Question / Help Is there any way to capture the Live Scene?

[deetari]

As in the title, is there any way to capture the current live scene? The scene source only works with individual scenes, and there does not appear to be a way to make it dynamically change based on the current live scene.

For the purpose of commentary, it would be helpful to be able to capture the currently live scene as a source. We'd place it in another scene and add things like stream chat, notes, and so-on before projecting this aggregate scene onto a monitor for commentators to look at. This would allow commentators to have more information available to them while working.

I've played with the virtual camera plug-in, but the slight delay caused by using that approach makes everything feel unsynced and rather unpleasant from the commentary screen.

OBS cannot capture its own projectors as Window/Game sources, either, so that approach is unfortunately infeasible.

Are there any alternatives for this that don't have such issues?

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Somewhat unrelated, but is there any way to edit the currently live scene without actually displaying those edits, as well? It's a little bothersome to try to add text or reposition an element in a live scene at the moment.

 

[WizardCM]

For your first request, you could do something like an NDI output and then use the NDI Studio Monitor application on another computer on the network to receive the feed.

For your second request, this is the purpose of "Studio Mode". You have a Preview that can be edited behind the scenes, and a Program that is the live output.

 

[deetari]

Thanks for the quick response! Numbering my answers for clarity:

1) It's probably worth looking into NDI options for this, but we'd prefer to keep everything on the same system if possible. Even if we do go this path, does it not incur the same type of lag/delay that the virtual camera plugin does?

2) Studio Mode does not hide edits made to the current live scene, unfortunately. If you attempt to add a source to the scene that's currently live, it shows up immediately. I'm forced to either switch to another scene while making the edit, or to duplicate the current scene and make edits in the duplicate before transitioning to it.

If that's not the intended behaviour, then I'm rather surprised, as it behaves that way on every system I've tried it on.

 

[WizardCM]

1) You can use NDI to pass media on the same machine. Skype does this for example, to pass individual callers as individual inputs to OBS. Latency should be minimal, near-realtime.

2) Ah, that's a possible default configuration. While in Studio Mode, you'll see a gear icon ⚙ between the two previews alongside a Quick Transition dropdown. Click the Gear, and enable "Duplicate scenes" and "Duplicate sources". Note this could result in duplicated audio in some situations, though OBS tries to be clever about it.

 

[deetari]

1) Sounds promising, I'll give it a go!

2) That's... a game changer that I would never have found, hah. I never expected the gear icon by 'Transition' to have settings for Preview/Program behaviour (and I don't think it did when it was first added, did it...?). I very hopefully scoured the Settings for these settings instead, and never found anything! This is super helpful, thanks so much. :)