OBS/Camlink4K/Sony Alpha a6400 - Struggling with settings
Hi! I have a Sony Alpha a6400 hooked up to my computer with the CamLink 4k and being pulled into OBS Studio (31.1.2). My computer is a Lenovo Legion (Intel Core i9-14900HX, 2200 Mhz, 24 Cores) with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070.
I livestream to YouTube with educational videos and Q&A's. I keep having this issue where I plug in the capture card and start OBS, and then all the scenes that use the capture card video are just a black screen. Sometimes if I wait, it'll start displaying, but other times I can't get it to ever show up. Today I ran out of time to troubleshoot before my live and had to use my webcam lol.
I attached the properties I have on the source.
1) What might be causing the camera to sometimes be black, and sometimes work?
2) Is there a capture card or set up that's more reliable and more plug and play? I got all this in 2022 so not sure if there's a worthwhile option I should invest in.
Thanks for any help!!!!
(here is the livestream from today if that helps https://www.youtube.com/live/g8mXu4gaWBs?si=w8nj6JyTNZODWoXH)
Tracy Lenz
YouTube
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2 Replies
If you unplug and plug it back in you probably need to change the source
So right above the crop in that screenshot you sent
If you click on the dropdown for the capture card selection
There might be a duplicate that’s greyed out
Choose any other device and then go back to the card
That should fix it
But probably be something you have to do every time as windows treats it as a new device often
Thanks for responding. Changing the source is definitely something I'm used to doing because you're right, unplugging and plugging back in things (since it's a laptop that travels with me) is a common occurance. But the capture card is the only thing that doesn't reliably work when I select the right one. My rodecaster/mic set-up likes to switch back to the internal mic too and that always works fine. When I switch to other cameras I can see those fine (integrated cam, webcam, etc) but the capture card is just a black screen.
I have a desktop I use for my team to remote into for certain software, so I could theoretically make that the streaming PC for video...but the two PC set-up seems like I'm overcomplicating something that already overcomplicated. It's on the table for consideration, though.