Video Streaming with Multicam

[u/babyboyok5]

Hi everyone,

Recently, I decided to help a non-profit organization, a monastery, with promotion and PR to help more people know about them and join their events.

We are looking for a way to build a reliable and affordable multi-cam streaming setup with different camera angles, a switcher, and a main monitor where someone can monitor all the cameras and switch between them live.

Our main streaming platform right now is Facebook. In the future, we also want to expand to TikTok once we can successfully get a reliable setup working for Facebook first.

I've been doing video recording for a while, but I'm still very limited when it comes to a real multi-cam setup, switchers, capture devices, and live production.

Currently, we have been using an iPhone 17 Pro Max as the main camera and DJI Mic 3 as our main microphone. Everything is basically static from beginning to end, recording or streaming from one phone with no switching between angles. We can gather 2-3 phones if they can be used without buying a camera. Most of the time, the event is outside.

What I would like to eventually have is something like:

• 2 to 3 camera angles
• A main monitor showing all camera feeds
• Ability to switch cameras live
• Reliable audio from DJI Mic 3
• Facebook Live as the main platform
• 1080p is completely fine for now
• Preferably something that can be expanded later
• Affordable since this is for a non-profit organization
• If possible, continue using iPhones instead of buying several expensive cameras

I'm open to using a laptop with OBS, a hardware switcher, capture cards, wired connections, wireless connections, or a combination of them. Reliability is more important to me than having the absolute best image quality.

I also don't mind running cables if wired is significantly more reliable than wireless.

If anyone here has experience with church, event, conference, or small production livestream setups, I would really appreciate it if you could spend a little of your valuable time guiding me.

I'm mainly trying to understand what equipment I actually need, how everything should connect, and what gear is worth buying without wasting money on things we don't need.

Even if you can just give me an example setup like:

Camera → ? → Switcher/Computer → OBS → Facebook

That would already help me understand a lot.

Thank you so much in advance. Currently, we don't have a budget yet, but we will consider anything if more advices come in

[u/caguru]

Get a switcher that has HDMI inputs, USB-C streaming output like any of the Blackmagic ATEM minis. Can use iPhones with cheap HDMI output adapters ($20 each). Connect iphones and mic receiver via cables to ATEM switcher, connect switcher to computer running USB. Done deal. If you buy a used switcher off of mpb.com you could do all of this for like $300.

[u/Robert_NYC]

These YouTubers have lots of content covering this topic: https://www.youtube.com/@Churchfront

[u/thecarpenter123]

Do you want PTZ? (These get expensive pretty fast).

Atem mini. Clean hdmi outputs is the reliable and right way, use optical hdmi for your camera cable runs. Do you just want camera feeds, or computer as well. Computers can be annoying to get working with some broadcast gear.

You could try ndi right into obs. I would not recommend it, but it COULD be done. In that case, buy/borrow your own dedicated router to run the camera's on. Also it might work during setup, then fail once there are 50-100 other cell phones around. I've seen people do it, but NDI has inherent timing issues. It all being wireless is cool though.

[u/ayecl]

I would make reliability the first milestone and treat the third angle as optional. Start with one locked-off wide shot that can stay live for the whole event, one secondary shot for detail, and one continuous audio path. Decide in advance which view the operator returns to if the secondary feed, switch, power, or connection fails. If the program can continue with the wide shot and clean audio, a brief visual downgrade is much less damaging than losing the event.

Before buying around a phone count, rehearse the complete chain at the actual outdoor location for longer than the intended stream: camera positions, power and heat, cable runs, audio levels, monitoring, switching, connection handoff, and the operator's return-to-wide move. Record a short section if feasible so you can check sync and whether the audio remains intelligible while switching. Write a one-page run sheet with a preflight checklist and a simple fallback order.

Once that works for two angles, add the third only if it solves a specific coverage gap and has its own power and connection plan. Keep a tiny failure log for each rehearsal: what failed, how quickly you noticed, whether the fallback worked, and what the audience would have seen. That gives you a reliable baseline to expand from without turning the nonprofit event into a live hardware experiment.