Question / Help Can I have ONE source but have it as *two* sources?

DocBadwrench

New Member
I'm not completely sure how to frame this question, but here goes:

Re my video-camera input: Is it possible for me to have two such items in the Sources list? I have a few scenes. One of them is standard camera input. The other would be color-corrected (in order to fit in better with the other scene).

So far as I can tell, I can't do this. But I wonder if there is anyway to fake it. I have looked at Studio Mode, but while that can do for some situations, I know it won't do for all situations (since I will need to change scenes at a moment's notice and not something that I can fuss with in an alternate view.

I will make do, of course, but thought I'd at least reach out to the community in case I'm missing something basic.

Thanks very much,
Doc
 

Xaymar

Active Member
A somewhat simple workaround is to have the Video Capture source in an extra scene, and use the scene reference source for color corrected places and the Video Capture source directly (reference to it) for non-color-corrected versions.
 

DocBadwrench

New Member
Thanks to both of you for chiming in. I'm not completely sure what you are saying, Xaymar, but let's see if I can describe some additional stuff. Maybe this will help:
OBS_Studio_Problem.jpg

  • What's green is what's working. It's the standard; what most of my scenes use. standard lighting and only straightforward chroma. The outline denotes where my avatar would also appear.
  • What's yellow is what's not working. It's what I intend to use for cutscenes (ignore the Fallout reference; I've been fiddling). Same thing with the yellow box.
I can get one to work, but not the other. And vice-versa. From what I can tell (and who the heck knows if I'm right) there may be two things conspiring:
  1. The Facerig Virtual Camera (which is always in use). It's so far not accounted for, so it's worth mentioning.
  2. So far as I can tell, there's no contextual filtering. Each Source and it's filters are locked together. I can't create different filters for sources across different scenes.
And that probably works fine except for that #1 thing. For all I know Facerig is doing Some Thing that prohibits me from creating a new source (that uses the same facerig camera source). Which is what I've been trying to do. Two sources. Same camera. Different scenes.

If this is completely strange to you that this should be happening, the next place I'll go is the Facerig forums. I'm still very new to OBS Studio so I don't have the XP you all have. :)

I hope that clarifies. You would not believe how hard it is to make explainer graphics when you are drunk.
 

DocBadwrench

New Member
Here is the recommendation I received from a FaceRig dev:

As far as we know, you cannot have two sources (in OBS) pointing at the same system resource (in this case, the virtual camera, which is seen as a webcam by the system, although it also applies to audio input). The same principle is when you are using the regular webcam in a software, and try to open up FaceRig, the camera cannot be accessed, because it is exclusively accessed by a single process/system, in a first request first serve fashion. This is how the OS handles access to resource drivers.

I think a solution to this is using manycam which lets you gain access to the same webcam simultaneously from different processes. You can try it out.

Going to give that a shot over the next day. Posting here so I close the loop on the thread for archival (and useful websearching) purposes.
 

DocBadwrench

New Member
Just closing the loop on this thread. I successfully used manycam to do this. But it requires turning over control for things like chromakeying and color-adjustments. Btw, this requires more than the base membership for that software. I got the lowest paid-access and that functionality was not covered.

The main issue, though, is that the cumulative affect of having Facerig, OBS, and manycam is that performance suffers greatly. It's inadvisable. A better long term solution was to somehow allow OBS to apply different filters to a single source.

Ultimately, this was not a showstopping problem. I'm just ditching this added capability because it's non-essential for my purposes.
 

Xaymar

Active Member
Have you tried the solution i described?
First make a new scene, then add the Video capture to it, fit it to screen - this is your unmodified source. Then in the scenes where you want to use a filtered camera, add the scene instead of the camera and apply the effects to the scene.
This way you can technically have infinite copies of the same unique source, each with its own effects, by just adding more scenes that have the original source.
 

DocBadwrench

New Member
OMG Xaymar. I did not actually understand that the first time you descibed it. I will give this another attempt tonight. Thank you for your patience. :)
 
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