Setting up a virtual studio using OBS Studio and Voice Meeter Banana

I had to come up with a way to setup some virtual studio style conferencing for a virtual event.  I have experience with OBS Studio but was required to have a sound track running before the stream.  Now having learned a bit about broadcast video I wasn't sure how I was going to setup the sound track as OBS doesn't really have a way of playing an audio file to another interface your not listening to.  

So to accomplish this I initially used a griffin iMic and set the input to line in.  Unfortunately because of the time constraints I must have had a bad cable or connection input setup that hooked up to a phone's headphone jack but the sound on it wasn't very good and could be better.  Instead of troubleshooting the cable, software inputs etc, I knew there were some virtual audio input software that could route songs, and input from other software like skype.  

Eventually I came across Voice Meeter Banana an advanced virtual mixing console able to manage 5 audio inputs (3 physicals and 2 virtual) and 5 audio outputs (3 physicals and 2 virtual) through 5 multichannel busses (A1, A2, A3 & B1, B2). Eventually I will probably get the virtual audio channeling setup properly to have an application or browser setup on it's own input but for right now I just need quick, dirty and it has to work.

I did a youtube video about some OBS Basics which can be viewed on my youtube channel.  

You will need to have OBS Studio installed and Voicemeeter Banana

The setup for piping the audio is simple.  The audio cassette in the picture below can play audio files in this case I have an mp3.  B1 is the Voicemeeter VAIO digital input which is also B1 which is lite up next to the audio cassette.  

The Hardware out A2 is set as the Voice Meeter Input which we will set as Mic/Aux 3 in OBS Studio as shown below.  This allows us to play the audio we require with an option of listening to it or not though our headphones on the computer speakers (which is set to Yeti Stereo Microphone).

To hear what your playing on on Mic/Aux3 you need to have audio monitoring set to monitor and output.  This will put play the audio on your primary computer speakers which is the Yeti Mic as we had stated before.  However if you continue to play the audio you can set audio monitoring for Mic/Aux3 to Monitor off.  

Your audio will continue to play and it will stream out unless you mute the audio on the output in OBS Studio which is shown by the speaker being either white or red.  The Red Speaker means your audio is muted while the white means that it is being passed through to the stream.  So in the image below Mic/Aux3 and Mic/Aux are live and will be heard in the stream while Desktop Audio, Desktop Audio 2 and Mic/Aux2 are muted and will not be heard.

To do the studio style interview setup I am using Google Meet but anything will work, skype, gotomeeting, zoom, and using window or display capture and the crop filter I crop the window where they are speaking so they fit in the 1920x1080 canvas.

The Google Meet call looks like this with 3 tiles and the layout is set to 6 tiles manually as at most you will have 3 users on screen.

The shots shown in green are the filter when there are 2 people on screen the red shows the crop filter set to when there are 3 people on screen.  Below I've distorted the images but you can see where the users are in the silhouette.  When they login to the google meeting you get them positioned and ask them not to move to much.  In the case of the framing I chose to setup I asked them to try stay in the middle of their camera and used OBS to scale to fit the rest of the frame.

the 2 person shot

3 person shot

After some thought, I thought I would try a new layout for OBS where I would layout the guest in a 16:9 format, because the guess were having a hard time staying in frame, so in OBS studio I used the display capture and the crop filter to setup video feeds from your meeting app of choice (in this case it happens to be google meet, but can be skype, zoom, teams, etc)

the blue outline is the crop from OBS Studio and with a live camera feed you get a result with a graphical background as shown below.  The top image is from an onsite camera with lighting and the other 2 are the cropped display from google meet.

Then you can have on display a computer screen video, etc, in this case it is an interview from google meet, where we just have the interviewer and the guest.  This gives more room for the interviewer to move and keeps them from getting cut off because of such type framing going with the full screen view as shown above.

Depending on the setup you can also have different frame this below is done with a camcorder and a HDMI to USB capture card, with 2 point lighting.  OBS will let you make groups and put graphics and text as shown below.

I put a graphic on the left and put a tight shot which was scaled from the wide shot from the shot above.

Audio quality is really important and depends if they have a microphone; most of the time they are using the phone or built in mic on the laptop and adjustments must be made with speakers so you don't get feedback from hearing your self through their speakers and back through their mic.  To prep it up takes about 30 minutes, for placement and audio.  For people doing this I would recommend they ask people wear earphones and get an irig mic or something similar.  It makes a big difference in the sound.

It is difficult to keep people from moving but this setup does work pretty well, to see some samples checkout the STARFest - St. Albert Readers Festival videos.

Why Flash will die

Adobe Flash (http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/) is quickly becoming the bane of the internet. Mostly used for online video or interactive websites, flash is quickly becoming a hassle that people don't want to deal with. Within the last year Flash has become the main vector for many malware attacks. Flash also has major issues with causing the CPU to max out, browsers crashing, and memory management. Flash is also not as good for SEO and can lower your ranking on search engines.

A brief history on Flash

Flash has been until now the best platform for delivering low bandwidth highly interactive web objects. What does that mean? Well, Flash has been a great platform for delivering interactive content and eventually making up most of the video on the web. This was due mostly to ActionScript; a programmable language for Flash that allows you to do things you couldn't do before on the web with ASP, PHP, ROR (Ruby on Rails), Perl CGI, JavaScript, QuickTime and windows media player. Flash showed much of it's promise in Version 6. That is where ActionScript became really useful, and more mainstream starting to replace the older program Director, which was almost the same program just raster based with a language called Lingo and had much more CPU and Ram requirements. Director was also given the same options as Flash for posting it to the internet via The Shockwave plug in, but did not catch on as much as Flash did, probably due to the size of the player files, and the lack of bandwidth most internet users had at the time. Flash has quickly come to be the leading video player of choice on the web, and there is no better example of this then youtube. This was probably due to flash being able to read the length of time in the "Flash Video" and the communication capabilities between different swf files where you can put in "markers" or "hotspots" to trigger events in flash players.

So why will Flash Die?

To put it simply, there is a shift to move things on the web to open source and open standards preventing any one company from controlling the web. That is only part of the story. Flash has also drifted away from why people used it in the first place. A low bandwidth solution for providing highly interactive content. Flash as it has matured has become more bloated due to request from flash users for more features and capabilities. Eventually I think Flash will disappear from the web all together unless Adobe does 3 things.

1. Makes Flash Open Source


2. Fixes Flash from hogging the Processor and Memory


3. Stops Flash from crashing web browsers

Most of the things done in flash now with the exception of a few items can be done now with javascript and css. With the move to web standardized content management systems which pretty much eliminates flash unless you put in a Flash Banner, Gallery, video player or some other flash element which has to be custom coded, Flash becomes very inconvenient to implement into websites. If Adobe were to open up Flash and get partners like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Yahoo to sign on and make flash freely available to everyone to make it easy and very cheap to produce flash swf files. This might be enough for Flash to become a true web standard and have HTML 5 have a native tag just for flash instead of using Active X (which is what they did for video). The odds of this happening are slim to none, it's hard enough to get these guys to agree on anything, let alone release control of their own technologies for an open technology that standardizes everything, which would be a benefit to us all. If Adobe wants flash to live on into the the future I think they have to open it up or it will go the way Director did into oblivion.