A (Final?) Test
I rushed out to Legends Golf Course, north of Sherwood Park AB, after work to squeeze in one more (the last?) round for the season. Most courses closed after Thanksgiving this year, but for a few others our warm weather has delayed the end . During video review of the previous stream, I had noticed a handful of issues that detracted from the overall smooth production flow that I'm aiming for:Hard Cuts Between Cameras. Switching from the cart cam to shot cam used to have a mix effect via OBS. Now with the Belabox setup the video switcher, controlled by Companion, creates the transitions. There are dedicated buttons on the mixer to adjust which type of transition you want, but my chosen mix wasn’t being applied. Turns out the Companion action I was using instantly switched which video feed was being fed out. A quick search revealed an alternative action, and now my switcher cleanly mixes the two feeds during transition.
Colour Grading. A few weeks ago Jacky pointed out the stark difference between the GoPro’s hot colour temperature (intensified by the yellow and red fall leaves) and the Sony AX43A’s cooler profile. Similar to the cuts, I had created OBS filters to somewhat match the colours between the different cameras; however, these were removed following the single input feed of the Belabox. I generated another OBS filter that adjusts the Sony camera colours to match the Gopro (for that intense colour feel I’m going for). In companion, I added a coinciding action to the video switcher that turns on the filter when switching to the Sony and off when returning to the GoPro. Unfortunately, with the Belabox delay, I’ve had to add in a hard coded timer to try to get the filter switch (on a 0.5s delay) to match the transition (4-7s delay). I don’t think you can tell when the filter switches at the 33:07 mark, but you definitely can at the 1:22:49 mark (watch the GoPro’s cart cam colours intensify for 1 second before the switch to the Sony shot cam). This indicates the Belabox feed has incurred and extra second of latency during the past 45 minutes of streaming. I don’t really know how to correct it now, but since it’s such a minor detail I may just ponder on it over the winter.
Tracer Alignment. The tracer is a static OBS overlay. It requires a pretty specific camera, ball, and target alignment to show an accurate result. I have a system where I put the ball in a specific section of the camera viewfinder to get everything to align, but any uneven ground or camera tilt will cause the tracer to be off course. Overall, I’m pretty impressed about how accurate the overlay can be, but other times the line is way off. Part of this is because I’ve angled the camera slightly to the left of the Garmin R10 center. This was to place the ball on the right hand side of the screen, player in center left and overlays far left where everything would fit nicely on the screen. I think I’ve achieved this so that the viewer sees a slightly profiled swing instead of directly behind the golfer. Unfortunately, this causes a slight tracer exaggeration for faded shots and decrease in draw shots as the camera is always looking a bit left of where the tracer is pointed. For this round, I straightened the camera on the tripod to better align the tracer. I think the angle is still fine for the view as the golfer is standing close enough to the camera to create that slightly profiled look. The tracer also better aligns. I think I’ll keep this change.
I arrived at the course, very excited to test the changes. Luckily, I was able to snag 9 holes solo as the course was fairly empty. But disaster, Sonobus, the audio program I use to monitor overlays and chat, wasn’t connecting. Worse, it wasn’t connecting in a way I hadn’t ever seen before. 15 minutes of fiddling couldn’t solve the issue. Everything else was working properly so I decided to stream being completely deaf to OBS switching and chat. Didn’t love not being able to communicate with viewers, but I couldn’t do anything. Stream went as well as expected being blind. Some people chatted, but I couldn’t hear them. Occasionally switching to IRL Link confirmed that the stream was running and people had sent messages, but the OBS Preview command only works once per app restart so I think I’ll look for alternatives to better monitor OBS. Shot a pretty heartbreaking +6 (42) with several 3 putts and generally poor ball striking. Wild how 4 shots completely changes how well you think you did on a round.
Upon return to the home PC, I couldn’t find an obvious solution to the audio. Everything just sort of connected properly and I couldn’t recreate the issue. I just know this will happen again so in lieu of an actual fix, I plan to create a restart command that will allow my phone to restart the home PC. Lots of issues to address there as I need my VPN and command programs to also restart and if … I just realized that this won’t work as the tracer needs to by physically plugged in following a restart. I don’t know….I guess I’ll work harder to recreate the issue? Maybe find an alternative to Sonobus?
I also noticed that the ball marker wasn’t moving around the hole overlay properly. OBS had deleted all the ball marker hotkeys on the overlay scene. This had happened once before when I moved the OBS profiles from the laptop to the home PC. I don’t know what instigated the deletion here, but I’m guessing an OBS update? I rebound the hotkeys and now everything works again, but I exported an OBS profile to make for a quick fix if this ever happens again. A brief search didn’t reveal anyone else having this issue, but I’m sure its a thing out there.
I did have an idea about automatically moving the tracer overlay to the ball position using a combination of Roy Shilkrot’s obs-detect plugin and Exeldro’s move plugin. It didn’t work on immediate testing, but if I can find a way to update filter properties from text files, I can make the tracer automatically reposition over the ball prior to the reveal filter. It would help adjust for the previously mentioned unlevel camera placements making for a more professional, seamless tracking effect. Unfortunately winter approaches and this might have been the final round of the season.
Exciting things ahead!