With my loaner Canon EOS R and a 50mm f/1.2 portrait lens, I got a cinematic image with awesome background bokeh, which looked so good that my Engadget colleagues accused me of using a fake background.
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How to use your mirrorless or DSLR camera as a Zoom webcam And because it takes a while to process the camera signal, your video image will be slightly behind your audio - by about a quarter second, in my case. You can’t use your Canon camera’s built in microphone (nor an external microphone), so you’ll need a headset or external mic. Now, when you open Zoom, Hangouts or any other video conferencing app, you can select EOS Webcam Utility Beta as your web camera. Next, you turn on your camera, put it in movie mode and adjust the exposure and focus settings to get the look you want. You download and install the beta software, restart (ugh) then connect your compatible Canon camera to your computer using a USB cable. Most of those are fairly recent, like the EOS R, EOS 5D Mark IV, Rebel T7i, EOS M6 Mark II and Powershot SX70 HS (for a complete list, check here).Īs shown in the video above, setup is relatively simple. Canon recently unveiled the beta EOS Webcam Utility software (Windows only) that allows you to output video from select models directly to your PC. Many Canon and Nikon models can stream video without too much effort, however, so let’s start with those. And while you can input to a USB port, most cameras can’t convert video to an IP (streaming) signal. That means you can’t plug a camera into your HDMI port because it’s only capable of outputting not inputting video. The problem is that PCs don’t have built-in video capture cards.
Connecting a fancy mirrorless or DSLR camera to a computer might not seem that hard, given that most have USB and HDMI outputs.