What is a Starting Soon Screen?
Starting soon screens or banners have become an essential part of modern streams. They serve as a smooth transition between offline and online content, help establish your stream’s unique style and brand, and set the tone for what viewers can expect. We covered in our previous article in-depth what a Starting Soon screen is and how to create one, which you can find here.
How do I add a Starting Soon Screen to OBS?
Just like any other form of media that you add to your stream, you have to go to the scene in which you would like to add to and click the + button in the sources tab, then depending on the format of your scene, you may either need to click Image or Media Source.
For this tutorial, I’ll be using the MP4 file that I created in the previous article and adding that to my scene, so I’ll be using Media Source.
Once you have clicked Media Source or Image (if you’re using just a static image), then a new window will pop up asking you to name the source; this is where you would usually put Starting Soon Screen, or similar.
Once you have named the source, click the Browse button in the next window, search for the file you have either created or downloaded, and add it to OBS. Once you have, you would need to check all the options that apply to your file.
I do recommend that if you have an animated screen, you select the loop, restart playback, and hardware decoding, and close the file when inactive options, as these are the options that I find work best for animated files.
By looping the file, it will keep looping until you change scenes, which is what you would want as you may not know how long you’re going to be on the starting soon screen and by having the file about 5 seconds long or so, you will not only have smaller file sizes but you will have less resources being used by processing a larger file.
Once you have selected the options for you, click the OK button, and it will add the source to your scene.
Now that you have the source added to your scene, you may have to do a couple of things. Depending on the resolution of your file, you may need to readjust the size of it, and you can make it stretch/fit to the screen by right-clicking on it and going to Transform, then stretch/fit to screen, and it will fill your scene.
If you have created a static image or have different elements for your starting soon screen, then you need to add those in the same way we added the main screen. Then once you have those on the scene, you can move, scale, and place them wherever you need them to be.
And then there you have it, your brand new starting soon screen is there in all its glory! All you have to do now is click that Start Stream button and have your community come along and chill with you in your pre-stream starting soon screen.
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