Happy New Year, DMS.
This may be a hopeless quest and for right now I’ve aborted this attempt. A friend has a talk in a week that will be done over zoom teleconferencing and I had hoped to create a live broadcast production, managed in lieu of using the usual webcam and mic. I wanted to do this in order to use a chroma keyed screen, two cameras, add text and video from several feed on the same computer as well as to have better control of the placement and manipulation of these feeds and to change “scenes” as needed (intro, main part of the talk, etc).
Now I’m realizing that zoom is not really suited for this but the platform choice is out of my control. I thought I almost had it figured out. First of all, there is a ton online of “how to stream your Zoom to OBS”. That is not what I want to do, rather the opposite. I want to create and manipulate an audiovisual feed on OBS and feed it into Zoom.
Zoom takes feed from the choice of a “webcam” and an audio input, the latter of which can be a virtual audio device created by the user.
OBS does have a plugin to create a virtual webcam. This works well and I can pull that into Zoom as the item, ‘OBS virtual Webcam’ appears on the list. The problem is pulling audio into Zoom from OBS. I just cannot find a way to do it. I resorted to capturing my audio on a mixer outside of the computer then feeding it into the computer in a digital USB audio stream. I had so many problems with synchronizing the audio as running all these programs on the 2015 Macbook pro was hard on its resources. Also, my digital audio virtual feed would occasionally disappear making the entire process unreliable, a possible disaster for the live event.
And I played with some of the Rouge Amoeba products like Loopback and Audio Hijack (nice products, BTW) but they had the same problem with the disappearing audio feeds.
This is some background of what I have done.
Back to what I think would be the solution but I cannot figure it out. OBS can insert audio delays in its integrated mixer. I tested a sample recording of my scenes and got the sync just right. However, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get a virtual audio channel out of OBS to be visible to Zoom in the microphone list. Zoom can pick up all sorts of Mac system sound devices including what I setup with Audio Midi setup including SoundFlower channels. Zoom can also pick up the devices I create with Loopback and other virtual audio apps. I just cannot get anything out of OBS that I can pick up in either Zoom or a virtual audio app. I don’t really understand the OBS object called ‘audio output’. When created, it appears in the OBS mixer panel as an audio input.
One solution would be if zoom could use a combined video stream but it seems it cannot.
If OBS could output a ‘virtual mic’ the way it has implemented a ‘virtual webcam’ then that would work.
For now, I’ve just aborted these attempts after too many hours of working on it and I’ll just do my best with Zoom in my home studio.
Any ideas on this? Other platforms besides OBS would be an option as would solutions from anyone who really knows OBS.
TY!!
