Question / Help Need advice on next move - OBS and Photoshop MAC

[DanJaworsky]

Hi everybody,
I'm an artist doing live digital painting & drawing.

Setup:
I'm running a late 2015 Macbook Pro and was having CPU overload issues so I got a refurb Windows machine as a dedicated encoding / uploading / streaming device. Now I'm just using the NDI plugin to export my mac display running Photoshop over the network to the Windows machine.

Problem:
My stream looks a ton better but I'm still having a lot of problems with running OBS and Photoshop at the same time. OBS is fine for a while and then the cpu starts climbing up out of control to over 100%-200% of CPU ( this is in activity monitor - the app itself is saying 10-20%). This causes Photoshop to start slowing down and everything in general freaking out on my machine and killing my soul.

The Windows machine was super cheap and it has no problems handling what I throw at it so far as far as compiling the sources, encoding, keeping a solid upload. The Macbook is a newer generation everything and can't handle these two apps (OBS and Photoshop) open at the same time, so I'm thinking that there is something else besides 'not enough machine' at play here.

From reading on my own I have guesses about what is happening but can't be sure:
1. Photoshop and OBS share resources that I don't see that are making them hate each other.
2. OBS for Mac is really just that resource intensive on the Mac for reasons unknown to me and them's just the brakes.
3. There is an unseen bug in OBS that someone could fix eventually.

Proposed solution?
If I get the most basic and cheap capture card (like the Cam Link from Elgato) will this allow me to just stream my Macbook as a source? Then I can just bypass OBS all together on the Mac. ...or are there GPU / CPU problems with that too? Will this cause new nightmares I haven't thought about?

Any other advice?

A few log files attached.
Thanks!

 

[Narcogen]

If you're just capturing the display and sending it over NDI to another machine, use ScanConverter instead of OBS.

https://www.newtek.com/ndi/tools/

The CamLink may work but Elgato's history of support for MacOS is abysmal. I'd look at BlackMagic, Magewell, AJA.

 

[DanJaworsky]

Hey Thanks Narcogen for the advice! ScanConverter will only broadcast all three monitors I have side by side as one source, there are hardly any settings to fix it. BUT the recommendation for ScanConverter lead me to something that works the best so far without as many dropped frames from the stream: vMixDesktopCapture.

I still think that I'd like to try a wired solution, because I'm trying to broadcast a giant Cintiq monitor over my network wirelessly. With the way I use photoshop, it appears to freeze every 2 seconds for a few frames, but Photoshop itself is working perfectly now.

But just pointing me in the direction of another NDI plugin opened me up much more to the problem I'm trying to solve, so thanks again.

I suppose I'll try an HDMI to usb solution and hope that Mac doesn't decide to ruin it for me. No capture cards that I see explicitly say that they support Streaming ONE desktop FROM your mac to a usb port as a source into OBS. Most of them are talking about using a video camera as a webcam or streaming games from a console, but I would hope and think that hdmi out is hdmi out (famous last words).

 

[Narcogen]

You should absolutely use wired connections for NDI whenever possible.