Nested scenes in OBS explained

So, what are nested scenes in OBS and why are they helpful? This is something you might wonder, well hello, my name is Aeridos and I'll do my best to try to explain this to you.

Nested scenes are scenes within scenes.

Any scene you create within OBS you can actually add as a source within another scene. This means you can have a collection of sources in a scene and have that scene as a source within multiple other scenes. This might sound very confusing, but it's actually really simple and helpful and it really helps to clean up your sources as well.

One of the reasons why this could be helpful is because you can address a source multiple times that you normally wouldn't be able to use more than once, like your camera. This way you could have special filters on an additional camera output without changing the filters on your normal camera source, just by applying the filters to the scene instead of the camera source itself. You could, for instance have your regular scene layout with a camera box, but also have a fullscreen zoomed in version of the same camera if your viewers are in need of a stern look because they've been naughty again.

Another great reason to use nested scenes is to group sources together to use them in several scenes. I do this with my alerts, because I don't use something like streamelements or streamlabs for my alerts. (more on this another time) I have alerts for the normal events, like donations, subs, follows, etc. But I also have alerts popping up on screen with a users' name and twitch avatar when that user talks for the first time in chat during that stream to give them a proper welcome message. I put all these alerts in its own scene, with just a blank screen and these alerts. And this scene I added as a sourse to my 'live' scenes. This way I don't have to add all the sources to each scene and it makes for a more compact list of sources in my live scenes.

Content creation tips:

Something I really recommend to use these nested scenes for is for your camera frame. If you use a nice camera border with under that a list of recent events (subs, follows, raids, cheers, etc) you can add all these things to a new scene. This way you can just add that scene to any scene you want to show your camera frame in, without having to line everything up perfectly every time. If you put your camera in its own scene before, you should add that scene to this scene. We're getting some proper scene-ception here now by putting scenes within scenes within multiple scenes. I do hope you're still understanding what I'm trying to explain here, because I'm even starting to confuse myself here.

Anyway, nested scenes are great, they make adjusting something quickly over several scenes effortless and when you want to create a new scene with sources you used before you can be done in seconds. If you have any questions about nested scenes or truthfully anything else, you can hit me up anywhere or you can tag me in a message in the content_creators section of the Elite Discord.

Aeridos