Capture tools sit at the foundation of your clip pipeline. The capture stack determines whether you produce three good clips per stream or zero. The four workhorse options: OBS Replay Buffer, Twitch markers, Elgato Stream Deck, and Streamlabs Highlighter.

OBS Replay Buffer is the universal foundation. Enable it in OBS settings, set buffer length to 60 seconds, bind a hotkey to "save replay," hit the hotkey the moment something happens. The previous 60 seconds writes to disk. Free, native, works regardless of platform.

Twitch markers are the lightweight overlay. A chat command (!clip or !marker) creates a timestamp on the VOD that you can return to later. Pair with a chat-mod permission so your trusted chatters can mark moments you missed.

Elgato Stream Deck is the physical hotkey upgrade. A dedicated button on a physical deck removes the cognitive load of keyboard shortcuts. Streamlabs Highlighter is the all-in-one option for streamers running Streamlabs natively. Pick one stack. Build the muscle. Capture is the gate.