- Stinger transitions, they're one of those
things that aren't immediately obvious to the viewer, but they add a huge amount of
production value to your stream. That one to two second transition, between scenes in
your stream, looks so much more seamless, so much more professional than things like
a cut, a fade or a luma wipe. If designed correctly, these Stinger transitions can integrate
things like your branding, the color scheme that you use, your logo and it really helps
enforce that brandin
g on your viewer, without really being too distracting, 'cause it's
so quick. A couple of months ago, I uploaded a video talking, about the basic transitions,
that are included inside of streaming software, like OBS and how you can use them. And the
overwhelming response from you guys, the Gaming Careers community, was that you wanted to
learn how to create your own Stinger transitions, in some video editing software. So, that's
what we're doing today. In this video, we're gonna be walking throu
gh step-by-step, how
you can create your own stinger transition, that integrates a few different colors, from
your brand color scheme, as well as your logo and will work with all kinds of streaming
software. So, it doesn't matter if you're using OBS Studio, Streamlabs OBS, or StreamElements
OBS.Live, it'll work with any of those. With this knowledge, you'll be able to customize
the Stinger transition, to use different colors, different shapes, different directions, speeds,
add your own logo, cha
nge text, all those kind of things, to really make the Stinger
transition unique to your own stream. All of that coming up after a quick message, from
today's video sponsor. The new Stream Deck XL from Elgato, offers a massive 32 customizable
keys, that you can use to control all the different aspects of your live stream. Get
studio level control, with more access to time saving integrations, directly at your
fingertips. To find out more, visit the link at the top of the description. Now, a word
of warning. This tutorial is going to be a little bit more complicated than usual. But
I'm going to do my best to walk you through step by step, so you fully understand what's
going on. Since the idea behind a stinger transition is that it is a video that plays
between two different scenes, so that it seamlessly switches between the scenes with the graphic
coming over the top. The idea is that, the video we are working with, needs to have some
layers of transparency. Because that's actually how
you see the scenes behind it. To be able
to work with tranparency in video we need to be using some slightly more complicated
video editing software and the main choice that people use is After Effects. After Effects
is part of Adobe's Creative Cloud which is a a subscription package that includes things
like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Audition as well as obviously After Effects. Now just
because I've said subscription model, don't close down the video just yet because there
is a free 7 day trial
that you can get that allows you to use After Effects completely
unlimited so you can create your own stinger transitions with me in this video, as long
as you do that within the first seven days of installing the trial, then you'll be able
to render it out and use it in OBS and all those kinds of things. So if you do want to
create a stinger transition with me today, use the link in the description to download
After Effects with a free 7-day trial. Okay, so once you have finished downloading a
nd
installing After Effects, I know that it's a big file, so it might take you a little
bit. You can open it up, start a new project and you should arrive at a screen like this,
which I know looks very, very different to any traditional video software, that you might
have used. But, I'll do my best to walk you through, step-by-step, exactly what you need
to do. The first thing you need to do, is create a new composition. So, just come to
this New Composition Button. Click that. And then we're go
ing to give this a composition
name. So, I'm just going to call it, Stinger, since that's what we are creating. And then,
down here, we have the Width and Height properties. Now, you wanna match these, to the canvas
resolution of your streaming software. If you don't know what that is, it's fine, just
leave it at 1920 by 1080. But, if you have a canvas resolution of 1440 P or 720 P and
you know that, then you can change that here as well. Leave this at, Square Pixels and
then change your frame r
ate, to the frame rate that you're streaming at. So, if that
is 30 FPS, set that 30, if you're streaming at 60 FPS, set that 60. 'cause you want the
actual video, to be the same frame rate as what you're streaming at. And the final thing
that you want to do, is just change the Duration of the composition, that we're making. These
Stinger transitions, they're best if they're really short, snappy, punchy, not that noticeable
to the viewer. They, obviously, want to be great and increase your produc
tion value.
