Camera Live – Multiple Cameras / Instances Simultaneously

[dank]

Hi!

I hope I’ve come to the right place for v002 Camera Live discussions.

I’ve been using this excellent utility (thank you!) for live streaming from a Canon 6D camera using Open Broadcast Studio.

I also have a 2nd compatible camera, an EOS 600D (aka Rebel T3i) and I’d like to be able to capture video from both simultaneously, and switch between them in OBS.

I am not sure if there’s a “supported” way to do this, but I have managed to “hack” a solution by asking MacOS to run two copies of Camera Live by using “open -n ./Camera\ Live.app” from the command line. I select one camera in the first instance, the other in the 2nd (takes a couple of goes at selecting the camera before it works, usually) and then I end up with two Syphon sources to select from in OBS.

I’ve got a couple of questions:

1. Is there a better way to do this?
2. Is what I’m doing (multiple instances of Camera Live) potentially dangerous / unstable?
3. Any possibility of having this capability made “officially” available?

A 4th question, though I understand it’s probably more of an OBS issue than a Camera Live issue:

4. When switching between two scenes in OBS (each with a different Syphon Camera Live source, i.e. to switch between the two different camera inputs), the capture goes momentarily blank – do you have any idea what might cause this?

Thanks again for this excellent utility!

— Daniel

[dank]

To be clear, when I say “run two copies” of Camera Live, I mean two execution instances of the same .app bundle. I’m not making a 2nd copy of the .app bundle.

[bangnoise]

Multiple connections aren’t supported by the underlying Canon SDK. If running two instances is working for you, it isn’t going to do any harm.

A Syphon Client takes a moment to connect to its server, so that may be the issue you see with blanking in OBS. If there’s any way to keep both sources “active” but one invisible, then try that. I don’t know anything about OBS I’m afraid.

[dank]

Thanks a lot for your response.

Interesting that I seem to be able to get it to work even though it’s not supported 🙂 What seems to happen is the 2nd instance will not connect to the 2nd camera the first time I select it – it says “Camera Error” – but if I then click on the other camera (the one already in use in the first instance), it will then say “Camera Error” on the 2nd instance (but the first will keep working), and then I click on the 2nd camera again and all’s good!

I will ask in the OBS forums about keeping the Syphon sources active in the background.

Thanks again.

[Author]

Posts