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Like many of you, my church is using OBS to stream our services. It’s a free application that makes streaming really easy to set up; it’s not the ultimate solution, but for folks like us it’s perfect. We feed two cameras from a video switcher, ProPresenter output, and an audio feed from our mixer. What I want to explain is my setup in terms of hardware and software while providing a couple of options that may or may not make a difference for you. I won’t get into all the specifics for each piece of software as you can find that elsewhere fairly easily.
The first way to do this is to run ProPresenter and OBS on the same computer (we’re Mac folk, but you can transpose to PC-Land as necessary). As long as your machine is fairly new and robust it will do fine; OBS takes a bit of processing power, so it might overtax your computer. We have a 2019 Intel-based iMac with 16G RAM and it does fine.
The second option is to run OBS on a second computer. There are a few reasons (at least) to do this, and I’ll share mine in the next article. For now let’s stick with one computer.
The configuration concept is this: ProPresenter can run multiple “screen” outputs, each with the same or different content. Your main projector in the sanctuary would be the main screen. You might run a stage confidence monitor on a screen mounted on the back wall, so your singers can see it from the stage. And for OBS we want to set up a third screen output, customizing the content and layout so it can be overlaid with camera feeds in OBS.
RenewedVision, the developer of ProPresenter, has good tutorials on how to set up these screens as well as how to set up OBS. I’m not going to duplicate that here; watch those and use my information to help apply it to your setup.
First, the hardware: Connect your camera(s) or video switcher to the Mac (we use an HDMI>USB video converter). Connect your audio interface to the Mac; this device is getting an aux mix from an output on your mixing console (there are multiple ways to do this). And that’s it.
Now, create that new screen in ProPresenter. We want to set a theme that puts lyrics in a box on the stream (such as lower-thirds). Their tutorials show how to do this; I have a basic rectangle box set at the bottom with a text box that fits inside. The box is set to a gradient fill, with transparency reduced to soften it against the camera feed that will be behind it. You want this box to provide enough contrast for your lyrics. Name the theme OBS Lower-Thirds or something creative. (Let me jump ahead to a hack I had to do: you’re supposed to be able to set Allow Transparency in the OBS ProPresenter source properties (keep reading) so all you see in OBS is the lyrics and small box. In my case that didn’t work; I kept getting the entire screen, so I modified the theme in PP to include a black background set to 0 opacity/transparency.)
Install the latest OBS and run it. You’ll see a main window (content screen), with different panels below: Scenes, Sources, Audio mixer, and other stuff. Click the + button under Sources and select your video capture device (camera feed input). If the camera is on and active, you should see its feed in the main window above. Click + again and select Audio source (choose the audio interface connected to the Mac). The last source will be a feed from ProPresenter—we’ll get to that in just a second. The order of the visual sources matters in terms of what gets shown in front of the other, so drag them up and down as needed.
The Scenes panel to the left allows you to select different sources for various purposes in your service. For example, we have a Welcome scene that simply displays a static welcome slide before the service begins. Scene 2 is a ProPresenter On configuration, where we have the camera feed with the lyrics at the bottom (plus sound from the mixer). Scene 3 is a ProPresenter Off configuration, where we turn off the lyric box during the sermon. You can turn each source on and off by clicking the eyeball next to each one, then save that config as a scene. There’s a slick way to automate this in PP using Action Palettes, but watch that same PP/OBS video for more info.
The connection to get ProPresenter into OBS is through a free app called Syphon. Install this on the Mac (it’s Mac-only. PC users go with NDI). Now in OBS, click + to add another source and select Syphon from the pop-up. In this new dialog box, go to Source and select the ProPresenter Syphon option, Allow Transparency (see my note earlier). Now if you show a lyric slide in PP to your main output, you should also see it show in the lyric box in OBS.
That’s it. Set up your streaming options depending on which service you’re using (we’re Facebook). I’ll summarize that in another article, but now you should have an idea of the structure and approach for making this work. We’ll look at using a second Mac for OBS next time.