But you don't want to distract from the actual content that you're creating. So, I'd recommend
setting the duration, to two seconds here. So, I think the default is 10. So, just change
that to two seconds and then click, OK, to create our new composition. So, what we have
up here, is a preview of the video, that we're going to be creating. And this checkerboard
style that we have, all that means is that it's a transparent layer. So, there is nothing
currently on top, which is exactly
what we want. And what we're going to do, is create
some rectangles, or some squares, that are gonna swipe across this transition. Having
a point in the middle, where they're completely covering the screen and then leave again.
So, let's start just by creating our very first rectangle. All we're going to do is
come up to the Rectangle Tool,here and make sure that you've got the Rectangle Tool selected,
'cause it might be already set on Ellipse, or something like that. So, select, Rectangle
and
then just to give myself enough space, I'm going to zoom out once, so you can just
use the scroll wheel, to zoom out. And I'm just gonna create a nice, big rectangle over
my layer here. And the color scheme, that I'm going to be using, is Gaming Careers like
main three colors, which is a red, a white and a gray. But, you can absolutely use whatever
colors you want. So, all you have to do is come up to this Fill Box, click that, enter
in the hex value, or search for the color that you want, howev
er you want to do. The
first color I'm going to be using, is the red. So, I'm just going to input that here.
And then you can see we have a nice, big rectangle, which is red. And, obviously, we're going
to try and animate that, from coming in from the left and out to the right. So, to actually
do that, we want to get off the Rectangle Tool, come back to the Selection Tool, here.
You press, B, on your keyboard, or just come up and click it, here. And what we're going
to be doing, is moving this r
ectangle from the left into the right and then off screen
again to the left. It looks a little bit boring, if the rectangle is just straight like that.
So, I'm going to rotate it slightly, to give it sort of a leading edge look. All we have
to do to do that, is come down to our shape layer here, this is our rectangle, go to,
Transform. And then, you can see here, we have a rotation, just change that to whatever
angle you want, I'm going to use minus 30 degrees. And now you see, if we move this
o
ff screen and on screen, there's sort of a leading edge aspect to it. We just need
to change the shape size slightly, to make sure that we don't cut any corners here. So,
again, I'm gonna zoom out by using my scroll wheel and then just drag on one of these corners
and create a nice, big box, giving yourself some space, either side, to make sure that
we have enough room to work with. And now you see, if we swipe that across and swipe
it across again, it's going to give us the exact design that we
want. So, position that
back in the center, exactly as we want to. And then, what we're going to do is actually
use keyframes to move this and animate it from left to right. So, as I explained earlier,
part of creating a Stinger transition, is that you need to have a point, at which your
screen is completely covered by a shape, or a color or a logo or whatever. It needs to
be completely covered, with no transparency. Because how OBS and other streaming software
deal with it, is, I'll talk it th
rough step-by-step. So, right now, when you start the transition,
this is your current scene, that is happening in the transparency. The animation then starts.
And you need to have this point, where there is full coverage of the screen, with no transparency.
'cause then the streaming software, swap scenes in the background. And then your animation
continues. And behind here, is your second scene, the scene that you're switching to.
So, just bear in mind that if you're creating your own Stinger t
ransition, you need to have
some point within the video, doesn't have to be the middle, but it has to be a point,
where the full screen is taken up by something and it's not showing any transparency. Because
that is when you're actually going to tell your streaming software to switch the scenes
in the background. I just want to get that out of the way. So, let's actually play around
with this animation. So, if we move our timeline across to roughly the middle, let's say the
one second mark, this
is where we're going to want our full screen coverage. So, I'm
gonna just step back a few keyframes here and then add a keyframe for the position.
So, we've already got the Transform Box open. But if you didn't, you can just press, P.
