Everything you need to know about using an iPhone as a WIRELESS camera with the ATEM Mini

in this video I'm going to show you three different ways to use an iPhone as a wireless camera with the A10 Mini [Music] hi I'm Aaron perecki so each of these options requires different apps or different accessory devices and they have a different total cost once you add everything up I want to give you a range of options to choose from depending on your budget so some of these options are going to be better quality than others let's start with the simplest and cheapest options and then work up to the more expensive options later first off if you've tried to use the built-in camera app on your iPhone you may have noticed that you aren't able to get rid of all the stuff around the edges so it's just not super useful as a live stream camera so instead we need to use some other app that can output a clean feed of the phone's camera and then we need some way to get that into the atem there are a bunch of different apps to choose from but I'm going to show you a few of the options that I've used in the past most of these work by treating an external display as a secondary screen that the phone app can push the clean video to that secondary display can be shared wirelessly over AirPlay and it also works the same with a wired HDMI connection so if you don't need it to be Wireless then all the apps I'm going to show you here will also work fine with a wired HDMI out of your phone to make it Wireless you'll need some sort of receiver at the other end to receive that wireless feed from your phone and turn it back into HDMI for the A10 mini so all of these apps work work the same way either you take an HDMI cable from the iPhone HDMI dongle into the A10 mini or you can AirPlay the iPhone to an AirPlay receiver like an Apple TV we'll start by looking at the options for apps on the iPhone and then we'll look at options for receiving the video feed wirelessly overviewer is a free and very simple application that runs on your iPhone once you've mirrored your display using AirPlay or connected with HDMI the app doesn't actually show the video at all anymore this is all you see this little control surface there's a couple of buttons but not that many different options this one lets you turn on the front light this lets you change between the different camera options so I have the 2X or the wide angle or even the front this one rotates the image around one of the nice things about overviewer is that it's extremely simple there's not a lot of features so there's not a lot that can go wrong when you're sharing your iPhone camera another option is the shoot app for iOS this is not a free app it does have in-app purchases but it has a lot more features than just a simple clean VW overviewer in the shoot app you can also choose which of the phones cameras you are using and and you can even enable features like drawing on top of your video it has a little grid you can choose whether you want to send audio in your feed as well there's even an option for ndi output which we'll get to a little bit later there's a few different plans you can purchase depending on what features you want there's also a lifetime updates option to get all current and future features forever these are my two top apps for this but you might be able to find some other options as well next let's move on to the different options you have for receiving the wireless camera feed from the phone with the iPhone there's generally three different ways you can have a wireless receiver for any of these apps the free option is if you already have a Mac running Mac OS Ventura then actually that Mac can be an AirPlay display from your phone let me show you how this works assuming all your devices are on the same wireless network already go ahead and pull down on the control center tap the mirroring icon and you should see your Mac appear in the list so if I tap this it'll just take over the computer screen and now my computer screen is a mirror of my phone so now whenever I opened up in any of these clean feed video apps my iPhone camera just appears on my Max monitor so to get this into the A10 mini I will take a USBC to HDMI adapter plug that into the computer plug the other end into the atom and then make sure I set my computer to mirror not use as a separate display once you plug the other end into the A10 mini you should see a copy of your computer screen show up on the HDMI port in the a time and now when you're sharing your iPhone to your Mac and you're in an app like overviewer you can just cut to this like any other camera angle this is a great option because this doesn't cost you any extra for the receiver assuming of course you already have a Mac running the latest Mac OS of course the downside is that it does take over your computer and you can't really use your computer for anything else while you're doing this and the computer screen is just showing a copy of the phone and if you look closely you'll actually see the mouse cursor is on the screen as well so another downside yet another downside to this option is if my phone disconnects from the Wi-Fi or the screen mirroring fails for some reason then my computer will go back to the desktop which means if that camera is on air in the A10 mini you would suddenly be streaming your desktop so you can do a couple things to help this like using a branded background for your desktop and keep your desktop clean the next option is to use a dedicated device that can receive the airplay signal and turn it into HDMI the expensive option is an Apple TV but there are also these much cheaper devices that are sold under a variety of brand names but you can usually find them by searching for Miracast I'll leave a link to the one I'm using in this video down below these are pretty cheap and they can receive AirPlay as well as Chromecast shares keep in mind that these are way underpower compared to an Apple TV so keep that in mind when you're looking at the sample video here so the way this works is that you can either get this device onto your main Wi-Fi network and then it appears as another place you can AirPlay to or you can actually have it broadcast its own Wi-Fi network and then connect to that network from your phone