OBS Studio Updates - Alt Cropping, New Transitions, and Source Snapping

Let’s talk about OBS Studio’s 0.14 updates, which include alt-cropping, new transitions, and a bit more.

If you haven’t yet, head over to OBSProject.com, go to the downloads section, and grab the latest version of OBS Studio with the browser source. Once you have it installed and updated, let’s launch it and check out some of the new features.

Alt-Cropping in OBS Studio

The first thing we’re going to talk about is alt-cropping. A lot of people have been asking for the ability to crop sources directly in the preview window, and alt-cropping helps us do that. If you used OBS Classic, you probably know what I’m talking about, but if not, let’s go ahead and add a source into our preview area.

From here, simply click the source you want to crop, hold down the alt key, and then drag the bounding box in where you’d like to crop. You can click any of the sides of the box, but you can also select a corner to crop two sides at once. You can undo the cropping by dragging the box back out.

You can use alt cropping to get a general area cropped out, and then right click the source, go to Edit Transform, and from here you can use the controls under the crop section to make any fine tuned adjustments.

Finally, you can use reset transform to return your source to its original dimensions.

Snap to Sources and Screen

Let’s go ahead and move onto another new feature which is snap to sources/screen. This can be enabled and disabled in the general settings. You can tweak how sensitive snapping is, as well as turn on and off the ability to snap to the edge of your screen, snap to other sources, and also snap to horizontal and vertical center of other sources.

With all of them enabled, you can see how this works – where my sources just snap to each other – make it easy to do aligning with edges and other sources. This can be very useful for setting up alignment of sources quickly.

New Transitions in OBS Studio

New transitions were also added in this update. If you remember, we can set our default transition to use next to the start streaming button. This tells OBS what sort of transition to use when changing from one scene to another. By default we have fade and cut, but let’s look at the other ones quickly.

To add a new default transition, hit the plus icon. Let’s start with Swipe. We can see here that we can give the transition a name if we’d like – but let’s leave it at the default. We’ll then be presented with properties for our new transition. For Swipe we can tell OBS which direction to swipe, and then select swipe in. Let’s go ahead leave this to left and keep Swipe in unchecked for now. You’ll see that if I change my default transition to the new swipe transition I made, it will do this animation when I change scenes. If I ever need to, I can go into the properties of this transition and make some adjustments. I’ll enable Swipe In so that you can see how that looks. Now, when I change my scenes, you can see the scene that I’m changing from doesn’t move when changing scenes.

Let’s quickly add another transition we can use, Fade to Color. This transition will basically go to a color that we choose, and then show our new scene. I’ll go ahead and select a blue, and leave peak color point percentage at its default. Now, when I change scenes, you’ll see this color fade in, and then as it fades out, my other scene is shown. Not my personal favorite transition, but I could see it getting some use.

Other Changes

For the last changes, I’ll go ahead and check out the OBS Website and view the full changelog. You can read the full changelog if you’d like to know all of the bug fixes and changes. Things like deinterlacing and the NVIDIA NVENC encoder has been added in, I know a couple of people have been asking me about this, so that’s pretty cool to see. For Windows, you can also tell video device captures to turn off when the device is not being used. Finally there are a bunch of bug fixes as well.

Overall, this is a pretty big update – as I know a lot of people were waiting for some of these options before switching over to OBS Studio. Personally, I’m still waiting to see the video playlist and image slideshow sources. Let me know in the comments below if you have any questions about this update, or if there’s any changes you’re waiting to see in the next update.

The Core OBS Studio Tutorials

Get the free graphics used in these videos.

1. Introduction to our OBS Studio Tutorial Series
2. OBS Studio Vs OBS Classic
3. Installing and Setting Up Profiles In OBS Studio
4. Best OBS Studio Settings
5. In-depth look at OBS Studio Sources
6. Using OBS Studio Filters
7. Setting Up OBS Studio Scenes
8. What Notification Should You Use With Twitch?
9. Setting Up Your Twitch Account Before You Stream
10. Streaming Live on Twitch and How to Improve Your Stream
11. OBS Studio Updates – Alt Cropping, New Transitions, and Source Snapping (current post)