on your keyboard, and you're gonna get the Position keyframe. And all we're going to
do, is click the stopwatch icon. And that is going to add a keyframe, at that time point,
saying, this shape needs to be here at this time. We then drag our time, all the way back
to the beginning, we want to move the box across to the left. So, all we have to do,
is drag the box across the left. And as you start dragging, if you then press, Shift,
or make sure that it doesn't go off of the Y axis, so we don't actually want any movement,
away from the Y axis. And then just position this, off frame. Just so that it's off frame,
completely. And you can see, now, if we play this back, it's really boring animation right
now. But you can see, it's moving between those two key
frames that we've set. So, we're
going to play around with the animation and make this look a lot nicer with some Easy
Ease, in just a second. But let's just get the exit animation as well. So, if we go back
to the middle, and we just step a few keyframes, after the one second mark, and we add another
keyframe there, to say, stay in the middle at that point. And then all the way to the
end, maybe come back just a couple of keyframes and do the same. We drag it across to the
right, press, Shift,
once we've started dragging, to make sure it stays on the Y axis. And then,
make sure that we're animating, so that we are off the screen completely as well. And
then if we play that whole thing back, you can see, again, really boring animation at
the moment. But we've got the very, very basics there. And we're going to start playing around,
making this look a lot smoother, now. Okay, so to animate this, make it look a little
bit smoother, so, it's not just such a static movement of constant vel
ocity, we're going
to use something called, Easy Ease. So, if we take our first two keyframes and highlight
them both, so they both turned blue, and then press, F9, on our keyboard, that's going to
apply some default Easy Ease, to those keyframes. Which basically just means, that it's very
slow around the start and around the end, and it's picks up speed in the middle. So,
you might not be able to notice it, just by looking at the video. But, there is some difference
now. But we can actually go
and play with the values, even more. So, if what you do,
is you keep those two keyframes selected, make sure that they're blue, and then come
up here, to the Graph Editor, click that and you'll probably be on a graph, that looks
like this. We wanna move across to the Speed Graphs. All you do is, right-click, move across
to, Edit Speed Graph. And you should get a window, that looks like this. Which is basically
looking at the keyframes and the actual speed between, so you can see, the speed is ve
ry
low at the start, it's quickest in the middle, here and then it slows down again, at the
end. So, all we want to do, is play around with this graph, to make it just a little
bit more animated. So, what I'm going to do, is I'm going to take this first keyframe and
really slow it down, by dragging this to the right. And you can see, what happens to our
our graph, is we now have really slow as it comes in and then it picks up a lot of pace
in the middle and then slows down again at the end. So,
if we watch this back and compare
it to the out, which is just still the static keyframes, you can see how much better that
looks. It ramps in, picks up pace as it goes. And we're going to do the exact same to the
outro. So, all we do is go out of the Speed Editor and we go back to the second two keyframes,
highlight them both. Hit, F9. Open up the Graph Editor again. And we're gonna do the
exact opposite animation. So, we're gonna take this right keyframe and slow it right
down. So, we get this
exact same graph on the way out. And now if we play it back, you
can see, that speed ramp, it just makes it look so much nicer, in my opinion. Obviously,
you can do whatever you want here. If you wanted to start quick and slow down, or however
you want, it's really worth playing around. But, this looks pretty good for the first
shape. And we're gonna add a couple of new layers now, to make sure that we have three
different colors, coming across our screen. So, the majority of the hard work is a
ctually
done now. All we need to do, is duplicate this red rectangle, make two other colors
and then just change the position of them slightly, so that they lag behind and the
three colors move across, together. So, first thing first, it's always worth renaming your
layers, so you know exactly what they're called. So, if you just right-click on the layer name,
click, Rename. And I'm going to call this, Red, just so that we remember, which layer
is which. And then we're going to duplicate this la
yer, by selecting it and then pressing,
Control-D. You can see we got a second layer there, which is called, Red, too. I'm going
to rename this to my second color, which is going to be gray. Obviously, whichever color
you want to use. And then with it selected, come up to the fill and then input the color,
that you actually want to use. So, I'm going to put my gray in. And if we play this back,
you can see that we've actually, we can't see the red anymore. Because the keyframes
are exactly the s
ame, for these two layers. So, the red is actually directly below this
gray. Once we play around with the keyframes and just move this gray back slightly, we're
going to see both the red and the gray layer. So, let's do that. With the gray layer selected,
press, P, to bring up the position keyframes again. And what we're going to do, is we're
going to select these first two keyframes, move our play head to the second keyframe,
just so that we can make sure that we still have full coverage. And t
hen we're going to
drag our gray, behind our red. So, we're gonna move it to the left, just slightly, so that
it lags behind the red. So, come up to the to the preview, drag the box to the left.
