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10 Things You Should Know About OBS

Mystery Pinball Theater 3000·video·20m 12s·analyzed·May 2, 2020
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.019

TL;DR

OBS tutorial for pinball streamers covering interface tips, scenes, profiles, output settings, and lighting.

Summary

Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 presents a technical tutorial on 10 OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) features and best practices for pinball streamers, covering interface shortcuts, scene management, output configuration, audio levels, and lighting. The content is a how-to guide focused on improving stream quality and production value for the pinball streaming community.

Key Claims

  • NVENC encoder uses GPU instead of CPU, reducing CPU load and improving stream quality compared to X.264

    high confidence · Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 discussing OBS output settings for stream encoding

  • Pinball streamers should target 3000-6000 kbps bitrate for Twitch, with optimal bitrate set to approximately half of actual upload speed

    high confidence · Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 on bitrate configuration for Twitch streaming

  • Base canvas resolution should match output resolution to avoid unnecessary CPU/GPU scaling overhead

    high confidence · Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 on OBS video settings optimization

  • Microphone audio levels should peak around -15dB, avoiding red zones but allowing occasional yellow zone peaks

    high confidence · Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 on audio configuration best practices

  • Pin Stadium lights should be set to continuous mode (Extremes) rather than flashing, with external supplemental lighting recommended for talent visibility

    high confidence · Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 emphasizing lighting importance for pinball stream quality

  • Studio mode is used for larger productions requiring preview/program separation, while most pinball streamers operate in preview-only mode

    high confidence · Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 explaining OBS program vs preview modes

  • OBS has no undo function, making it critical to lock sources when not actively moving them

    high confidence · Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 on source management and accident prevention

Notable Quotes

  • “This kind of blew some people's minds...if I hold down the Alt key and I grab a handle...I can crop the image and this is such an easy shortcut and it works with anything”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 1:52 — Highlighting a fundamental OBS interface shortcut that improves workflow efficiency

  • “If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, you want to make sure that your encoder is set to NVENC...that will put all of the compositing on the graphics card, which will lighten the load for your CPU”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 12:55 — Technical optimization advice for hardware-accelerated encoding

  • “OBS has no undo. So you have to manually find where it was before. It's frustrating.”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 7:52 — Explains the critical importance of locking sources to prevent workflow disruption

  • “For pinball streamers, if you can handle 1920 by 1080 at 60 frames per second, go for it”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 14:57 — Baseline recommendation for pinball streaming resolution and frame rate

  • “Lighting is key. People, you're using cameras. Cameras do nothing without light.”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 18:32 — Emphasizes lighting as the most critical element of stream production quality

  • “If you look at Don't Panic Flip, you'll see a stream that is a hundred percent perfect. He's well lit.”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 19:04 — Cites a specific streamer as exemplar of proper lighting implementation

Entities

Mystery Pinball Theater 3000personSecond String Silver BallorganizationDon't Panic FlippersonPapa TVpersonOBS (Open Broadcaster Software)productTwitchorganizationCity The ChampeventPin Stadium ExtremesproductFlip Georgeperson

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Mystery Pinball Theater 3000 producing technical educational content for pinball streaming community, including tutorial videos and associated podcast

    high · Explicit mention of Second String Silver Ball podcast focused on pinball streaming education and multiple references to improving streamer setup quality

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball streaming infrastructure and best practices guidance being actively shared by content creators to improve overall community stream quality

    high · Comprehensive tutorial addressing common streamer mistakes and optimization techniques, with references to exemplar streamers (Don't Panic Flip) demonstrating best practices

