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Using a "proper" camera as a webcam

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Re: Using a "proper" camera as a webcam

#181

Post by mikepurvis »

moduspol wrote: post #47
ldayley wrote: post #42

One thing that I’ve been trying to educate my colleagues about (including the A/V folks!) is that one can bypass the need to fiddle with drivers by using a generic hardware HDMI -> USB video conversion stick utilizing the mirrorless/DSLR’s HDMI output. It’ll mount as a generic video input that Zoom/Teams/OBS can use. You can find these for $40-$100 and it allows one to switch out hardware brands at will without insta…

I just failed at this recently. Apparently the camera needs to support "clean HDMI out," which many don't. Mine (for example) has HDMI out, but it's for like a "preview" screen for a photographer--it doesn't just output a clean, high-res HDMI stream. There's a web page on Canon's site here: https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/support/se... You'll see one list of cameras on there, but at the bottom, you…

This is the gap I hit, after trying to set up an old Canon G11 (released 2009) as an alternative to a webcam for my partner's Twitch streaming. It has a micro-HDMI port on the side of it, but only for reviewing photos— it doesn't pass through the live viewfinder image, and it appears there may be hardware limitations which prevent that from ever being possible, even with the various hacked up firmware options like CHDK/Magic Lantern [1].

[1]: https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/G11

Re: Using a "proper" camera as a webcam

#182

Post by munificent »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #137

If you go this route, please make sure your system is robust and ready to go before meetings. We had to ask one employee to go back to his reliable built-in webcam because every other meeting started with 2 minutes of him getting his camera turned on, messing with audio inputs, getting his microphone boom in place, and fighting other quirks. He also had a tendency to drop out of long meetings when his camera overheat…

I've got a very nice mirrorless camera and glass and eventually came to the same conclusion: It's just not worth the hassle even for the improvement in image quality.

However, I have found that it's absolutely worth it to upgrade to a better microphone. Just about anything is better than the mic built into most computers and better voice quality will give you more presence and make it significantly more enjoyable for others to listen to you. Wearing headphones also helps so that the computer isn't forced to do echo cancelation on the signal.

Re: Using a "proper" camera as a webcam

#183

Post by ClumsyPilot »

ISL wrote: post #126
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100 can get you an excellent microphone with a boom arm and that will be appreciated by your colleagues much more than being able to count your stubble in 4K 60 fps. I actually don't want colleagues to be able to inspect my face in immaculate detail, and the amount of ceremony and awkward stands begind the monitor, etc. do not make sence to me. The more expensive webcams do a decent enough job.

No boom needed for a big improvement -- the Blue Yeti Nano sits nicely on my desk, gets the job done.

I think its nice, I find a big mic on the desk gets in the way

Re: Using a "proper" camera as a webcam

#184

Post by cevn »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #137

If you go this route, please make sure your system is robust and ready to go before meetings. We had to ask one employee to go back to his reliable built-in webcam because every other meeting started with 2 minutes of him getting his camera turned on, messing with audio inputs, getting his microphone boom in place, and fighting other quirks. He also had a tendency to drop out of long meetings when his camera overheat…

That sounds unfortunate. After a few kinks at the beginning, I've moved to using my nikon z6 as webcam. The first kink was power delivery, I found a plug that goes into the battery slot.

After that everything works flawlessly.

Re: Using a "proper" camera as a webcam

#185

Post by JoshTriplett »

E4YomzYIN5YEBKe wrote: post #117
extinctpotato wrote: post #16

Could somebody do an ELI5 on why some phones have very good cameras but for some reason there's no standalone USB version of them?

That appears to be what the Opal C1 is doing. https://opalcamera.com/

That looks great, except for being mac-only.

Have they given any indication about whether it'll be a standard UVC camera and Just Work on all platforms?

Re: Using a "proper" camera as a webcam

#187

Post by MR4D »

orbital-decay wrote: post #95
pmoriarty wrote: post #15

If you're willing to throw $1000 at a "proper camera" of the sort the author recommends, then sure, it would be very disappointing if it didn't outperform the webcam built in to most laptops or phones. But is there a "proper camera" for under $100 that can also offer an improvement over a webcam?

The key to the better quality is not camera, it's light. A dedicated camera with a fast lens has three key improvements over a typical webcam: - bokeh - less noise in the dark, better dynamic range (almost irrelevant for a webcam) - less compressed video (potentially), which is critical for chroma keying; certain USB3 webcams can deliver a much less compressed stream as well. If you're willing to sacrifice bokeh and…

I'll second this. My recommended order is:

1 - Lighting

2 - Microphone

3 - Camera

Even when you see people on the news through webcams, their pictures and audio often are not well lit or mic'd.

Re: Using a "proper" camera as a webcam

#188

Post by tzs »

We had a surprising result using a "proper" camera instead of a webcam for a task.

We needed to take a picture of a particular thing every 15 seconds over a weekend. Our first though was to get a cheap webcam that has some reasonable interface to retrieve static images.

Then someone remembered that the owner of the company was doing some personal projects that involved photography and he had a bunch of cameras in his office. One of them was a Canon Digital Rebel. That could be controlled by a computer.

The owner always liked to save money, so agreed to let us use the Canon for the weekend. I wrote a script to trigger it every 15 seconds, set it running Friday before I left, and came back Monday to see how it went.

What I found was a dead camera. The electronics seemed fine, but something mechanical was broken. A bit of poking around on camera forums turned up that something in the mechanics of the Digital Rebel didn't like extended rapid picture taking, and apparently every 15 seconds counted as rapid if you were doing it for more than a few hours.

We then bought an under $100 Logitech webcam that ran a web server on its ethernet interface that made available a URL that when fetched gave you a static image of whatever the camera was currently looking at. It was simple to write a script to hit that URL every 15 seconds and save the result in a file named with the current timestamp. That ran flawlessly over the weekend capturing all the images we needed.

Re: Using a "proper" camera as a webcam

#190

Post by ISL »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #137

If you go this route, please make sure your system is robust and ready to go before meetings. We had to ask one employee to go back to his reliable built-in webcam because every other meeting started with 2 minutes of him getting his camera turned on, messing with audio inputs, getting his microphone boom in place, and fighting other quirks. He also had a tendency to drop out of long meetings when his camera overheat…

This advice goes for... life. Don't switch over from something reliable to a newer/flashier solution until the reliability of a new system gets close-enough that you won't break critical functionality.

Source: Recently swapped over to a better camera, after testing it out in informal meetings and verifying reliable function...

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