and that's actually a great option if you are using this somewhere like a hotel where you don't necessarily trust the hotel Wi-Fi network in either case you pull down the iPhone Control Center and then tap the screen mirroring button and then choose the Miracast device in my case I've named mine the house files and in a few seconds your phone screen should be mirrored to this device and again when you open any of these clean feed camera apps your phone camera should be mirrored into the atem what you're seeing now is the iPhone camera shared wirelessly into my atem using the Miracast device so again keep in mind that this is not a super powerful device so there might be some lag or some frame drops but the good news is these devices are super cheap and they also have that trick where they broadcast their own Wi-Fi hotspot a more expensive option that works almost the same way is to use an Apple TV to receive the airplay feed the Apple TV is a lot more expensive than these Miracast devices but it is also definitely better quality but the other downside with the Apple TV is that it doesn't broadcast its own Wi-Fi so you have to connect it to a Wi-Fi network or wired Network and make sure your phone is on that same network but once you get set up again just like before you mirror your phone to the Apple TV and then once you launch a clean feed camera app this is what it looks like in the Apple TV this is the live video feed from my iPhone wirelessly into the atem recorded into this video you will probably notice that this looks better quality than the Miracast device but again keep in mind the price difference for the Apple TV while this is less likely to have frame drops compared to the Miracast it is still limited by the speed of your Wi-Fi network one thing you can do to help is to get the ethernet version of the Apple TV and plug that into the wired Network that way you have only one Wireless hop instead of two personally I use this option quite a lot during my live streams I think it's really handy to be able to quickly share a screen wirelessly either a phone screen or even mirroring my computer screen or my actual phone interface the Apple TV just kind of sits there in the rack out of the way and I don't really think about it it's just always there ready to receive a feed as far as the cost goes the Apple TVs are not super expensive the Wi-Fi one is 129 and the ethernet model is 149. and while this is definitely more expensive than the Miracast devices it is still relatively affordable okay I should interject here to also quickly mention Android devices if you don't care about Android devices as cameras just go ahead and Skip ahead there's timestamps down in the description below basically the same Concepts also apply to Android there are some apps that support a clean video out either over HDMI or over Wireless and then you'll also need some sort of receiver to receive that feed the Chromecast is one option for receiving a mirrored screen from Android but I actually don't recommend that because the Chromecast device is always output an hdcp encrypted signal which means you probably won't be able to connect that directly to an A10 mini it'll just not show anything on the screen instead you'll have to remove that hdcp which some HDMI Splitters do but you can never actually really guarantee that when you're buying one so I just generally don't recommend using a Chromecast instead the mirror screen devices work almost exactly like a Chromecast although they usually have even more options than a Chromecast does like AirPlay for example and they don't force themselves into HTTP mode so you can take this mirror screen device plug it into your A10 mini and then share your screen from Android into that mirror screen device just like I showed on the iPhone as far as apps go there are a couple of options but the only one I know of for sure that works is called filmic Pro that app actually also exists on the iPhone but it's kind of more complicated so I just like to use some of the simpler apps on the iPhone instead if you do know of more options for Android apps with a clean HDMI out over Wireless please let me know in the comments below okay so these are the simplest and cheapest options but I also want to talk about a totally different kind of option which is ndi ndi is a network protocol for moving video around a network this is a bit more advanced than just using AirPlay and it does require more thought put into your network layout for example you're going to want to make sure that you're using a relatively new Wi-Fi router that supports the latest Wi-Fi protocols the bandwidth required by ndi is pretty high ndi also definitely works better over a wired connection so you should at least try to make sure that your receiver is hardwired to your network this will also be better if your phone is also wired into the network but of course the whole point of this was about wireless phones so we'll see if we can make it work anyway but nothing about the setup changes depending on whether the phone connection is wired or Wireless as long as it's all on the same network so I'm going to go through a few different options of what's available on the iPhone for sending ndi feeds and a few options for turning that ndi feed into HDMI for the A10 mini on the app side of things the app I showed you earlier called Shoot also supports ndi if you get one of the paid options another option is the app called ndi HX camera this app just starts right up into a picture of showing the camera there are a couple of options in this app you can change the settings here and choose what bandwidth of ndi you want to send as well as front-facing or rear facing camera and whether you want to send audio out as well so once your ndi camera is on the network then you can receive it from any ndi receiver and that takes us to the three ndi receivers I want to talk talk about an Apple TV the magewell pro convert and the bird dog play so let's start with the Apple TV again you'll need to buy the Apple TV which is either 129 for the Wi-Fi version or 149 for the ethernet version but in addition to the Apple TV itself you'll then also need to buy the ndi receiver application this is not a cheap application it is 99 but it does work great