Again, use the Shift Menu, to make sure that you have not left the Y axis, at all. Drag
it behind, however much you want. And then if we watch that back, you can see we have
red followed by gray, straight away. We haven't done the swipe out yet. But you can see, it's
exactly the same velocity. And there'
s the exact same gap, between them, all the way
through. Which is why we've duplicated the layer, rather than just creating a new shape.
So, let's do the same with the outro keyframes. Drag, to select them both, so the same, they're
both blue. Make sure you come across to the second keyframe. And we just want to drag
this, ever slightly, to the right, because it wants to leave first. So, click and drag.
Use Shift, to make sure we don't leave. Create the same sort of gap. And then let go. Just
ma
ke sure that we're still covered, completely, in the middle, which we are. And if we watch
that back, you can see, we've got two layers now, moving across, at a really nice animation
speed. Okay, so let's do the exact same process again. We're going to select our gray layer,
Control-D, to duplicate. We're gonna rename this to our third color, which I'm going to
call, White, because I'm using white. Come up to the Fill Box, enter in our third color.
Again, you can see, we've lost the gray, 'cause
it's hidden behind this white. Because the
keyframes are exactly the same, since we've duplicated it. What we have to do, is press,
P, on our keyboard, on the white layer. I'm just gonna zoom out, so that I get a lot of
space. Highlight these first two key frames, move the player to the second, to make sure
that we remain, full coverage. And then, we just drag, hold down Shift and I'm gonna create
a bit of a bigger gap this time, something like that. And let's just have a look, how
that looks a
s it comes in. And there you can see, free moving in, really nicely. Let's
just do the intro, whilst we're here. Select our second two keyframes and then drag our
play head across to the second one. And all we have to do, is drag that out again, create
the same sort of gap, hold down, Shift, to make sure we don't leave the Y axis. And then
if we watch the whole thing back, we should see, we have really nice animation of the
three rectangles, moving across, at the same velocity. So, very, very ha
ppy with that.
And next thing we need to do, is add our logo, just so that it has something in the middle,
as we are transitioning between the two scenes. Okay, so what we want to do, is we want to
have our logo showing, in this middle bit. So, once the white comes past, we want to
reveal our logo and then the logo also disappears, as the white comes past again. Obviously,
feel free to use logo, avatar, text, whatever you want to use, in the middle here. I'm going
to use the Gaming Careers logo.
So, all I need to do, is come up here, to the left-hand
side, right-click, go to, Import File. And then I'm just going to find the image, my
logo here, import that. And then drag it down from the project, into the top layer. So,
it needs to be on top, of all three of our shapes. And as you can see right now, that
does work. But, we have the Gaming Careers logo, all the time. And we don't want it to
appear, as soon as our transition starts. We want it to appear, as this white wipes
past. So, her
e's the complex thing, I'm going to make it super simple. You don't really
need to understand why things work that way. We need to take our white layer, duplicate
it, using Control-D. Drag it above the Gaming Careers logo. Right now, you can see the Gaming
Careers logo, disappears with it. So, what we need to do, is to apply an Alpha Matte.
All we have to do, is select our Gaming Careers logo, make sure that we have this, Track Matte,
option available. If you don't, all you have to do is hit, F4
. So, it might look like this,
hit F4. And you should see this Track Matte. And then on the logo, we select, Alpha Matte
and then our top layer, which is called, White, too. So, once we click that, you can see exactly
what we wanted to happen, does happen. The white layer, reveals our logo. And it also
disappears with our logo, which is perfect. The last thing, really, in terms of a video
standpoint, that I want to do, is just animate the logo a little bit. It looks a little bit
static, if we wa
tch this back, with just the logo in the middle. All we need is a slight
scale, I think, to make this just a little bit more appealing. So, with the logo selected,
press, S, on your keyboard, to bring up the Scale keyframes. And then just before it starts,
around here, I'm going to set a keyframe of, say 75%. So, I click the stopwatch, to create
a keyframe there. And then just after it disappears around here, I'm going to create another keyframe,
of, let's say, 85%. And then I'm going to just hi
ghlight them both, Easy Ease them,
just to make them look a little nicer and watch that back. And you can see, we have
the logo growing, ever so slightly, in the middle. Which I think looks really good. So,
one last thing that we need to do, to really sell this transition, I think, is to add some
sound. Those who've followed me, for a while, know that I love Epidemic Sound. Their music
library, I use in all of my videos and all of my streams. They also have a really great
sound effects library.
