two puppets in one scene for an interview...daily show style

Question

What would be the most elegant way to record a talk show type scene where the two particpants are far apart? The best I can come up with is to have the two computers independently run character animator with syphon on and record the video conference off something like skype or MS teams...but that gets two uneven sized windows...not the daily show type setup I'd like. I've read the howtos here...but they would seem only to work with comptuers in the same room or they don't seem to support 2 puppets in the same scene.

Application: I'm teaching at a uni in the Netherlands. For one of my classes I created video annotations for each of the powerpoint slides using character animator (the red monster is great). Students go through the deck at their own speed and the clips are 30 secs to 5 mins long...good for short attention spans. For a class in the fall there are 2 of us who teach...and we play with each other in front of the class. We want to be in the scene together. Oh...and we don't want to have to spend any time at all compositing anything cause...lazy and clueless.

alank99101739 · Answer

Two approaches come to mind. The first is NDI streaming can go over a remote network, but it is more effort to set up. The NDI documentation does describe it, but it involves setting up a "directory server" so it does not only look for NDI sources locally. I tried but gave up as not worth it.

I have a much lower tech solution (more likely to work! ;-)). I use Skype to connect to someone I am interviewing, then you can use NDI to bring that signal into something like OBS Studio. (On the Mac I use EcammLive which is a paid product, but its easier to use.) Just put the two people side by side! Much easier than trying to mix the two video streams! If you want to get fancy, give both people the same desk and backdrop, the same height of desk, and try to get them to line up when you put the two video streams side by side in OBS/Ecamm/vmix etc.

As soon as you want to do anything fancier (e.g. both characters over the same background) you will need to use NDI streaming and work out how to get remote streams to work. (It does work, just needs special setup.) NDI is the only way I know to get a remote stream with transparency support so you can overlay it on a common background.

Or of course on Mac you can use Google Meet or similar, so both people just join the call separately. You can use CamTwist for example on Mac (not sure about Windows) to take the Syphon output from CH and turn it into a virtual camera that you feed into Google Meet as the camera of choice. Just make sure you select the 2YUI format camera and it all works fine for me.

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