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.061

0:00
OBS is a broadcast switcher. It's a way to switch between different media sources, different images, different cameras, all that stuff. There's a lot to learn in OBS. It's a huge program. There are a few things that you should know, and I have 10 things that streamers, I feel, need to know about OBS. We're going to start right now. Not waste any time. Number one, use the Alt key to crop. This kind of blew some people's minds. So here we are. I have like my picture here. That handsome devil. And, you know, you can grab these you can grab these handles and size everything. But often you don't need the whole image, as you can see, my image actually ends where my shoulders are. Right. So I don't need the whole image. So I hold down the alt key and I grab a handle this. Now, this might happen. OK, so I'm cropping. I'm cropping just from this this part here. If I don't hold down the Alt key and I'm sizing, I'm sizing. But if I hold down the Alt key and I'll show you another way, check this out. If I right click on this and go to transform and this is the Mac version, it's the same in the PC version. And I say edit transform. OK, not a lot of people even know this is here. Transform is here. A lot of people know edit transform is here. And what that'll do is bring up this and this this sets up like everything that's going to happen with the transform, the position, allowing the bounding box. Usually the bounding box will be set to scale to inner bounds. OK, and that's what this is doing right now. It's scaling to the inner bounds of that transform. What I want to do is it makes it easier. Sometimes I'll just switch it to no bounds. Right. I switch that to no bounds. OK. And I hit close. now when I hold the Alt key I can crop those how it shows up green I can crop the image and this kind of blue some people's minds this is such an easy shortcut and it works it works with anything even this this text box up here hello world I can hold down the Alt key and crop the hello world alright so try that out using the Alt key to crop use number two use groups okay so there will become a time where your sources get so filled that it scrolls down the screen. Well you know you can actually group together similar things. So if I have these two images here actually if I add another text element so I go text and say okay I would normally name it always name your sources don't just don't just click OK. Manu Smith I'm gonna put my name there and say okay so I have hello world have met a Smith and I have me now I can take the I can highlight those two with the shift key all the text elements right click and say group selected items then it says what's the name and I can say text elements e le m e and T s phone so now I'm not cluttering my interface knows all my text elements are within that group and what's really nice about this is you can lock the group if I lock the group okay I can't move them but also if the group is locked and the elements inside are unlocked I still can't move them the entire group is locked so I'm locking the group level if I unlock the group then I can grab somebody so that's kind of nice also real quick this is like 2.a you can multi-select all right if you have if you have a bunch of elements you want to select and they're the only things that are unlocked if I draw a bounding box over them now I'm multi-selecting and I can also multi-scale and I can multi-alt key crop. All right so there's some things that will help you but group your elements. Another thing is you can use scenes within scenes which is terrific. So what I mean by that is like okay so we have I'll switch over to scene two which is my opening animation and on top of that I threw in this image of a pinball machine, Strangely Pinball. Now imagine that, you know, let's take this source here and I'm going to use my alt key and I'm going to crop in a little bit, crop in there, whatever. Imagine that I'm creating like this scene that has all the elements that I want and I want that to sit behind me. I want this guy here and I want a text element maybe that says, I know I'm moving fast, but I'm just trying to show you. Breaking news. Breaking news. Great. So I want this to act as kind of a background for another scene. Okay so this scene is now defined as a container Now if I create a new scene I going to go plus create a new scene I have a blank scene and I can add my image right Add existing I don remember which one it was i think it was that yes okay there my image i can go add a scene now and say scene three add existing uh scene two i mean okay there we go now i've added that entire scene that always defaults to being on top and Boy this well that's gonna be loud no matter what it's gonna default on being to being on top

  • “The higher you set it [CPU preset], the less CPU it uses, but it could tank your performance. So be careful with setting CPU preset.”

    Mystery Pinball Theater 3000@ 14:44 — Cautions against over-optimization that sacrifices quality

