A number of you are fans of Wirecast, a production tool that can input audio, video, and graphics content from various A/V sources plugged into your local computer and that allows you to switch and mix those sources for broadcasting to popular live streaming platforms such as YouTube, or our own DukeStream Wowza server. Some of you have mentioned that you would like to gain that same functionality for Panopto software recorders without having to purchase expensive mixing hardware. We’ve done some testing recently that shows you can do this by running a combination of Wirecast with Panopto.
The key is the Wirecast Virtual Camera Driver, which I credit my colleague Chip Bobbert for introducing me to. In his post, “Using Pro Cameras in a USB World,” (https://sites.duke.edu/ddmc/2014/02/19/using-pro-cameras-in-a-usb-world/) Chip offers an excellent short tutorial on how to use the Virtual Camera Driver:
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/87130283[/vimeo]
It’s important to mention that the combination of Wirecast plus Panopto creates a lot of system overhead on the local machine. I wouldn’t recommend this on a normal laptop. Panopto and Duke have done some cursory testing and found that it works fine on a fairly powerful desktop (i7 8GB RAM).
If anyone is interested in using this combination of tools, we’d love to hear from you. We’ll be interested to hear what your experience is and get a more precise sense of specs that can support this use case.
