Overview and Shoutouts
I spend more time on YouTube than I’d like to admit. So now we are actually going there. Starting simple was probably a good idea. Simple in this case meaning two less than optimal webcams that appear to be from different planets. So immediately no longer simple. They also max out at different framerates. 30 FPS is too slow for showing hands on keyboards when things get crazy, at least with these cams. So for now synth and piano keyboards get the 60 FPS cam via NVIDIA BROADCAST . Not for the AI enhancements but for the video noise reduction and the fact that it lets me select 1920 X 1080 resolution at 60 FPS…without crashing OBS. Unfortunately N-Broadcast currently only supports one cam at a time. If and when that changes it will…probably crash OBS. But it does show up in OBS as a video capture device. Praise be.
That leaves the other cam. The one from Mars. There was no amount of futzing in various native camera settings that was going to get two similar color profiles out of these two cameras. We’ll come back to that later in Davinci Resolve . I was quite happy just getting the two cams in and out of OBS and had been hours into tweaking a test file. The first render was letterboxed. Farking hell. There was an input /output resolution setting mismatch in OBS between the two cams. There is no amount of cropping or conversion in post that can fix this that doesn’t involve an inordinate amount of nonsense. The fix is making sure input and output resolution matches for OBS recording. OBS can handle 30 FPS and 60 FPS in a split screen with two cam input…as long as resolution lines up. Pretty remarkable. Differing resolution and aspect ratios are another story. Your getting letterboxed. Start over.
So now our first two YouTube shoutouts. You can spend hours discovering how to do that one simple thing reading wikis and manuals. Resolve and OBS have settings in the hundreds. Someone somewhere has probably made a video. The decision here to merge two separate cam inputs in a split screen setup in a single OBS output stems simply from the fact that you can do this without needing a crew to manage switching scenes and sources. But there was still a stumbling block. One more step to overcome. The split screen also needs to merge properly at the output. I found the solution at Gaming Concepts and his Advanced OBS with multiple cameras video. It hadn’t occurred to me that scenes could also be sources in OBS. In retrospect the recursive solution should have been obvious. It wasn’t. Gamers to the rescue !
The next thing was simply not wanting to spend hours finding a way to get to the two cam windows in OBS that…are truly two equal windows. Pressing alt and dragging one side of each OBS window at a time was simple, but also not immediately obvious. This one was a bit comical. Gamers again , but now down at the pub. Or not. Pandemics will do that. Here’s to How To Play Online Webcam Darts With A Dual Camera Split Screen Using OBS for free . Slainte
There is more of course. Way more. I’m writing this with the video waiting in the que. Time to post. More to follow. If something turns out to be a disaster we’ll tuck it in and write about that too. It’s all going to be part of this new journey. Good, Bad or indifferent. Perfection is elusive. Getting to the starting line could be easier. But you can’t even fail if you don’t show up. Winning ugly might be the thing.