★ Art Stream Announcements Thread!

[brightobject]

Approved by Bummer

I N T R O D U C I N G : T H E

Smeargle's Studio Art Stream Announcements Thread


Planning on streaming, or streaming NOW, but don't know where or who to tell about it?

Wondering if any of your favorite Smogon artists are streaming?

Well, never fear-- this thread is for just that!

• Hosting an ongoing stream? Link it here for all to see!
• Want to build up hype for an upcoming stream? No problemo--just post the info right here!
• And if you really need it, feel free to use this thread to ask for general streaming tips, gauge interest, or just talk about recent streams.

 

[brightobject]

THIS IS NOT FOR VIDEO-GAME STREAMS, by the way.

It's for art streams only! :)

 

[Bummer]

And if you really need it, feel free to use this thread to ask for general streaming tips

Don't mind if I do.

Basically, what's some recommended software you need? Same question for websites. I can personally see myself streaming a while whenever I plan to sit down and draw something more intricate, but a beginner's guide on how to set things up would greatly help me with this aspiration, and I assume other's as well.

 

[brightobject]

Don't mind if I do.

Basically, what's some recommended software you need? Same question for websites. I can personally see myself streaming a while whenever I plan to sit down and draw something more intricate, but a beginner's guide on how to set things up would greatly help me with this aspiration, and I assume other's as well.

uhh from what I know, there's several ways you can go about streaming:

free streaming software that links to its own site, such as livestream procaster or livestream studio, et cetera. Pretty simple to adjust stream windows, et cetera with these and they usually work pretty well. The problem is a lot of these have weird catches involving paid plans, such as forcing any viewers to also have accounts onsite unless you have a premium plan, etc.

You can also use OBS (Open Source Broadcasting Software) to stream to any number of personal streaming sites (twitch, yt, etc). It's free, if a little more complicated to learn and use, but it's pretty user-friendly and I haven't had any trouble learning the ropes.

Tagging TrainerSplash who knows more about it than me

 

[strawberry]

It'd be wise to include some recommended softwares and tips/advices about streaming in the op for those who want to, but aren't quite sure how to stream yet, possibly in the form of a FAQ.

 

[TrainerSplash]

Woah, wasn't expecting to be tagged, I didn't know this thread existed either.

uhh from what I know, there's several ways you can go about streaming:

free streaming software that links to its own site, such as livestream procaster or livestream studio, et cetera. Pretty simple to adjust stream windows, et cetera with these and they usually work pretty well. The problem is a lot of these have weird catches involving paid plans, such as forcing any viewers to also have accounts onsite unless you have a premium plan, etc.

You can also use OBS (Open Source Broadcasting Software) to stream to any number of personal streaming sites (twitch, yt, etc). It's free, if a little more complicated to learn and use, but it's pretty user-friendly and I haven't had any trouble learning the ropes.

Tagging TrainerSplash who knows more about it than me

I have yet to actually see a "premium stream" most of them I see that you do not need an account to talk in the chats but you do need one in order to stream, the only one I know of that you need an account to talk is Twitch, you don't need to pay for Twitch either. Livestream has premium, but it's just like Deviant Art where you don't really need it and can get by without one. I'm not sure how Picarto works, Picarto is an art only stream website, it also has premium if I remember correctly, again I have been able to talk on those. On livestream's sites and chats you also set up moderators a moderator only chat or no chat at all, I think Twitch has similar, and it gets emotes (picarto does too but only smilies). If anyone is actually planning to use any of the streams I mentioned above you best bet is to use Twitch the most, Twitch has several good features on it, you can add emotes if you're partnered with them OR download something called FrankerFaceZ which allows you to use emotes for that specific channel, Twitch also has input commands such /w [username] which allows you to send a message to any user currently online through the use of any chat even if they are not there, people also have bots there, the one I have seen the most is nightbot, allows you to add song request and other commands.

Don't mind if I do.

Basically, what's some recommended software you need? Same question for websites. I can personally see myself streaming a while whenever I plan to sit down and draw something more intricate, but a beginner's guide on how to set things up would greatly help me with this aspiration, and I assume other's as well.