So, I have done my best, to try and find something, that matches
this transition. Now, you don't want it to be overpowering, 'cause you're gonna be playing
this transition often. But, just something to sell the effect, a little bit more, I found
and I'm going to be importing into my project. So, to do that, similar to my logo, I just
right-click, up in the project, Import File, find the actual audio file that I have. I
think I saved it in here. Yep. I mean, if you wanna find your own sound effec
ts, there
are loads of free ones available online. Or, if you wanna check out Epidemic Sound, obviously,
I have a link to a free trial, down in the description as well. Loads of sound effects,
loads of music. But, I'm gonna drag this down, into my layers. And if we actually open up
the audio properties, we can see an actual waveform, as well, I can tell, that this is
going to be too loud and we're gonna need to turn it down. But, I kind of already chose
this audio track, 'cause I know that it wo
rks with the animation style that I've created.
So, I'm just going to turn this down, to minus 10 dB. And if we play this back, we can see
that it, really nicely, matches up with our animations. Still too loud, in my opinion.
So, I'm just gonna turn this down, a little bit more, to minus 15. And you can see we
have, what I think is a really, really nice transition, that we're going to be importing,
into our streaming software, so that we can use it as a Stinger transition. Now, in terms
of rende
ring this video out, to actually use it in our stream, we need to remember a couple
of things. Firstly, we need the video to contain a transparency, 'cause that's actually what
is required by a Stinger, so that your streaming software, can show your scenes behind it.
So, we need to retain the transparency. And we also need the file size to be very small.
Since the streaming software, is probably going to be playing this transition, multiple
times and it needs to be played very, very quickly. We
don't want to be rendering out
a massive uncompressed video file and expecting our streaming software to be able to play
that, really quickly, without any sort of issues, or lag, or drop frames or anything
like that. So, for those two reasons, we need to use a video codec called, WebM. By default,
After Effects in your computer, don't have this codec installed. You need to head to
the website that I'll include a link to, in the description, as well as on screen, now
and actually download the Web
M codec, install it. You'll probably need to save your After
Effects project and relaunch After Effects. But, once you have done that, we need to head
up to the Composition Menu, here and then add to Adobe Media Encoding Queue. If, for
any reason, this option is grayed out, it probably just means that you don't have Adobe
Media Encoder installed. Again, you can install that for free, as part of your free trial.
So, make sure you head to the Adobe website and download the Media Encoder. The reaso
n
we need to use the Media Encoder, is because that is where the codec exists. But, hopefully,
once you've managed to sort that out, you have this new window open, which is the Media
Encoder. And you can see up in the top-right file here, we have our project ready to be
rendered. Now, we need to change a few of these settings, to make sure that it's rendering
as WebM and at the right sort of quality settings. We're gonna actually change out this preset,
that they've already selected for us. So,
you can just click on ABI, here. And then
we changed the ABI format, down to WebM, which should hopefully show now, that you've installed
the WebM codec. On Output Name, we want to, obviously, name what this is going to be called.
Stinger, is a good name, it works for me. So, I'm just going to click, Save. Obviously,
choose the location, where you're going to save it, because we need to find it later.
Make sure you have both, Export Video and Export Audio, checked, since we have both
video and a
udio in this project. And then, you just want to check over the video settings
here and make sure that the resolution is the same, the frame rate is the same. Make
sure that the codec selected, is VP9, 'cause that is the the latest version and it's the
best quality, for the best compression. We wanna make sure that the method, is selected
as Constant Quality. And here, we have a slider for quality. And one of the key things that
we need to remember, is to keep this file size small. I would recom
mend trying to keep
this file size below five megabytes. And you can see down at the bottom, here, we actually
get an estimated file size. So, as you move this up to 100, you can see our file size
jumps all the way to 30 megabytes. Usually, these Stingers, aren't particularly complicated
and you don't need to really bump the quality that much, since they're so quick. So, just
aim for something, 60, if that keeps your file size, at around five meg. Honestly, you
could slide down to 30 and 40 and
you wouldn't really see much difference. So, just make
sure that you're keeping your file size as small as you possibly can. 2-Pass Encoding,
you can leave that checked if you want, since it's going to be a relatively quick render
anyway. And then, this is the most important option, you need to make sure you're checking,
Include Alpha Channel, 'cause that is the transparency. So, if you if you don't check
that, you're going to have a black video, until your your rectangles come in. So, include
t
he Alpha Channel. You might as well use Maximum Render Quality. And then you can click, OK.
