Video & Sound Mixing

Wayfinding: Tools > Software > Video & Sound Mixing

By 2021, OBS (Open Broadcast Software) had become the standard for video mixing, but others recommended to me included:

• vMix: Natasha Rickman wrote: ‘I was particularly excited by layering actors in Vmix, which I first tried in Duchess of Malfi and continued into Romeo and Juliet – the idea of seeing faces overlaid, or that we are seeing one character in profile and one face on, plus playing with perspective, feels very exciting to me as a way to view characters in terms of their emotional state or point of view, that is different to how you would see them in theatre, film and television. I was excited by the introduction of Vmix as it liberated performers from operating all their own tech, plus we could move away from green screens and Zoom backgrounds’.

• Manycam: Rickman also told me: ‘I used a program called Manycam, which made my camera become a video. … that means you can incorporate film into Zoom, which is quite useful’.

• QLab: a standard for light and sound design in traditional theatre, too. Brendan Bradley told me that part of developing the OBXR fork of Mozilla Hubs included creating a program like QLab to change lights, sounds, and scenery between shows during an OBXR festival. It is also possible to integrate QLab into Unreal projects, creating a similar cueing environment for your stage manager (or your performer-technicians).