Second Life: OBS Streaming Tutorial

Strawberry Singh has posted a nice tutorial on YouTube and her blog. It runs 26 minutes. The video is simple, complete, and well done. I’ll link you to her current challenge where there is a link to the video. The challenge is a bit of fun and incentive to learn how to stream Second Life™.

Strawberry’s Video Challenge

I did find that my OBS (18.0.1 Windows 64-bit) is a bit different than Strawberry’s (18.0.1 64-bit Mac?).

If you haven’t seen the term ‘vlogging’ it is blogging using video. Medhue Simoni is doing an almost daily (8 or ( AM SLT) video tutorial on Second Life modeling and animation. I suppose we could call the tutorials his vlog. See: Medhue channel. The channel has 4,000+ subscribers.

Strawberry’s Vlogging Challenge is here. You can compare her videos and Medhue’s. Strawberry gives away that she has notes and a script for her video in the OBS tutorial as she flips from primary to her secondary screen with the script.

Medhue wings it in his videos, fully extemporaneous. He is speaking from his memory and knowledge. There isn’t a right or wrong with style. What you do is up to you. But, notice the rambles, umm-er’s, and false starts that Medhue makes. Nothing wrong with that, it is typical of extemporaneous speaking. I find it trying to listen to.

Much of the content on YouTube is made using this extemporaneous style. It isn’t my favorite content.

The result between the two is, at least for me, Strawberry is much more pleasant to listen too. I’ll point out that Strawberry has 3 to 5 times more views of her videos and 7,000+ subscribers. It would be intellectually dishonest to say Strawberry’s videos get more views because of JUST her prep work. But, I am certain it helps.

I will also point you to Drax’s videos, World Maker and other series. I can’t say he scripts the videos. I just haven’t heard him say that or seen explicit give-aways like we see in Strawberry’s video. However, I suspect he does and that his prep is more in the line of Hollywood storyboarding where image, words, and views are all planned. I do see the video editing in his videos, transitions and titles. He is recording raw video and then editing it into his 5 minute presentations. I have no doubt he is putting some significant effort into his videos. Some of his videos have been watched over 100,000 times and he has 8,000+ subscribers.

 

I won’t say that preparation is the total key to gaining a large audience. Talent and content are major influences. Also, Drax has been doing this longer and the SL community is aware of him. Strawberry is newer on the video-scene but comes from having a well-known fashion blog. Medhue is the newest in video field vlogging. He has done lots of videos. He is better known by the SL techies and that is a smaller audience.

The many factors contributing to acquiring a returning viewer base make it difficult to say what the most influential factors are. My belief is the more effort, self-education, and thought one puts into creating content then the better it is received.

For those of us playing in Second Life the point of all this learning and effort is to have fun being creative.

TIP

When you install OBS and run it, you will find it places not just the usual icon in the Toolbar, it also places an icon in the Tool Tray (the far-right section of the Tool Bar). It is only the Tool Tray icon that indicates when you are streaming or recording. I want this more useful Tray icon to show on the Toolbar.

Windows 10 Tool Tray

Plus, the Tray icon can be right clicked to get a menu to start and stop recording/streaming.

So, how do we get that icon to show in Windows 10? There is a settings panel that controls that. To get to it use Cortana (Ask me anything…). Type in Taskbar Icons. You should get a single result: Select which icons appear on the taskbar. You can set which app’s icons appear on the Toolbar outside Tray.

Icon Controls

Having this icon visible makes OBS much easier to use.

I find that OBS sometimes kills my viewer’s ability to take snapshots (screen captures from within the viewer). I have fewer problems if I start FS then OBS. But, I haven’t found a consistent fix or work-around.

TIP 2

Strawberry points us to Machinima Friendly Sims for a source of places to shoot video and stills. I’ll add to that Flickr’s Photo Locales in Second Life (SLURL REQUIRED).

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