So... I may have gotten ahead of myself with the OBS Ninja excitement. After running a quick test with actual student actors last week, it quickly became apparent that audio in particular was going to be a problem. Some of that probably could be solved by making sure everyone was using
headphones and an external mic, but there were enough other little issues with getting people connected that I decided to scrap the whole idea for now. We're running out of time for messing around on this particular show, but I may revisit the idea for other stuff in the future.
My fallback is to use
Zoom and take advantage of the fact that I have access to a whole room full of computers that were fairly recently purchased with video editing in mind. They're currently not being used due to 100% virtual instruction. The format of the show is such that there's either all 19-20 actors onscreen at once, or it's a smaller set of 1-5 people. For the parts where it's everybody it's okay to just look like a
Zoom meeting, and I'm screen-capturing the standard
gallery view for that. That happens on the main computer--which is still using OBS to record and control everything.
For the smaller scenes I'm using five more computers in order to have a specific actor pinned on each one. Those are also running OBS so I can
screen capture the
Zoom window and
send a clean view of that actor back to the main computer via NDI*. That lets me do things like arrange them in a specific way on the
screen with control over aspect ratios and sizes, along with having more controlled transitions. Conveniently, the show always returns to the full cast view in between each smaller piece, so I have time to walk around and pin the actors for the next small scene while that part is happening. Since the
Zoom audio is the same for every participant, I'm just pulling that from the main computer for every scene.
These six computers do show up as participants in the
Zoom meeting, but the "Hide non-video participants" option in
Zoom video settings means they're not visible in the
gallery view. That same feature allows me (and the director) to also be in the meeting without being included in the recording. So, I guess I'm actually using seven computers if you count my laptop (since it has a webcam) that I will only use for coms when not recording.
It's kind of a ridiculous but fun setup... I'm tempted to see what would happen if I expanded so each actor always had their own computer, but I don't think the
network or the "Master" computer could handle that many NDI streams. Could be fun to push those limits on future productions...
Oh, and another minor thing that more directly relates to the topic of this thread: I'm using the virtual camera into OBS Ninja to
send a
preview of the actual OBS output to the director.
*In my initial test I had some lip-sync issues using NDI, so I may experiment with using OBS Ninja instead to see how that compares.