Switching scenes with a plain cut or a fade is fine. Switching with a stinger is what makes people ask who does your graphics.
What a stinger is
A stinger is a short animated video that plays over the switch between two scenes. Something sweeps across the screen, and at the moment the screen is fully covered, the scene underneath changes. The viewer never sees the cut — they see a designed moment instead.
That covered moment is the entire trick. It is also why a stinger has to be set up with one specific number right.
Adding one in OBS Studio
- Find the Scene Transitions panel, usually at the bottom right of the OBS window.
- Click the + and choose Stinger.
- Give it a name and click OK.
- Point Video File at your transition file.
- Set the Transition Point.
- Click OK, then make sure the stinger is the selected transition in the dropdown.
The transition point is the whole job
The transition point tells OBS when during the animation to swap the scene. It is measured in milliseconds from the start of the video, or in frames.
Set it to the moment the animation fully covers the screen. If your stinger is a two-second sweep that blacks out the screen at the one second mark, the transition point is 1000 ms.
Get it wrong and the effect breaks in an obvious way: set it too early and viewers see the new scene appear before the animation covers it; too late and they see the old scene lingering as the animation clears. If your stinger looks broken, this number is almost always why.
Streamlabs works the same way
Streamlabs supports stinger transitions with the same two inputs — the video file and the transition point. The wording differs slightly, the logic does not.
Practical notes
Keep it short. Under two seconds. A stinger is punctuation, not a scene of its own. A five-second transition is five seconds your viewers are watching nothing happen, every single time you switch.
Transparency matters. Stingers are usually delivered as WEBM with an alpha channel so the animation can layer over your scenes rather than sitting on a solid rectangle. If yours arrives as a plain MP4 with a black background, that black will show.
Sound is optional but effective. If your transition file has audio baked in, check the level against your game audio before going live.
One is enough. Some streamers set up different stingers for different scene pairs. It is possible, and it is usually more work than it is worth.
Where a stinger fits
A transition is the last piece of a setup, not the first. Overlay, screens and alerts do more for how a channel looks. But once those are in place, a matching stinger is what ties the scene switches into the same visual language.