How to Use OBS for the First Time - Step by Step

OBS Studio looks intimidating for a reason worth understanding: it hides nothing. Most consumer software buries its controls in menus and shows you a big button. OBS puts every dock on screen simultaneously, because a live broadcast operator needs to reach any of them without navigating.

That design makes it dense and it also makes it learnable, because nothing is hidden from you. Of everything visible in that window, you will touch about five controls today.

This page is the orientation, not the settings reference. It explains what you are looking at, walks one recording from open to finished file, and covers the six things that go wrong in a first session. If OBS is not installed yet, start with how to download and install OBS Studio.

What You Are Actually Looking At

Along the bottom of the window sit five docks. Above them is the canvas.

The Canvas Is Not a Preview of Your Monitor

This is the one misunderstanding that causes the most confusion in a first session, so it is worth being precise.

The black rectangle is the frame OBS will render. It has its own resolution, set independently of your display. It starts empty because you have not put anything in it yet. Your screen appears there only once you add a source that captures your screen — and if that source is larger or smaller than the canvas, you get letterboxing or cropping until you fit it.

Everything else in OBS follows from that. You are not pointing a recorder at your monitor. You are composing a frame, and then recording the frame.

The Concept That Makes OBS Click

A scene is a saved layout. A source is a layer inside it.

Sources stack like layers in an image editor: the item at the top of the Sources list draws in front of everything below it. A webcam listed above a Display Capture appears over your screen. Drag it below and it disappears behind.

A scene is not a recording, a file, or a session. It is an arrangement you can return to. Broadcasters keep several — "Intro card," "Full screen," "Screen plus camera" — and switch between them live. For a tutorial recording, one scene is genuinely all you need, and you can ignore the entire Scenes dock after adding your first source.

Your First Recording, Start to Finish

1. Run the Auto-Configuration Wizard

If the wizard appeared on first launch, use it. If you dismissed it, open Tools → Auto-Configuration Wizard.

Choose "Optimize just for recording, I will not be streaming." OBS benchmarks your CPU and GPU and picks a resolution, frame rate and encoder that your machine can actually sustain. Accept what it suggests. It is a sane starting point, not a ceiling, and you can change any of it later.

2. Add One Source

Click the + at the bottom of the Sources dock. Three options matter:

• Display Capture — an entire monitor, including notifications and anything you alt-tab to. Simplest, least controlled.
• Window Capture — one application window and nothing else. Notifications and stray windows stay out of the recording automatically.
• Game Capture (Windows) — hooks a full-screen game directly. Use it for games, never for regular applications.

For a first recording, Display Capture is the fewest moving parts. For a tutorial you intend to publish, Window Capture is the better habit — how to record only one window in OBS covers the details.

Name the source something you will recognise, pick your monitor or window in the properties dialog, and click OK.

3. Fit the Source to the Canvas

Your source almost certainly does not exactly match the canvas, so you will see black bars or a cropped edge. Fix it in one keystroke:

Select the source in the list, then press Ctrl + F (Cmd + F on Mac), or right-click → Transform → Fit to screen.

This step is missing from most beginner guides and it is the direct cause of "why does my recording have black bars down the side."

4. Check Your Audio Before You Record, Not After

Look at the Audio Mixer and speak at your normal volume. The bar should move and sit mostly in the green, roughly between the -20 and -6 marks. If it touches red, you are clipping and the distortion is permanent — lower the input.

Two failure modes to catch now:

• The bar does not move at all. OBS is listening to the wrong device. Settings → Audio → Mic/Auxiliary Audio and pick the right one.
• Desktop Audio shows no activity while something is playing. On Windows this usually means the wrong playback device. On macOS it is expected — macOS does not hand system audio to applications without help.

Silent recordings are the single most common thing people discover after the fact. Thirty seconds here saves re-recording. If it is already too late, OBS recording has no audio is the full diagnosis.

5. Decide Where the File Goes

Settings → Output → Recording Path. Point it at a folder you will remember. The default is buried, and "I recorded something and cannot find it" is a genuinely common first-session ending.

6. Record

Click Start Recording in the Controls dock. OBS minimises to your system tray or menu bar; the Controls dock shows elapsed time and the growing file size while it runs.

Do the thing you wanted to record, then bring OBS back and click Stop Recording. Give it a second — it finalises the file after you stop.

7. Open the File

File → Show Recordings opens the output folder directly. Play it back before you close anything, and specifically watch it at the size your audience will: if it is going on the web, look at it on a phone.

Six Things That Go Wrong on Day One

1. The preview shows an infinite tunnel of itself. Completely normal on a single monitor. Display Capture includes the OBS window, which is displaying the capture, which includes the OBS window. It does not appear in the recording once OBS is minimised, and it disappears entirely if you use Window Capture instead.

2. The recording is a black rectangle. On macOS, Screen Recording permission has not been granted, or was granted without relaunching OBS. On Windows, it is usually OBS running on the wrong GPU. OBS black screen: every cause and solution sorts them.

3. There is no sound. Either the mic device is wrong, the mixer channel is muted, or you expected system audio without configuring it. Step 4 above catches all three before you record.

4. The file is a .mkv you cannot open. Sensible default, unhelpful surprise. MKV survives a crash where MP4 would be destroyed, but many editors and players will not touch it. File → Remux Recordings converts to MP4 losslessly in seconds. OBS MKV vs MP4 explains which to record in.

5. You recorded the wrong monitor. Double-click the source, change the Display dropdown. Worth checking the preview before every recording on a multi-monitor setup.

6. It looked fine while recording and is unreadable on a phone. This one is not a bug and there is no setting that fixes it. It is the real limitation of what you just built, and it deserves its own section.

The Honest Limit of Your First Recording

OBS did its job. It captured your screen faithfully at the resolution you asked for.

The problem is that a faithful capture of a 27-inch monitor, viewed on a phone, is a 27-inch monitor shrunk to fit a phone. Menu labels become a few pixels tall. Your cursor is a speck, moving in the small jittery increments a real hand produces. Everything that was obvious while you were recording is guesswork for the viewer.

Fixing that with OBS means exporting the file, importing it into a video editor, scrubbing to find each click, and keyframing a zoom around it. Twenty to forty minutes of editing for a five-minute video, repeated for every video you make.

That editing pass is the entire reason Cubix Capture exists. It tracks what you click while recording and applies the zoom and cursor smoothing during capture, so the readable version is what you get when you press stop rather than what you build afterwards. It runs on Windows and macOS, and the free Starter plan is enough to record the same walkthrough twice and compare.

What to Learn Next

• Configuring OBS specifically for recording — source types, formats, separate audio tracks: how to set up OBS for screen recording.
• The full map of every setup area, including streaming, profiles and plugins: OBS Studio setup guide.
• Encoder and bitrate values once you care about quality: OBS best settings for screen recording.

Keep Reading

• How to Download and Install OBS Studio if you skipped ahead and something is missing.
• OBS Black Screen: Every Cause and Solution for the most common first-session failure.
• OBS Recording Has No Audio: Complete Fix Guide for the second most common one.
• Where Do OBS Recordings Go on Windows and Mac? if the file is not where you expected.