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Using your Sony mirrorless and dSLR (and other cameras) as a webcam without a capture card

Welcome to my brief tutorial of how to use your sony camera as a webcam; without having to use a capture card. This is super handy if you want to have a nice camera for your zoom/skype/messenger calls.

I used my sony a7-iii in this demo – but – you can use any camera supported by Sony’s Imaging edge remote software (and likewise with any canon, nikon, panasonic or other camera that supports some kind of live-view capture on your PC). I tested this with an old canon dSLR too and it worked great. This is how OBS works to capture your live feed.

The software you need to install is as follows:
Sony Imaging Edge Software – https://imagingedge.sony.net/en-gb/ie-desktop.html
OBS – https://obsproject.com/
OBS virtual webcam – https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/obs-virtualcam.539/

Ready to go

Once all that is installed then you can fire up OBS first ready for action.
Secondly startup Sony Imaging Edge and Launch the Remote Control (make sure you camera is set to PC remote connection mode not Mass storage or anything else) – this will give you a nice remote view screen with all your camera settings too – this is the window you want to capture in OBS (and where you’d capture the cameras live view window for other brands) (see video on capturing the window).
Then go to OBS and select capture window and select the Remote Control Window – trim the capture area so you only capture the live view and not all the camera controls.
Normally this is all that is needed for setup as the OBS virtual camera normally automatically starts when any capture takes place.
The only thing left to do is to make sure you’re happy with what OBS is capturing and go into an app such as zoom and select the ‘OBS Camera’ as your webcam and you’re all set!
Hopefully this saves you some money and is also handy if you want to share your screen and have more flexability with what your audience sees 🙂

Enjoy!

Please note this is windows only – so if you’re on a mac running OSX then the process is slightly different where you want to use a program called camtwist (http://camtwiststudio.com/) instead of OBS. And you don’t need a virtual camera as OSX will see that automatically

Here’s the details in video form:

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