    • 5:32
    but notice how if I drag it to the bottom now my image is here and I'm contained kind of I'm on top of it, but I'm
    5:40
    I'm contained Inside the scene our arms sing over the scene. Basically if you use scenes as groups of objects Now I'm able to grab this entire scene and size it. See? And once again, I can size it, I can Alt key, I can crop it. Okay? So I've done some pretty complex scenes by creating scenes and then using scenes within scenes. Alright, so there you go. Let's keep going. Number, I don't remember which number, number four? Create profiles. Okay, I'm going to go back to my initial scene. A lot of people ask me what's the difference between a profile and a scene collection? Well, a profile stores everything that is in settings. So if you come in here and you change your stream type to say Facebook and then you change your output types and your encoders and stuff and your bit rate for Facebook and your microphone selections, everything in here will be saved under that profile. Okay, so that when you go choosing different profiles, you say new profile and you start to it'll always save under the profile that you're currently in. So that's where profiles get saved. The settings get saved in profiles. Scene collections is exactly that. You can have I have a few scene selections right here. I don't have many because it's my Mac and I don't usually use the Mac. But here's my MPT3K scene collection right here. Okay, so this is what I use whenever I'm ready to stream pinball. I choose the scene collection But if I want to do this tutorial again I'm gonna choose that scene collection. So that's the difference between profile and Scene collections. Okay. Here's another one when you're working with lots of sources in a scene Lock everything that you don't want to move Basically what I mean by that is when you when you start to use we'll start to populate your scenes with sources and you have a lot of sources and you want to move something. And I accidentally grab, you know, one thing over the other. Like say I want this, but I accidentally grab the background. Oh no, there's no undo in OBS. So you have to manually find where it was before. And it's frustrating. Cause if I miss me, I'm grabbing, I'm grabbing the background unless I specifically grab me. Now I can't even grab me. One thing that you can do is you can highlight the element in the sources first and then go for the move. But what's even better is just lock everything. Lock everything once it's set. When you want to move that element, say I want to move me, I unlock it and then I move it. That way I don't miss it. If I miss it, I'm just doing this. But if I grab it, so lock all the things you're not using.
    8:32
    It's annoying when you don't have an undo and you've moved something that you made pixel perfect. Program and preview, what do they mean? So this is important in OBS when you open OBS you're basically in preview mode. A lot of people do this and never even know that the program mode exists. This is preview mode. We usually just broadcast on preview mode. What that means in the broadcast world is there's the preview and there's the program. The program goes out to your audience. That's what you're broadcasting to your audience. The preview is for the editor or the switcher to see what's to prepare things for what's coming next. OK, here's why it's important. If you never, ever click studio mode, studio mode is when you're actually doing kind of a big production or a bigger production that requires a little more than just one screen. As pinball streamers, we set up one screen and then we just switch. We switch scenes between that one screen and we never deal with studio mode. But when you go into the bigger things and like even even I'm sure like Papa TV and stuff like that They'll do studio mode Which I'm not gonna get into it because it's a whole different video But in short you now have you see it says program up here and it says preview here Program is what's currently being sent to your audience
    9:54
    Okay, and preview is what you are preparing Here's an example. If I had a separate screen and we do this at City Champ if you go watch I have a separate screen we have one big screen that broadcasting not only streaming out but broadcasting in the hall so people can watch the current games that are happening If I right click on this and I say full screen, the full screen of this program is going to go to this monitor. OK, that's how I get this program screen over to the screen in the house. OK, so not only is this program monitor going out to my streamers or my stream viewers, but this right click, this is going to go to this monitor. That's how I broadcast like the nice big play field to people. Preview, on the other hand. Now, watch this. I have preview over here. I can switch scenes and it doesn't affect the program scene. So I can switch scenes again and it doesn't affect the program scene until I do a transition. OK, and that's why the transition show up. I'll say this transition is a cut and I just did a cut. OK, cut. I just see the cut. Or if I choose the the pull down. Right. I can say now this transition is going to be a fade. OK, now whatever is going to program goes to your viewers. That means I can switch around here and see what I'm going to prepare next. I can even go to sources. OK, in the scene, double click and change things up and it doesn't affect what's going out to my streamers. Like I said, I'm going to turn this off. Most streamers, not just Pinball, but most streamers only exist in the preview mode.
    11:31
    And here's one more thing about this mode. Now you can understand if you want to see a full screen view of your OBS setup. If I right click, now it says full screen projector preview.
    11:43
    That's why it says preview there. Full screen projector preview. Well, what screen do I want to preview? I hit this. Boom it goes full screen You see that remember in Studio mode if I right-click it says full full screen full screen projector program Okay over here. I could say full screen projector preview Okay, and so that's how you can get some more color. We're not going to studio mode right now, but I want you to be aware that
    12:14
