Two cameras, one person, zero free hands. When you stream alone, you rarely cut: you're cooking, gaming, talking or walking through town, and the second camera shows nobody anything for an hour. Starting today, your studio cuts for you. You choose which scenes it switches between and how often, and it cuts on the beat until you switch it off.
What scene rotation does
Below the scenes on your desk there is now a "Scene rotation" row:
| What | How |
|---|---|
| A switch | Rotation on or off, in one click |
| "every … s" | The seconds between two cuts: from 15 to 3,000, so up to 50 minutes |
| A tick box per scene | Which scenes take part. At least two, or the switch won't turn on |
| The timer | "Cut to 'Camera 2' in 0:42", with a bar that fills up |
When the timer runs out, your studio cuts the program to the next ticked scene, in the order your scenes stand on the desk. After the last one comes the first again. With two cameras that means back and forth. With three: one, two, three, one.
The cutting happens on our servers, not in your browser. You can close the desk, put the phone away, or start the studio from a laptop and leave the rotation running. On a phone the row is below the scenes too.
What we had in mind
Your cut comes first. When you cut yourself, the timer starts over. The shot you just cut to always gets the full time and isn't cut away after three seconds because the timer happened to run out.
It only cuts away from what's its own. If the program is on a scene you haven't ticked, the rotation waits. That's how you pause it without switching it off: cut to your "be right back" scene, take a break, cut back to a camera, and the rotation carries on. The same goes while the automatic fallback scene is on program because of a bad link: the rotation doesn't cut your viewers out of the dead-spot picture. When the studio switches back to the camera, the timer starts again.
No cut to black. A camera whose link isn't good right now is skipped: nobody is sending, the source has only just connected, or the link is bad. The desk tells you below the tick boxes which camera is being left out. If there's no other scene to go to, the picture stays where it is and the timer starts over.
Any scene can take part. Not just cameras: you can tick your fallback scene or your "starting soon" scene too, if you want a picture, a video or your clips to run in between. A web page as a scene is loaded anew with every cut and takes a few seconds to appear; an uploaded picture or video is there at once.
What it's good for
- Gaming with a face cam and a phone. The phone as a second camera shows your hands on the controller or the room. Thirty seconds on it every two minutes? Two scenes and 60 to 120 seconds do that; you cut back yourself whenever it suits you.
- Cooking, crafts, the workshop. Wide shot and close-up taking turns every 20 or 30 seconds while you need both hands for the work.
- IRL with two phones. Selfie camera and chest camera, every 45 seconds. If one of them hits a dead spot, the program stays on the other.
- A podcast or talk for two. Each person sends as a source of their own, as in streaming as two, and the picture changes without anybody at the desk.
What it can't do
- It's a hard cut. Like every cut in your studio. Transitions are planned but not built yet.
- One beat for all scenes. You can't give one scene 60 seconds and another 15, and the order is the order of the scenes on the desk, not random.
- It doesn't listen. The rotation doesn't know who is speaking. It cuts by the clock, not by the conversation.
- A black picture on a good link counts as good. If an app sends the inside of your pocket at full bitrate, the rotation cuts to that too.
- Not from a Stream Deck or the chat yet. You switch it on and off on the desk in the browser. The OBS-compatible API and the chat bot can't control it yet.
- A camera that just connected waits a moment. It takes up to five seconds after connecting before the studio rates the link as good. Until then it is skipped.
How to switch it on
Start your studio and open the desk. Below the scenes, tick the ones it should cut between, enter the seconds and flip the switch. The timer starts at once, whether you're on air yet or not. The difference between program and preview, and why a cut is not a take, is explained in Program and preview.
You can see whether it cuts the way you want without any viewers: start the studio, send from two sources, set the rotation to 15 seconds, watch. The setting stays when your studio restarts.