FLAUNT YOUR SKILLS WITH GAMESHOW
Stream like a pro
YOU’LL NEED THIS
GAMESHOW Download and try it for free from
www.gameshow.net.
STREAMING ACCOUNT Head to www.twitch.tv to sign up as a streamer.
THE STREAMING MARKET on YouTube, Twitch, Hitbox, et al is growing quickly. So quickly, in fact, that if you’re not putting out a professional-looking stream, you may struggle to gain any viewers at all. This is easier said than done. Open Broadcaster Software certainly gives you the flexibility to produce a fully custom stream, but it’s among the most ugly and finicky pieces of software ever created. XSplit provides a beautiful overlay and a similarly beautiful interface, but a subscription involves a not-insignificant outlay. The solution? Streaming’s new kid on the block, Gameshow. It’s only been around for just over a year, but the fact that it was spawned from the labs of streaming expert TeleStream makes it the perfect tool to add a professional shine to your streams. It’s not free, unlike OBS, but there’s a limited-resolution or watermarked trial to use to see if you like it, and the full version involves just a $29, one-time outlay for 12 months of updates.
1 STARTER’S ORDERS Let’s start from the very beginning. Download Gameshow, install it, and run it. Skip past the release notes window, and you’re given your most basic creation options. You could, if you’re playing a popular game, opt for a template related to the likes of CS:GO or Dota2, or choose one of Gameshow’s pre-built generic templates, but don’t. Although we’re in this for an easier time, that’s not going to teach you anything, and it certainly won’t make your stream unique. Instead, select “Blank,” then click “Next.” Now click the radio button for the service you’ll be streaming to, type in the title of the game you’ll be streaming, and, if you have a discrete graphics card, change up the encoder from the basic x264 software encoder to something with a bit more muscle.
>> Users of the free version are stuck with a large animated watermark overlaid over any stream of 30fps 720p at 1,750Kbps or more, so drop the encoder settings down [ Image A], unless that’s something you really want, or you are a paid-up user. Streamers to anything other than YouTube should also pick the most local server here. Hit “Next,” and you’re asked to authorize with your streaming service of choice, which only happens on your initial setup; you won’t be asked again if you create a new template in future. Just like that, you’re in—and doesn’t Gameshow’s dark exterior look intimidating? It does. But it’s a puppy inside.
2 GET THE SHOT Let’s give you a quick primer. Gameshow uses three base components to create a streaming template: shots, layers, and, er, shot layers. Shots hold your delicately composed picture elements—your webcam, game, explanation text, and the like. Because they can be reordered in any manner you choose, these elements are called shot layers. Plain ol’ layers, on the other hand, enable you to slather several fully composed shots on top of one another. If you create, say, a stream overlay shot in the top layer, with your branding smeared all over it, and put a nice background shot in the bottom layer, you can easily flick through several shots on the middle layer without affecting these in the slightest.
>> We’ll start by creating the most basic of shots. So, fire up a game—absolutely any game will work for this— and make sure that it’s running, ideally in a window or on a second monitor, so you can still see Gameshow. You’ll see, in the bottom portion of Gameshow’s main interface, that you have one blank shot at the moment, in the middle layer. This should be highlighted, and it’s the one you’re about to make changes to. In the left-hand column, click the plus button, then click “Screen capture” to tell Gameshow you want to capture something. This is a slight
misnomer, because this option enables you to capture a full screen, a window, or—as you’re now able to do by changing the capture type appropriately—a game. Click “Select Window/Monitor,” deselect “Capture any full screen game,” then select your game’s process in the upper drop-down box. Hit “OK,” and the game’s content, minus any ugly window borders, should appear in the preview window [ Image B]. Hit “OK” once more, and your game now appears frontand-center in your shot.
3 FACE TIME What streamer worth their salt would omit a good old face-cam from proceedings? Presuming you’ve got a webcam hooked up and pointing at your visage, this is a trivial matter: Just add a new element to your shot as before, but this time select “Capture devices,” and then your webcam. Here’s where things get a bit more tricky, though. For one, that camera is now going to be obscuring some of the game. And if you’re anything like us, it’s also going to be capturing the strewn detritus of a particularly disorganized office. Time to make use of Gameshow’s Properties panel to set things right. First, click your game capture layer in the left column, then click the slider icon above. Dragging the scale sliders [ Image C] enables you to resize the game to your liking, and you can click and drag it in the central shot composition window to place it exactly where you want it.
>> Now head back to the shot layers section, and select your webcam. Back in the Properties panel, scroll to the bottom, and expand the Crop menu. You can use these sliders to trim away the abandoned chip bags and dirty plates, and then resize and reposition your webcam as you did before.
4 ALL THE ELEMENTS If you were to start your stream now (by clicking the broadcast icon, at the top-left of the shot composition window), your viewers wouldn’t get a very good show. In fact, they would see what’s currently in the live view on the right-hand side—a boring gray screen. This is down to the way Gameshow handles its output; you can compose shots and make tweaks on the fly, but a shot, or any changes you’ve made to it, aren’t (by default) broadcast until you explicitly make it so by selecting it and hitting the Space bar. This is super-handy for maintaining
a professional appearance, but something you’ll have to remember to do as you stream.
