Aitum Vertical and Aitum Multistream for OBS Studio | Record, stream in horizontal and vertical
John Lacey
Showcase your expertise through content creation | Co-host of The Video and Livestreaming Show | Host of Build A Presentation Muscle Podcast | Author of Learn Livestreaming and Learn OBS Studio LinkedIn newsletters
Hi OBS Fam!
This week on OBS Obsessed I'll be looking at the free Aitum Vertical and Aitum Multistream plugins for OBS Studio; more on that in a moment.
What is OBS Studio anyway?
I forget sometimes that there are many many people out there who don't know what OBS Studio is, so let's revisit that first.
OBS Studio is free and open source software for:
OBS Studio is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. You can download and install OBS Studio from OBSProject.com
There is a little bit of a learning curve with this software. It can do so much. I sometimes describe it as being both a "rocket ship" (in the sense that it can do pretty much anything) and a "pocket knife" (in the sense that it is super useful).
The truth is you really only need to know a small handful of things to get started.
Here are some resources that might be helpful:
One of the great things about the open source nature of OBS Studio is that there is an army of developers creating cool plugins and other things to extend its basic functionality.
Aitum Vertical and Aitum Multistream are two such examples of these kinds of plugins.
Aitum Vertical plugin for OBS Studio
The Aitum Vertical plugin will introduce a second canvas into your OBS Studio installation.
By default this canvas is in a vertical orientation, but you can adjust the dimensions to be any rectangle (vertical, horizontal, square).
This way you can have two versions of your scenes and sources. One optimised for horizontal and one for vertical.
This means you can record videos in horizontal and vertical at the same time.
This means you can livestream in horizontal and vertical at the same time.
Even though I don't really stream in vertical, I often use the Vertical plugin to record a second instance of my livestream so I can easily slice it up to use as YouTube Shorts, Reels and TikTok videos.
You can use the same sources or different ones. So you could even brand these two experiences differently if you wanted to.
You can link your vertical scenes to horizontal scenes, and once you've done this when you move to a different scene in your horizontal scenes dock (or use a keyboard shortcut or an Elgato Stream Deck button), the vertical version will follow.
Once you've installed the plugin, you will have four extra docks to play with. (If you're not seeing any of these, just go to the Dock menus and click on them.)
I'm not entirely sure when this feature was added, but it looks like you can now copy scene transitions from main (that is your horizontal Scene Transition options).
In the Vertical dock, you'll see the following options:
Aitum Multistream
The Aitum Multistream plugin gives you the ability to stream to multiple destinations, but it also lets you do this in a granular fashion for both the 'main' canvas and (if installed) the vertical canvas.
It is important to keep in mind that each additional destination will add load to both your computer and your Internet connection. For this reason I tend to multi-stream via Restream. Though the ability to send out the Main canvas to some destinations and the Vertical canvas to others is a very cool feature.
It is worth noting that you can specify streaming outputs for the Vertical canvas without installing Multistream. If you do have Multistream installed, those settings in the Vertical plugin will be unavailable and you'll be instructed to use the Multistream dock instead.
Join me live
Check out the event invite links for the date and time in your local time zone.
Remember if you can't join live, you can watch the replay later on.
BONUS: OBS Studio Transitions
In the last episode I looked at working with OBS Studio Transitions.
Have a great week!