source list i could click on the text hold shift and then click on the media source and this will select everything between those two sources, now i can click on any of the images inside and drag them down to the bottom.

But a much easier way to do this is to instead select the folder button above sources and drag all of the sources into one folder named support bars, while we're at it lets also go ahead and add our webcam frame and our webcam into a folder of their own as well, now we do hit a small snag here depending on your support graphics you might have three or four more blank spaces, you need to fill and now you could do the exact same process i showed you with stream labels but rather than add follower you could add it as subscriber or whatever else you wanted or if you're just starting out and you just want to focus on followers then you can go ahead and crop out the rest of them.

If we select the support bars folder it'll select everything in there and now we're going to hold down alt and we're  going to drag from right to left and it will start cropping, if you want to you can also crop from top to bottom but in this case we do just want to crop off the extra three support bars this alt on drag also works for resizing your webcam when you're trying to fit it into a 4-3 box because sometimes having a big 16-9 a wide screen webcam takes up too much space on your game screen.

If we follow the process we showed earlier and we import a square graphic for a webcam frame then we're going to be able to lay it over the top of our webcam and we can hold alt and we can drag the webcam to be smaller and fit the box.

Now the last step of  our gaming scene is maybe you'd like to add a chat box to the screen so that when people talk in you  chat they also appear on screen to do this let's head back in and hit the plus sign and then we're going to add a chat box widget, now you'll probably have the default chat box set up most likely and when you add a chat chatbox widget it will be square at the top left of the properties when you double click on your chat box in the source list you can actually change the height and width start by changing this to 1080 by 1920 and then resizing it if that's too long for you, you can obviously crop or you can adjust those properties yourself to try and get a better fit for what you're trying to put it in.

While we still have the chat box properties open we can also turn on emotes and badges to appear in screen, now let's put this chat box over here next to our camera and our followers type something to test and make sure that your chat box is actually below your camera in the source list but above your game scene.

Congratulations! you pretty much understand the basics to getting all of this set up and you have a game scene set up now but first we need to go ahead and add a just chatting scene which i think that every single creator should have a just chatting scene set up for connecting one to one with their audience, to add a new scene we're gonna hit the plus above the scenes list we're gonna name it just chatting and hit okay if you click on the game scene it will transition you back to the other scene where you had all your work, a small safety tip for people if you're going to transition to a scene that shows your desktop or your browsers or anything like that or you just don't want to have to transition every time you click on a different scene and i recommend turning on studio mode, studio mode can be turned on if you go down to this little button in the bottom  left here.

So now when i click on the game scene it won't instantly transition me is that it will show me what i've clicked on and i can click transition to move between and if i do it the opposite way it is the exact same, now you can go ahead and set up your just chatting scene however you want but i do  have a few recommendations, for example i do really think you should make a large full screen camera or at least a decent size of the screen as your camera, i also recommend you should add your chat to it and you should add your own support bars  if that is the kind of thing you're looking to do, obviously you'll also want to add an alert box.

Now when you're adding a lot of these widgets and a lot of these sources you're going to follow the steps that i showed you earlier where you click plus and then you go and select the widgets and when you do that it's actually going to say do you want to add your alert box you've already added to a different scene or do you want to create a whole new alert box.

Now i recommend just sticking with having the exact same one in every scene for now but again there's that guide in the description if you want to get down and figure out exactly how to make everything work, once you have all that set up one of the fastest and easiest ways to add some polish and production value to your stream is to set up transitions and really make them fancy, let's quickly add some transitions to our overlay and then i'm going to show you guys how to install our full free template so you don't have to worry about any of this and of course how to set up all your audio.

So what we're going to do is we're going to click the cog wheel above the scenes list, click add transition, change it to a stinger and then import your video file that you want to use as your stinger, now you'll want to be using a webm video stinger because this means you'll have transparency, now you'll want to change time to frame and then what you do is you're going to set your transition point to whatever the frame is that your screen is completely covered for me 30 frames is when my screen is completely covered so i'm going to hit 30.

