Creating a "Privacy Scene" in OBS

There are many times as a streamer where you want to be live, but you don't want people to see exactly what you are doing. Perhaps you are picking your cards in a Splinterlands Tournament, setting a combination lock in DayZ or on fleet operations in EVE Online.

Fortunately OBS Studio comes with all of the components configure this with just a scene and two filters; you can add some text over the top just to tell your viewers why your screen is obscured.

Setup

1. Open OBS Studio,
2. Create a new scene called "Privacy Mode",
3. In your new scene add your capture source as a new source - this may be Display Capture, Game Capture or Window Capture depending on the game.
4. Right click your source, and select "Filters".

Filters

1. Click the + button and add a "Scaling/Aspect Ratio" filter, and configure it as follows:
   a. Set the name to "Scale Down",
   b. Set the scale filtering to "Point",
   c. Set the resolution to something really small, for example "85x48".
2. Click the + button again and add another "Scaling/Aspect Ratio" filter, and configure it as follows:
   a. Set the name to "Scale Up",
   b. Set the scale filtering to "Area",
   c. Set the resolution to "Base (Canvas) Resolution".

It should look something like this now:

Finishing Touches

You can add a new image source above this filtered source, to let your viewers know what is going on. Feel free to use this one:

You are now all setup to keep some key information private while still interacting with your viewers.