Build a scene
Find your way around the studio — the scene rail, the frame, layer settings, and how Apply actually works.
A scene is an ordered list of layers composed into the picture your platforms receive. This page is orientation — the studio's layout and the Apply model every other scene task on this page relies on. For what to actually put in a scene, see the pages this one links to below.
The studio layout
The Stream tab is laid out like a broadcast desk:
- left — Scene: the scene list, the current scene's layers, and a single "+" to add one.
- middle — Frame: the incoming-feed window, and the work surface — layers are dragged directly on the picture your viewer will see.
- under the frame — the cockpit: go live, record.
- right — Chat and the fan dossier.
Any panel can be undocked (its header icon) to float independently; the layout is remembered, and a "collect the studio" control in the corner puts everything back.
Editing a layer
Clicking a layer row — or double-clicking it on the frame — opens layer settings, which take over the right-hand side. Settings split into two places: what the layer shows (text, file, style-specific fields) on the right, and how it looks and behaves (look, motion, scheduling, opacity, crop) in a strip below the frame that's shared across every layer type — see Style, motion, and letter effects. Only the sections a given layer kind actually supports are shown — a camera layer has no "look" section, since a live video feed has no letter color or backdrop to paint.
An empty scene is fine
With no layers beyond a single full-frame source, your stream reaches every platform as a byte-for-byte copy — nothing is re-encoded. That's the default, not a degraded state.
What "Apply" does
Edits are not saved automatically. Build out the change, then press Apply once — the frame is composed a single time and fanned out to every armed platform from that one composition, so five platforms cost no more than one. Re-composing is visible to a live viewer as a brief stutter, which is exactly why it isn't done on every keystroke.
If there's no signal at the moment you apply, the panel says it'll apply once signal arrives — the scene is already saved, it just hasn't had anything to compose yet.
The "Re-composing" / "No re-encode" indicator
At the top of the panel: No re-encode (green) means the scene changes nothing and the stream is copied byte-for-byte; Re-composing (amber) means the server is decoding and re-encoding the frame — the only way an inset, a crop, or a vertical frame can exist.
What's next
- Add a picture-in-picture camera — the most common first layer.
- Crop your frame — trim unwanted edges.
- Add captions and a timer — put a live line of text on screen.