How to set up scenes, alerts and overlays in OBS

The difference between "someone screen-sharing" and "a channel" is mostly scenes and alerts. Both are free, and the whole setup takes under an hour.

Scenes vs sources

• A scene is a layout you can switch to — like a camera angle in a TV studio.
• A source is one thing inside a scene — a game, a webcam, an image, a browser widget.
• The same source can appear in several scenes. Changing it in one place changes it everywhere if you reuse it properly (see below).

The four scenes you actually need

• Starting Soon — shown for the first 5–10 minutes. Gives people who arrive early something to sit through, and gives you time to check everything works.
• Main — gameplay, webcam, alerts. Where you spend the stream.
• Be Right Back — so you never have to end the broadcast for a bathroom break. Ending a stream resets your position on browse pages and loses everyone.
• Ending — a thank-you screen for the last minute or two, and a natural moment to raid someone.

Setting up alerts

Alerts are the pop-ups when someone follows, subscribes or tips. They come from a third-party service — most commonly StreamElements or Streamlabs — and OBS just displays them.

1. Sign in to StreamElements or Streamlabs with your streaming account.
2. Open their Alert Box or Overlay editor and set up which events you want and how they look.
3. Copy the overlay URL it gives you.
4. In OBS: Sources → + → Browser, paste the URL, and set the width and height to match your canvas (usually 1920×1080).
5. Use their "test alert" button to confirm it appears in OBS.

Treat that overlay URL like a password. Anyone who has it can fire fake alerts on your stream, and it should never appear on camera.

You do not need Streamlabs Desktop to use Streamlabs alerts — the browser-source approach above works perfectly in plain OBS, and plain OBS is lighter on your PC.

Overlays and the webcam frame

An overlay is just a transparent PNG (or browser widget) layered on top of your gameplay — a webcam border, a chat box, a recent-follower bar.

• Free and paid packs are available from Nerd or Die and OWN3D; both have decent free sections.
• Add them as an Image source above your game capture, and drag your webcam to sit inside the frame.
• Leave the middle of the screen alone. Overlays belong at the edges — covering gameplay annoys viewers.
• Less is more. A clean stream with good audio beats a cluttered one with six widgets.

Keep it lightweight

Every browser source is effectively a small web page running on your PC, and they add up into real rendering lag.

• Tick "Shutdown source when not visible" on browser sources so your Starting Soon widgets aren't running during gameplay.
• Delete alert widgets you set up and never used.
• If you see rendering lag climbing, scene complexity is a likely culprit — see fixing dropped frames and lag.

Two upgrades worth it later

• Hotkeys. Settings → Hotkeys, and bind each scene to a key. Switching scenes without alt-tabbing is the single biggest quality-of-life win in OBS. A Stream Deck does the same job with physical buttons.
• Studio Mode. Lets you set up a scene on a preview before pushing it live, so viewers never see you dragging things around.

Once your scenes are built, run through the pre-stream checklist — especially the privacy section, since Display Capture is the mistake that hurts most.