Now what i want you to do is you should type 30 in and if it's too early or too late you can adjust what your frame transition will be until it  is correct once it's correct hit done, now select the new stinger as your default with this circle hit done click on the just chatting scene or the  game scene whichever one you had up and you'll see that it plays the transition, now i actually have a video that shows off 30 plus free transitions that you guys can download and try out for your stream  and it also has a deep dive into really polishing your transitions and really polishing those stingers to make them as fancy as possible so if you want link in the description in that playlist.

I know it is actually a heck of a lot of work to get all this set up by hand and we're barely even actually digging deep into all of it so why don't we just set up a template for yo  guys so you can just go ahead and delete anything you don't want rather than having to set up everything you do want, the first thing you want to do is get your hands on a dot overlay whether it's a paid one from own.tv or one of the free animated ones from our discord linked in the description, it doesn't really matter, once you have your dot overlay you're gonna head down to the cogwheel in the bottom left click on scene collection, click on import overlay and select your dot overlay file from wherever it is on your computer, this will generate a whole new list of scenes with all of their sources set up and organized into folders, it has a lot of different options to choose from and anything you want to edit or customize, you can just double click on.

Now i will throw it out there any animated text can't be edited which means that you can change your stream labels that are already custom built in for you but you won't be able to change anything with big animations included, now with overlays like this you will need to follow the steps i showed you earlier in the video to add a game capture your alerts, your chat box and any other widgets you want to use because sadly with streamlabs we can't template in widgets to your  overlays, if you need any further help with setting up your overlays, alerts or any of that stuff as i  said there is the playlist in the description as well as a giant faq inside our discord and 43 000 members there who can all help you get set up and get going.

That's all of our visuals though and while visuals are pretty important actually at the end of the day it's your audio and your sound, that is the most important when it comes to getting a stream crisp and clean so let's cover how to get your audio mixer all set up and good to go.

Now if we select our game scene or anything that has any animated files or media sources in them well then streamlabs is going to assume there is audio with that as well, if we look on the right or to our mixer they're going to be included in our source list now we only really want to focus on two of these sources our mic source and our desktop audio source, i want you to click the cog wheel in the top right of your mixer, this will open up your advanced settings and first thing we have to do is hide anything that isn't one of those sources as i mentioned you'll do this by clicking the hide in mixer box, let's click on the settings cogwheel in the bottom left of streamlabs obs and if we look over here on th  side you'll see audio i want you to click on this  audio section and i want you to click on your mic aux and select your microphone input whatever that might be called.

Now they're all named differently but it should say your brand name for example mine is my broadcast stream mix from my go xlr, be careful not to leave this as a webcam or something  else that could be picking up audio or else it's going to start sounding terrible, make sure it is the correct microphone by usually clicking or tapping on the end of your microphone without a noise gate on it, you'll probably also want to make sure that your desktop audio device is set up and set to default.

Now if we go back to our mixer and if we talk into the mic it is being picked up by these bars now your bars with a microphone should be hitting into your yellow, if they start hitting red I recommend lowering them down just slightly because once they're in red there's not much room  for if you start yelling without it cutting off the audio and distorting it to sound terrible, now any audio that plays through your computer will actually be picked up by your desktop audio and that is what we can see here so we're playing music that is being picked up and you can level the audio here to mute our microphone or desktop audio, we click this little button next to the mixer and to lower the volume you can click and drag this.

The final step here is that you'll want to click the cog wheel in the top right of the audio sources again open the advanced settings and on the right you'll see audio monitoring, now this will really help you when it comes to listening back to your own audio if it says  monitor off it means you can't hear this source through your headphones but your viewers can monitor only means you can only hear it and then monitor and output means that you are transmitting as well as listening back to it in your headphones, remember though if you monitor only your mic to listen back to but your desktop audio is set to monitor off then you'll transmit that audio from your mic because you can hear it and that is being picked up by your desktop audio.

If you want to full deep dive into audio and getting everything set up i have a video it is again linked in that playlist called how to make any microphone sound better, i cover leveling as well as a deep dive into filters that you will need to have on your microphone but for now the most important thing you can do is give yourself a pat on the back because congratulations! the basic streamlabs obs  setup is done and you are able to start streaming like a pro or kind of like a medium level pro, i really recommend checking out that playlist and please comment down below, if you managed to watch all the way to the end of this video i hope it helped you guys and i'll see you next time!