Streamers with budget studios often lack the conveniences for professional live video production that come with high-end equipment, such as dedicated video production systems. For instance, such systems allow users to record multiple camera angles at their full resolution simultaneously on a single device such as a PC or a Mac. Livestreamers have to rely on expensive software or dedicated video production hardware to record streams with multiple cameras at full resolution. In this article, let us explore how to control multiple cameras with OBS, an open-source encoder for low-budget streamers.<\/p>\n
Using multiple cameras makes streaming interesting, engaging, and presents a better method to communicate stories. However, there are several challenges of using such a setup for individuals.<\/p>\n
While OBS is not designed to record multiple cameras as separate video tracks\/ files, there are ways to control multiple cameras with OBS.<\/p>\n
Launch OBS Studio on the desktop and set up hotkeys for starting and stopping the recording. Start another instance of the application and provide a recording path for the two cameras in each instance. Use the hotkeys to start or stop the recording when ready. With this method, the two videos with different paths will get recorded in sync, as the same hotkeys are used for both.<\/p>\n
Use a large canvas space (example: 3840*1080) and place the cameras as full-sized objects in the two halves. Use a video editor for cutting, resizing, and repositioning the footage. Ensure that the video tracks are synchronized to minimize post-processing resource requirements before streaming.<\/p>\n
Open-source multimedia frameworks, such as FFmpeg, can be used in combination with OBS to record streams from multiple cameras. This eliminates the need to re-encode while allowing users to record multiple tracks to one file simultaneously.<\/p>\n
Although recording multiple camera angles simultaneously in full-size for streaming is a common requirement, it is surprising that there are not many stable\/ well-known options for such video productions. There are paid solutions that are either too expensive or have other drawbacks, such as the use of a custom recording format. Regardless of the method that you choose to control multiple cameras with OBS, resource consumption would be a major challenge. While the former two methods rely on processing power, the latter method is restricted by storage.<\/p>\n