Lately, I've been helping out my friends at B2P2 to improve a bit their online physical training sessions. Previously they were using pure Zoom based camera views, and I thought that we can do something better.
What were our problems with a simple camera view?
- The instructor often had to turn just to show a given posture from different angles. This make the experience halting as the instructor changed postures and repeating the same instructions to emphasize the elements we should pay attention at.
- We've missed every branding. While zoom allows a virtual background, and we could have set up an image with a logo there, it did not work in our case. Given the various postures, zoom often can can recognize the interesting parts, and would crop out too much parts of the instructors.
- We were considering broadcasting a few sessions publicly and doing it on multiple channels at once.
What was the basic setup?
If you ever search for streaming software, there are clearly two players on the market, both being open source solutions:
You can read about comparison of both. Basically, StreamLabs' version builds on top of the base OBS by providing a bit nicer GUI and a few extras in exchange for bit of a performance penalty. It has plenty of premium features (you have to pay for these), like support for multiple streams that only works with 3rd party solutions if you use pure OBS.
How should the stream look like?
I've decided to have two scenes. A simple introductory scene with a single camera setting and a B2P2 logo, and a main scene with the logo and 2 cameras to show the instructor from two different angels at once.
Extra apps we use
How to get two camera views without much spend?
We are using the mobile phone as a second camera. There are many apps to provide a video stream from the mobile to OBS. After trying out many options, I've settled with iriun. The majority of options provides a direct video stream that can be included into OBS. On the other hand, Iriun sets up a new webcam, and requires a driver to be installed. While the other options do not require a dedicated driver, simple video streams over WiFi lagged quite a bit behind the main camera stream. The mobile stream lagged between 1500-3000ms behind the laptop's camera, and the lag changed continuously, thus I could not simply offset it. Iriun can connect over WiFi and USB too, and even the WiFi connection lags much less compared to the simple video streams.
How to switch between the scenes?
There are many ways how one can set up scene switching. My preferred approach is to use another mobile for this task with the StreamControl app. With StreamControl, the instructor can easily switch between the scenes at the beginning and end of the sessions.
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