Social Distancing: Remote Mixing

[bewk]

I'm on High Sierra with HD|Native.

Is there a way to aggregate devices in Windows like you can in macOS? I'm not familiar enough with Windows so others might be able to chime in. I came across this which shows the steps for combining the Zoom audio device and built in hardware on a Mac. I'd assume there to be an equivalent on the Windows side. I tried this setup as well and as mentioned earlier it still was sending out mono audio via Zoom. Listento was still giving the most reliable stream and best quality audio.

-Chris

[KingTor]

We've used Source-Nexus Pro with great success for getting audio from Pro Tools to Zoom, Skype, etc. Honestly, though, haven't done any stereo streaming in awhile. I think I know what I'm going to test today. :)

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[reichman]

Originally Posted by Ryan Young

I'm honestly having fantastic results with OBS and YouTube live-streaming. There's only about a 3 second encoding lag but picture plays smoothly and audio is "uncompressed" and in perfect sync.

Hello Ryan:

On your enthusiastic recommendation, I'm going to try OBS tomorrow. Any signal flow advice? How did you do the routing?

Thanks,

[EarHole]

I looked into OBS and the quality is fantastic but based on what streaming service you use, there's about a 30 second delay.
I found Dacast to be a nice service as you can provide clients with password protected stream links.

The issue with You tube live, facbook live, and twitch is that anyone who later looks at your stream can see what you're working on. So you mix one project today and that client forwards the email to someone else and then tomorrow they can see the next project you're working on.

[Ryan Young]

Originally Posted by reichman

Hello Ryan:

On your enthusiastic recommendation, I'm going to try OBS tomorrow. Any signal flow advice? How did you do the routing?

Thanks,

• I placed a 5.1 send on every master (DIA, BG, FX, MX, etc) and bussed it to a 5.1 aux track.
• I placed a down-mixer plugin on that aux and set the output to optical out on my OMNI.
• Optical out on OMNI feeds my Mac Pro's optical in.
• In OBS, I set the "mic" or audio source to be the computer's "digital in". It's a perfect stereo representation of whatever I'm working on.
• I set some really cool "scenes" in OBS that I can switch when desired. It can show just the video window, both my edit and mix windows with video window, etc. Whatever you want to get creative with.

Check out some screenshots I posted here. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions. Once you kind of visualize the flow, it's pretty easy to do. The screen will be perfectly in sync with the audio feed so it's a great way for them to see you work and hear what you're working on. Playbacks (with just the video window on OBS) are great too.

[jeremiahmoore]

What hardware are folks using to capture and stream their video feed?

Looking at a few options here for HDMI or DVI > USB

-jeremiah



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[reichman]

Originally Posted by Ryan Young

• I placed a 5.1 send on every master (DIA, BG, FX, MX, etc) and bussed it to a 5.1 aux track.
• I placed a down-mixer plugin on that aux and set the output to optical out on my OMNI.
• Optical out on OMNI feeds my Mac Pro's optical in.
• In OBS, I set the "mic" or audio source to be the computer's "digital in". It's a perfect stereo representation of whatever I'm working on.
• I set some really cool "scenes" in OBS that I can switch when desired. It can show just the video window, both my edit and mix windows with video window, etc. Whatever you want to get creative with.

Check out some screenshots I posted here. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions. Once you kind of visualize the flow, it's pretty easy to do. The screen will be perfectly in sync with the audio feed so it's a great way for them to see you work and hear what you're working on. Playbacks (with just the video window on OBS) are great too.

Thanks Ryan! OBS is great. I discovered something: you can use Dolby Audio Bridge as your playback engine in Pro Tools, and then have OBS pickup Dolby Audio Bridge as an Audio Input Capture. No external wiring necessary. I'm a little disappointed I can't figure out how to do something similar with AJA video hardware, but doing Display Capture of the regular Pro Tools video playback window is actually pretty good for streaming. So I'm set.

Latency on Facebook Live was about 19 seconds. I'll update this message as I test latency on other platforms.

[reichman]

Here are the results. It really comes down to YouTube Live and Source Live. And note that the latencies will obviously vary, these are the averages of what I got.

Pro Tools – video and stereo streaming over the internet:
OBS Display Capture & Dolby Audio Bridge:
Facebook Live - stereo ~ 19sec. latency - okay video
Twitch - stereo ~ 14sec. latency - okay video
YouTube Live - stereo ~ 6-10sec. latency - okay video (YouTube latency settings did not correlate with measured latencies)

Application-Specific Display Capture & Audio:
Microsoft Teams - mono, some time stretching ~ 0.5 sec latency, low quality video
Source Live - stereo ~ 6sec. Latency - video not as good as OBS, but better than Teams - great built-in client features
SessionLink Pro - stereo ~ 0.5sec latency, A/V sync squishy and not good (using screen capture), video not as good as OBS, but better than Teams, good client features
Skype sound quality too low for mix review

[noiseboyuk]

Originally Posted by reichman

Here are the results. It really comes down to YouTube Live and Source Live. And note that the latencies will obviously vary, these are the averages of what I got.

Pro Tools – video and stereo streaming over the internet:
OBS Display Capture & Dolby Audio Bridge:
Facebook Live - stereo ~ 19sec. latency - okay video
Twitch - stereo ~ 14sec. latency - okay video
YouTube Live - stereo ~ 6-10sec. latency - okay video (YouTube latency settings did not correlate with measured latencies)

Application-Specific Display Capture & Audio:
Microsoft Teams - mono, some time stretching ~ 0.5 sec latency, low quality video
Source Live - stereo ~ 6sec. Latency - video not as good as OBS, but better than Teams - great built-in client features
Skype sound quality too low for mix review

Definitely worth trialling Session Link Pro imo. It's not been 100% rock solid every day, but its largely very good. Latency around 0.25 secs and HD video. Note - for solid sync you need to feed it with a capture card, not the screengrab option.

[jeremiahmoore]

Hi all -

Still working out methods here, been remote-mixing across several sessions, transmitting from San Francisco to NY.

I've been trialing session link pro here and have used it for two of said sessions.

It's fine, but I'm not seeing any quality advantage over Zoom with "original audio" mode and stereo enabled, and zoom is free.

I've been unable to get encoded video into it directly except from my logitech webcam. I purchased a hardware encoder (elgato HD60) but it's not supported by this; I'll be experimenting with another capture method this coming week (Magewell HDMI Plus).

Of course I can't *fully* tell what the experience is like for my client on the remote end. I may ask her to iphone video the experience and send me the file, so I can get a greater sense of any lagginess



Have not yet tried it, but working to get YouTube Live set up and tested.

It seems promising for higher-latency realtime streaming mix for review, which we discuss immediately after. But it's not good for conversing; I'm thinking of pairing it with simultaneous regular video call or conference system on the side for lower rez / lower latency communication.

Now all these various inputs/outputs need routing etc; Source Nexus to the rescue here thus far.


-jeremiah