    Most people are using it in preview mode only there is a whole different world to OBS All right. Number eight, because I know we at number eight. Make sure the output settings are appropriate for the place you're streaming to. OK, so, for example, let's take a look at the settings and I'm going to give you an example for Twitch because that's the one I know the best. We come to settings and we go to output. Now, if you have this is there's a lot involved in this thing, but I'm going to give you the bare minimum. If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, you want to make sure that this encoder, this is a Mac, so it's not going to show up, but that your encoder is set to NVENC. It should say either NVENC or NVENC new. Set it to that because that will put most of the compositing that or all of the compositing that OBS has to do on the graphics card, which will lighten the load for your CPU. It will also create a better looking stream. X.264 is a pretty good stream, but it's heavily reliant on the CPU. NVENC is an amazing stream that's not reliant on the CPU at all. So you see your CPU uses drop to almost nothing.
    13:22
    And if you have X.264, try that. If you have AMD, which is another place, there's another graphics card, try that. It's not the greatest, but at least it'll take the load off your CPU. For Twitch, for example, so we're going to set our rate control to CBR, which is constant bit rate, and you want to, for pinball streamers, you want to be between 3000 kbps and 6000 kbps. If your internet upload speed can handle 6000 kbps, do it. If it can't, go to three. Here's how you can tell. Do a speed test. Go to speedtest.net and check your internet speed. If your upload speed is, say, 10 megabits per second, I would be worried about using six because the setting you set here should be about half your actual upload speed. OK, so if you're at 10 like me, I usually set it around four so I can have like a megabit, one kilobit of headroom. If you're at 20, 30, 40, feel free to set that to six. The higher the bit rate, the better your stream is going to be. Not the faster your frames are going to be, but the better the quality of your stream is going to be. For keyframe interval, we're going to use two. And the CPU preset, play around with it, but very fast seems to be decent for most people. The higher you set it, the less CPU it uses, but it could tank your performance. So be careful with setting CPU preset. And the other other thing is on the
    14:55
    if I go to video for pinball streamers if you can handle 1920 by 1080 at 60 frames per second Go for it now if you are not if your elements and everything are not set for 1080 for 1920 by 1080 if your camp this is your base canvas is what your what this screen is going to look like this is now this base canvas is set to 1920 by 1080 which means HD which means this canvas here is set to 1920 by 1080 okay your output resolution should match that some people think that if you set your base canvas to HD and you change your output resolution to like 1280 by 720, that that's a good thing. It might be a good thing in the world of non-streaming, but in the world of OBS where your CPU has to do now that scaling on every single frame, it's not worth it. Just make your base canvas and your output the same so that OBS and your CPU and your GPU don't have to do extra work to downscale the whole thing. And adversely, don't upscale so that's kind of crazy right so we're gonna keep on that so this is really super basic for the output settings maybe at some time I'll do a more in-depth on more in-depth video about output settings nine is audio tips one of the things I want to tell you about audio here is that when you are streaming your microphone should be reaching the notice where my microphone is reaching right now it's reached it's mostly in the green but sometimes it flicks up into the yellow most a lot of people say don't let it touch the yellow actually but um sometimes if you if it doesn't touch the yellow it's not quite enough so i like it to sit somewhere like my peaks are peaking around you know negative 15 db which i think it's fine you really have to listen to your stream afterwards and notice some condenser mics will be really loud some dynamic mics will be really quiet and vice versa so you just have to test the other thing is if you're using a microphone go to advanced audio properties and then mono that microphone set it to mono because microphones are not stereo they're mono so that it'll make sure it comes out both ears for your viewers or your listeners and make sure the output level is high enough so that you don't have to actually adjust the db here in the volume level here you can pump it up a little bit from here but this will also raise the noise floor so not only you bring up your system you bring up your signal you bring up your noise also try and get a system that has a microphone that has enough power that it doesn't drain all the usb power out of your your laptop or your desktop or whatever all right that's a basic rule of thumb on the audio though make sure that your audio is not hitting the red it could it It could hang out around the yellow. That's probably fine. Green is good for background noise and stuff, background music and stuff like that. Finally, the tenth OBS tip has nothing to do with OBS. It's lighting. I see a lot of pinball streamers, they have a play field. They might have pin stadiums built in. Now, pin stadiums in and of themselves are great, but sometimes they have a mode where they actually flash on and off or they turn off or they're not they're not set to you know make this make the table really bright that's what extremes are for pin stadium extremes will just stay on and they're lighting the table and if you have them set up the right way they will also light you as the talent lighting is key people you're using cameras cameras do nothing without light so if you ask me again why does my why does my my play field look bad or my my camera look bad I'm gonna ask you what lighting are you use using welcome to the world of video cameras and video production lighting is everything I know don't panic flip George over don't find flip not only has extremes on his tables But he's hitting the table with like external light also and he is well lit if you look at don't panic flip You'll see a stream that is a hundred percent. Perfect. He's well lit. I will see a lot of streamers Their playfield will be spotless. It'll be 60 frames per second and I'm watching a dark shadow of a person play Which, you know, if you just want to show footage of your game, that's fine. But if you want to show reactions to people, want to people want to feel like what you feel when the ball's rained or whatever. Make sure you're lit also. So when I do my stream, I actually have two lights on me on my face. In addition to lighting of the table and and whatever else I want. Lighting is key. Light, light, light. Okay, that's it. I think I've gone long enough. Ten things I think pinball streamers should know, at least new ones should know about streaming in OBS. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to check out Second String Silver Ball, which is our podcast, which we have a ton more information about pinball streaming. And that's it. I'll see you guys later. MPT3K out. Peace.