>> Even if your shot had gone live, your viewers still wouldn’t be getting a very good show, as you’re broadcasting with no audio. You can add different audio sources to different shots, but this is a good opportunity to make use of a layer to ensure your system audio is audible, no matter what shot is live. In the uppermost layer, click the plus button to create a new shot, and select “Capture Devices > System Audio Capture.” Bear in mind this grabs any sound your machine makes, not just that of the game, which is perfect if you want to involve chums on Discord or Skype, but less neat if Windows 10 is going to shout at you with repeated noisy pop-ups, so make sure your Windows notifications are all switched off. You also have no microphone audio at this point. We’ll leave adding this particular shot layer as a little exercise for you—if you’re going to create, for example, a BRB shot, you may wish to add it to individual shots on the central layer, rather than having it active at all times.
5 SHOT FOR SHOT Gameshow is adept at transitioning between different shots, so let’s try that now. Right-click your shot in the lower portion of the interface, and select “Duplicate shot.” Change the copy by using the shot layer properties controls to make your webcam bigger and your game smaller, then hit the red dot button at the top-right of the Gameshow window to see only the live view. Switch to your new shot by highlighting it and hitting Space, and you’ll see the components smoothly resize themselves; switch back using the same process, and you’ll see the opposite happen.
>> You can create more complex transitions between shots using the Switch menu on the main menu bar. Select your choice of an immediate cut, a smooth transition (which is what we’ve been using so far), or one of a number of fancy dissolves and wipes [ Image D]. Note the “Go” option at the top of the menu—using Space still pulls off the old smooth transition; if you want to use your new one, either select “Go,” or hit Ctrl-G. Alternatively, and this basically does away with the “compose your shot before it goes live” deal, you can switch on AutoLive in the Switch menu, which changes shots, using your fancy transition, as soon as you click on them. If you’re going to use this, make sure you’ve planned out your stream, and composed all the shots you need, before going live.
6 STREAM AWAY Now would be a good time to test your stream, and the only way you can really do this is by going live. There’s a broadcast icon at the top-left of the preview window; click this, and you start sending your stream to the Internet. Keep an eye on the stats that now pop up. They let you know the bitrate you’re broadcasting at, the amount of CPU power your stream is draining, the number of viewers your stream currently has, and, importantly, the number of frames you’ve dropped. If you start dropping a lot of
frames, look for potential issues with your Internet connection, or drop your bitrate (“Output > Output Settings”) to the point where your broadband connection can handle it properly.
>> While you’re streaming, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your Twitch (or YouTube, or Hitbox) dashboard [ Image E], reachable via the Output menu, to ensure you’ve titled your video correctly, and to keep an eye on chat. Professionalism in presentation is one thing, but you need a keen eye on your audience if you want to keep them coming back. As we’re only testing, though, it may be a good idea to cast an eye over your stream to make sure everything’s coming out as you expect. Listen to the audio—if there are problems, follow the steps in the “Sound Advice” box, pg. 63, to fix them. Watch the video, and check your transitions—this is where you’ll understand exactly what you’re doing wrong.
7 ADDING FLOURISHES With a test stream out of the way, now’s the time to start delving further into Gameshow’s features to see what else you can do. Visual shot layers—game capture, webcams, any videos you might have added in—can be manipulated beyond scaling and cropping. Try tweaking the X and Y rotation to put these elements on a wacky angle, for instance. This isn’t recommended for the main focus of your footage, but might be a nice effect for your webcam. You can also add mattes, trimming or blurring the edges of your shot layers, and while the built-in options aren’t particularly good—unless you want your game surrounded by a cartoon heart [ Image F] or a silly spiky edge—you can import your own images as custom mattes.
>> The more pallid among us may wish to tweak the color options, too. Boosting the saturation and contrast can make a big difference to the output of poor webcams, and there’s a handy reset button if you happen to leave yourself looking like a diseased alien. If you’re lucky enough to be sitting in front of a brightly colored background, you can also use Gameshow’s built-in chroma key options to mask it out altogether. Click the head-and-shoulders icon to bring them up, switch chroma key on with the appropriate checkbox, check the box that lets you pick the key color, and click in your preview to isolate your background. There may be a fair amount of slider tweaking required before you get brilliant results, and bear in mind that this is chroma key, rather than color key, which means it can only remove bright colors, not whites or blacks.
8 FINISHING TOUCHES You’re pretty much familiar with the basics of Gameshow now, so let’s go about tidying up your stream layout with a final spit and polish. Add in a background on the bottommost layer (to go behind your game and webcam) by creating a 16:9 image in your favorite arty program, and adding a new “media file” shot layer. Now create yourself a BRB shot in the uppermost layer, for when you’re away from your PC, or getting your stream set up. Create a new shot (ideally, this time, without your system audio or microphone input attached), add an image by adding a media file as before, and—hey, why not?—add some royalty-free music, too. It’s added in the same way as you would add an image, and is set to automatically loop while the shot is active. Happy streaming!