okay so I've got the Apple TV connected into the A10 mini here now I can scroll down and choose the ndi receiver application so if I choose this it'll bring me to this sort of home screen and now I can tap my remote and choose the ndi camera phone that's showing up on the network the app does remember the previous Source you used and it automatically shows it if it's available so I can tap on the pink iPhone camera and that's the feed showing from my iPhone so now you see the A10 mini is just showing the live feed from my phone camera which is sitting off to the side here I have a pretty good Wi-Fi signal here and my Apple TV is wired in but I am noticing a couple of Skips and frame drops here this does also depend on the quality that you are outputting from the ndi app so we can go ahead and change that to see how it affects it this is on the lowest quality mode but I don't know why it's not 16x9 anymore but let's go ahead and try it in the shoot App instead when I've enabled ndi in the shoot app you'll see this little ndi in the corner and now I'll go ahead and have to choose that from my Apple TV so I'm going to tap on this and now I see a new source PK phone shoot let's go ahead and try that and now this is the feed from the shoot app give you a look at this this is the real-time feed from the shoot app we'll see how this compares to the ndi camera app again this will totally depend on the quality of your Wi-Fi as well as other interference that might be nearby if my phone disconnects then it'll actually freeze frame on whatever was the last thing shown eventually it'll time out and go back to the home screen the nice thing about the ndi receiver app on the Apple TV is that it is not extra Hardware to buy and you can also use that Apple TV for other things later and it is pretty simple to use I do like the feature where it automatically shows the last source that was available if it pops back up on the network so you can set all this up once and then whenever you're ready you just open your phone ndi camera app or shoot and it'll just pop up on your Apple TV if you've got the ndi app open another ndi option is the magewell pro convert this device actually does a ton of different things I often use it as an rtmp server to receive a feed from a yolobox or an atem mini and output that into a live demo it can receive rtmp feeds rtsp and also ndi so to set this up for ndi you can log into the admin interface and if your phone app is running you'll see it listed as one of the options here I can go ahead and select PK phone the shoot app and that will output the ndi feed over the magewell's HDMI port into the stream here let's go ahead and cut to this angle so you can actually see what it looks like so this is the live feed from the magewell's HDMI port of the ndi camera app generally this magewell Pro convert has been super stable for me I don't really have any complaints about it at all but do keep in mind the difference between controlling this from a web page on a computer versus using the actual physical Apple TV remote to control the ndi app on Apple TV this device also isn't cheap it is about 400 but it is super useful since it can do so many things now let's look at the last option that I want to talk about which is the bird dog play the bird dog play is a relatively new device from the bird dog company it's 149 dollars so it's actually extremely well priced especially compared to other options for Hardware that can receive ndi there's not a lot of features available in the bird dog play but that's kind of what you want when you're dealing with these kinds of devices so I've got the bird dog device plugged into the A10 mini here and it's showing me this kind of splash screen now for this because there is no physical remote you're going to have to configure it on your computer instead so I've got the bird dog interface pulled up here and I can go to this AV setup tab once I have the ndi app running on my phone it'll actually show up as a source here and it will also remember sources that you've used so I can go ahead and choose PK phone ndi HX camera click apply and now it's actually showing up on the atem here so again my phone is acting as a wireless camera to the A10 mini let's take a closer look at this video feed as well so this is a clean feed of the bird dogs HDMI output recorded into this video I will say in a previous version of the bird dog play software it actually wasn't working at all with the phone there was a whole bunch of screen tearing on the picture I'm actually right now streaming in the middle quality in the ndi camera app and it does a pretty good job with the bird dog play I did update the firmware but the latest version of the firmware got rid of the whole screen tearing problem I was having before one nice feature of the bird dog play is that it does have this failover option so you can see I can choose a failover source so if I wanted to I could actually have a second ndi feed on the network like showing a graphic or some sort of video Loop and that way you could choose that as a failover option in case the main source disappears and that way it's just a little bit friendlier than just falling back like to the default home screen of the Apple TV or a splash screen showing the device so I mentioned that ndi is the last in this list because it is a most expensive it requires a dedicated device that can receive the ndi feed and it also requires apps that are usually not free I haven't yet found a free app that can send an ndi feed over the network but hopefully there's something for you in here based on how much you want to spend and the quality you want to get out of it and that's about it if you have any questions leave them down in the comments below and also if you have any suggestions for other apps that you like that give a clean HDMI out for iPhones or Android please let me know down in the comments as well links to everything I mentioned are in the description below so make sure you click through those if you're interested in learning more and as always thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Aaron Parecki

Views: 23,005

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Id: k_WnffXIZQg

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023