Soon as you're ready, you can click this little, green Start Queue sign, it's going to render
out the file. You can see a little preview, down in the bottom. It shouldn't take long.
2-Pass encoding, means it'll take a little bit longer. But, once that's rendered out,
you can open up your streaming software of choice. I'm going to start with OBS, but I'll
also talk through Streamlabs OBS, it's very, very s
imilar. And then we can get this Stinger,
actually into our scenes. Okay, so here I am in OBS and I've just got a couple of different
scenes set up. A game scene with Apex running and then a, Just Chatting, scene, just to
simulate the switch between the two. You can see, right now, there's a fade animation between
the two scenes. And we're going to replace that with our Stinger. So, all you need to
do, is come across to the scene transitions bit, here. If you don't see this dialog, then
just go
to, View, Docks and make sure you have Scene Transitions enabled. And we're
going to add a new transition. So, click the, Plus Button, choose, Stinger, name our Stinger.
We can just leave it as Stinger if we want. And we can see a little preview here. Wanna
browse to find that video file, that we just had. So, I saved that, I think in a working
project. Yep, there it is. And all we need to do, here, really, is set the Time Transition
Point, or the Frame Transition Point. Now, if you followed alo
ng with this guide, you
remember that we had full coverage, of the transparency, at one second in, exactly halfway
through. If you've adapted that and changed it, make sure to note down the time when you
have full coverage and you actually want OBS, to swap the scenes in the background. So,
for us, that was one second in. So, we're going to type in, 1000 milliseconds. You can
do frame, instead of time, if you know the frame number instead. And then, the only other
option we want to change, is th
is Audio Monitoring. I would recommend changing this to, Monitor
and Output. That just means, that we're also going to hear the audio of our Stinger, as
well as sending it out to our stream. We can click, Preview Transition, here and it's just
gonna do the actual transition for us. So, you can see between the two scenes, B to A,
or A to B, seems to be working really, really nicely. Just as an example, if we left this
set at zero, for our Transition Point, we're gonna see the transition happen. S
o, we're
gonna see, A go to B and then our transition play. Which isn't what we want to do, we want
the transition to happen, when there's full coverage, which is at one second in. So, that's
it, all we have to do is click, OK and then we can test out our transition. And it looks
great to me. Works both ways, as well. Nice, quick playing and really brings the branding
out, for our stream. So, I'm very, very happy with that. If you are using StreamElements
OBS.Live, the process is exactly the sam
e, the layout is the same as normal OBS. But,
if you're using Streamlabs OBS, the process is pretty similar, but just the menu is in
a different position. So, it's this cog wheel above your scenes, you wanna click, you wanna
add a transition. Again, you wanna make sure that it's a Stinger. You can name it, Stinger,
if you wish to. You actually need to enter the duration, here. So for us, that's two
seconds long, which is 2000 milliseconds. Browse for our video file and then set the
Transition Po
int, which is halfway through 1000 milliseconds, change the audio monitoring,
again, to Monitor an Output and then click, Done. And if we test that out, we should see,
that our transition works perfectly. If you are new to the Gaming Careers YouTube channel,
or you haven't yet subscribed yet, I'd highly recommend doing so and turning that notification
bell on, so you never miss an upload. And I'd also like to give a massive thanks to
the Gaming Careers patrons, who keep this channel running, mon
th-by-month, by supporting
me, so I can keep creating these tutorials. So, a massive thank you, to them and you can
check out a few more of my videos, here. I'll see you guys in the next video. Peace.
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