As for actual software: Livestream Procaster only AND I REPEAT, ONLY works for Livestream! It doesn't have very much useful commands, but it allows you to hook up any audio sources you want viewers to hear, a camera, both your screen and camera, or just your screen, you can even hide or highlight your mouse. If you have it set up in the settings you can have all your streams on it's website or saved to your computer. I don't really reccomend this software and I only use as OBS likes to be stupid and not work on my 10 year old computer that runs Vista. As for Open Broadcaster System or OBS for short has several uses, you can record videos without having to livestream or stream to multiple areas such as Twitch, Livestream, Youtube, Picarto, etc. Now I only messed around with it a few times but I have seen my brother stream on Twitch with it and recently got a capture card for his games (but this is an art related thread so I won't go into detail on that), it allows you to screen cap several windows, open several pictures, a layout, etc. With it's functions this is a quite handy tool, and it works for anything iirc, so that means you can use it on livestream without having to download and use procaster's limited functions, again OBS has muliple input sources I think. The last software I have seen is XSplit, I have no clue how this works, and you can get a premium version, but when I downloaded and try to use it, but from what I got from it is that it's dumbed down version of OBS, but again I couldn't get it to work cause of Vista and take everything I say about Xsplit with a grain of salt.

Wow this is a mega post and I have no clue why I know this much lol. I hope this helped to anyone planning to stream in the future or just simple questions.

 

[TrainerSplash]

Stream is Over Going to be streaming up to about 3 hours tonight. Drawing dA IDs and some comic stuff. May or may not do request after words. http://www.livestream.com/trainersplash
Also bumping this a bit cause I think it's also worth mentioning that certain groups or small company usually have a stream for any one in it to use, I wonder if it would be a smart idea to do that so we could have an "official Smeargle's Studio Stream", similar people who I know do this is Sonic Paradox, Game Grumps, and The Creatures, they all usually have their own separate streams themselves but like I said anyone of them usually tend to work on their group ones. It'd be wise if mutliple users streaming at a time to get in a skype call or something too and do a "multi-stream"

 

[MiniArchitect]

Forgive the thread bump; I'm going to be trying my hand at streaming!

http://www.twitch.tv/miniarchitect

The stream will take place Saturday, December 5, around 9:00 PM EST.

I'll be showing you how I go through the process of lining and coloring a hand-drawn sketch in Adobe Illustrator. I know I've gotten questions in the past about how my artwork is made, but I've never done a full on tutorial, and despite my best efforts to explain it, understanding the production that goes into vector art can be difficult without seeing it for yourself. I'm hoping this will be a chance to better teach people about my artwork, and also a fun opportunity to hang out. And all this accompanied by some chill background music.

These are the pieces I'll be working on. Don't know if we'll get through all of them, but content will still be substantial!

Hide

Hope to see some of you there!

 

[imas]

Never used twitch before so I'll ask here, will I be able to look at the stream at a later date? I can't make it on the 5th but I really love your work and it'd be an amazing learning experience to see the stream.

 

[MiniArchitect]

Never used twitch before so I'll ask here, will I be able to look at the stream at a later date? I can't make it on the 5th but I really love your work and it'd be an amazing learning experience to see the stream.

From what I understand, the VOD (Video On Demand) of the stream will be available on my channel for 14 days after the broadcast, after which Twitch will automatically delete it.

 

[imas]

Oh that's great for me, I should be able to catch it by then. Thank you!

 

[MiniArchitect]

Well, I ended up vastly overestimating the amount of work I would be able to get done in one setting, and didn't end up showing as much as I had hoped to... but the stream still worked! And nothing crashed on my clunky, fragile laptop. That's enough to qualify as a success for me.

I'll leave some of the tips here that I learned in preparation for the stream, and hopefully save someone else some time.

I discovered that if you're streaming with Mac OS and you want to include audio of any sort outside of your microphone, such as a playlist of background music, you're going to have to jump through some hoops. I'm not sure about the details behind it, but from what I understand, Macs don't have a means of natively capturing their own audio output and redirecting it to other programs. But, if you're using OBS, you need to be feeding audio into OBS in order to broadcast it.

To fix this, you need to download a program called Soundflower, which will do exactly the above, and then manually fiddle with your audio settings to get it to work. This video tutorial will detail the whole process:

I also made some simple overlays for when I needed to step away for the stream, or to address technical errors and settings:

Hide

To make overlays for yourself, you can make a new document in Photoshop (or whatever drawing program you're using) with the same size as your screen resolution and a transparent background, place whatever image and/or text you want to use for your overlay in the lower, upper, whatever part of the screen you want, and save it as a PNG file. You can then import that as a source image over your display capture in OBS to place it over your stream display, without covering the display entirely. The ones above were made by using the gradient tool with a solid gray on one stop and complete transparency on the other stop.