Hi all, as the title suggests, I need some help choosing the correct components for a live stream. Due to the pandemic, we've began to live-stream our church services over Facebook. Until now, we've simply been using a Samsung Note 9 for this purpose. However, we are hoping to improve our video and audio while being able to overlay our presentation slides on the top of our video feed. We are looking to utilize vMix for this purpose, but I'm a little confused about getting the two signals into the streaming computer.

I would like to use one computer/operator to handle both our church presentation software (Faithlife Proclaim), and run the live-stream. But I'm thinking it would require a lot of switching between programs (vMix and Proclaim) to make this happen and that might be two much for one operator.

Therefore, I'm planning to add a second computer/person dedicated to just the live-stream. On this second computer I would be inputting the video file from the camera, and the slides from the presentation computer to create our live-stream. The camera is a Canon XA50, so I'll be bringing sound from the soundboard (XLR inputs) into the camera and sending the signal over HDMI to the computer. Of course, presentation slides will also be sent over HDMI from the first computer to the live-stream computer.

Here's my question. Who do I accomplish this? Do I simply need to get two capture cards (one for each feed) and bring them into the new computer separately? Or is there an external device that would handle two HDMI inputs, but feed them into the computer as two separate feeds so that I can switch them in vMIx?

Also, we have to get a PC for the live-stream. Should I get something with thunderbolt connectors? Or will UBS-C do the trick?

If possible, in order to avoid additional complexity, I prefer to use vMix for both encoding and switching.

Thanks!

If you only have one camera and your streaming computer is able to be located near the camera then you could just use a HDMI->USB converter.. this would be an inexpensive option for getting the camera signal into vMix.. then if you can put the presentation computer on the same network as the streaming computer you could use NDI for the presentations.. check out NDI Tools at https://ndi.tv/tools/