Wirecast Empowers Single Operators to Run Multi-Camera Live Streams with Ease | By The Digital Insider

Running a professional multi-camera live stream as a one-person crew may sound impossible, but with Wirecast by Telestream, it’s not only achievable—it’s efficient. By combining capture cards, PTZ cameras, and a joystick controller, a solo operator can switch between multiple camera angles in real time while maintaining broadcast-quality production. Wirecast acts as the central hub, managing HDMI and SDI sources, PTZ over NDI, and audio from a USB interface. Its intuitive layer-based workflow allows operators to easily organize audio, camera feeds, and pre-recorded media, while Stream Deck integration ensures fast switching at the push of a button. The result: smooth, professional multi-camera productions without the need for a full crew. Check out the video:

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I am moving on my gear in for yet another multi-camera live stream setup now if you have the budget and the crew to have multiple camera operators each run in the camera for you these aren't too hard but when you're trying to do one by yourself it's a little bit different we believe now in an earlier video I took a quick look at how I do these live streams but in this video I'm going to go in depth and show you step by step how to do a one-man band live stream complete with multiple cameras and animated graphics so let's take a look at how I pull off these live streams by myself so you will need a piece of software to take the video from your cameras encode it and broadcast it live to the web there are several options you can use including vmix OBS or the software I use which is made by telestream and is called wirecast this software can do all sorts of things and we will be taking a look at some of its abilities in this video so there's a variety of ways to get video into wirecast the first way I'm going to talk about is using a capture card capture cards bringing video into your computer via HDMI or SDI you can use an external capture card or an internal capture card if you have a desktop but as I have a laptop I'm using an external capture card there's a variety of these capture cards from magewell Blackmagic and Elgato these capture cards will let you bring in professional video cameras or dslrs anything that has an HDMI or SDI output can be brought into your computer moreover you don't have to just hook one of these up you can hook two or more cameras up and switch back and forth between the two cameras using wirecast as a video Switcher foreign is to hook up several cameras to an atem mini and pre-switch the cameras and bring them into wirecast wirecast will see the atem mini as one source and you will switch on the switcher itself instead of in-wire cast now from a solo operator's point of view there's one thing wrong with either one of these options and that is that you need camera operators if you ever want to change any of the shots on any of your cameras well when you're one-man crew and you don't have camera operators what is another option the best option is probably using ndi to hook up multiple PTZ cameras which you can then control with a joystick and here I'm going to show you how to do that so I'll post links to the Gear I used in the description field of this video first of all we'll need a Poe switch Poe means that one ethernet cord delivers video signal from your camera to the computer power from the switch to the camera and control of the camera to the joystick controller we'll also need a thunderbolt 4 dock from OWC to give us a bunch of extra ports to hook up everything that we need for this live stream we will need some way to bring audio into the computer this is a Behringer USB audio interface which allows us to bring audio in from a dedicated audio mixer a stream deck while it's not essential is really nice because you can use it as both a switcher to switch between your different cameras and you can bring in animated graphics and titles with it and I'll show you how to do that later you'll also need a couple PTZ cameras and the joystick controller to control these PTZ cameras for purposes of this demonstration I'm also going to use an external capture card to hook my Sony fx6 up so that I'll have three different camera sources so here's a look at the OWC Thunderbolt Dock and what I plugged into each port and here's what goes into each port on the poe switch thank you and here's how I set up the audio interface foreign TZ cameras and the joystick controller a stream deck and an external keyboard and mouse are connected to the OWC Thunderbolt dock a thunderbolt ethernet adapter is connected to a second Thunderbolt port on the laptop I want to keep all broadcast traffic separate from my internet connection so my Poe switch is only for the cameras and the joystick controller the high-speed internet line to stream the video out on connects to this external adapter next let's get the joystick controller and the PTZ cameras communicating with each other first you'll have to open a free app from PTZ Optics go to the settings menu and choose multi-camera settings in the box that pops up you will enter IP addresses for both cameras 1 and 2 which correspond to the two PTZ cameras I'm not an I.T expert but basically the cameras and joystick controller need to all be in the same range the first three sets of digits should be the same I didn't want these to be anywhere close to my actual network settings for connecting to the internet so I changed the default IP addresses I entered the following IP addresses camera 1 169.254.150.10 and camera2169.254.150.11. now we need to go into the joystick controller and add those IP addresses for each of the PTZ cameras we will add a device here and then we will enter the IP address for Camera one [Music] and Camera 2. Then we will go into setup and we will set up the IP address on the joystick controller let's take a look at this whole setup I've got a capture card running to my fx6 an Ethernet Line running to PTZ camera one looking out my front window and another ethernet Line running to PTZ camera number two looking out my son's bedroom window now let's go into wirecast we're going to start things off by adding the audio interface now wirecast works with layers much like Photoshop or most mles I'm going to put the audio on the bottom layer because we want the audio to be present at all times now on layer 2 I'm going to start adding my visual sources wirecast allows you to add pre-recorded media files in this case we're going to add a still because every live stream needs bars now this still doesn't have the correct aspect ratio for my project so I'm going to just scale it up and send it live now let's bring in a pre-recorded video we'll add another source choose the video and it will be imported on layer 2. This allows you to cut away from live cameras to pre-recorded videos that your viewers can watch live cameras now let's start to go add in our live sources any video that you want to bring in Via capture card will be found under the video sources Tab and there is the capture card that has the fx6 on it next let's bring in the PTZ cameras now these are not connected via HDMI or SDI to a capture card instead they're connected on the network so we're going to have to go into the network tab to find the PTZ cameras so there's PTZ camera one and PTZ camera 2. I'm going to take quick screenshots of the view that each camera sees for use with the stream deck next we're going to start up the stream deck software and drag the screenshots I just took with a view of each camera on them to a button on the stream deck I will then map each button to the corresponding camera this one is the fx6 shot I will then repeat the process for PTZ cameras one and two these pictures are mapped to the physical LED buttons on the stream deck and when you press a button the corresponding camera is selected into preview and wirecast and ready to be taken live foreign ly let's add some animated graphics and titles to do that we're going to use a piece of software called new blue title live I'm going to select four pre-made animated graphic templates to bring into our broadcast. Now let's go back over into wirecast to bring these animated graphics in now we want these animated graphics to show up over the top of the video so we'll add them on the layer above the video layer we'll add a source these sources will be found under the network tab these are ndi sources because they are on the network even though they're on the same computer however we have a little bit of a problem here we want to bring in four separate animated graphics we are already using level 1 in wirecast for audio and level 2 for camera sources there are five levels in wirecast which leaves us with only three available levels luckily wirecast allows you to Nest levels and side levels which basically gives you an unlimited number of levels that you can use in wirecast here we'll Nest all four animated graphics inside One graphics level and then map each of these four animated titles to a button on the stream deck so now we have the stream deck set up with four animated graphics and three cameras that you can call up all with just the touch of a button here you can see me switching between the three different camera shots I have and with just the touch of a button I can bring in animated graphics as well thank you and I can change the shot with the joystick controllerforeign  so that's a look at how I pull off multicam live streams as a single operator thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next one.

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Published on The Digital Insider at https://is.gd/iEhIwJ.