Recently, I agreed to run remote participation for a three track one day conference. Remote as in I was not in the same city as the event, and running it out of my home. I’ve done this several times and keep trying And this involves setting up three separate computers, one to monitor each room. A volunteer physically present would join the Zoom meeting from the room. During the height of the pandemic, I had done similarly when the events were all remote.

This can be something of a challenge. My desk is set up for my work and non-work activities. I have a dual set of monitors hooked into a KVM switch. A KVM switch allows you to share keyboard, video, and mouse between multiple computers. Since most of the time I only need those two computers, it does not have the ability for three. My work computer is a laptop with a dock, and my home computer is a regular PC. My work computer cannot be used for non-work purposes, but I have some old laptops I’ve docked in its place that have enough power to run Zoom.

Nearby in the room is yet a fourth monitor…my television. I have an auxiliary HDMI cable running from the TV over to the computers which would allow me to connect it to display things on the TV as an extra monitor. I currently have it unhooked.

Finally, I added a small portable USB powered monitor, which sits above the other two monitors, and is hooked into a third computer. This I had previously used as a Zoom computer, to pipe a second person’s audio in. But I stopped being the sound engineer for dual host audio podcasts. I’d invested in the cheapest Atem Mini, which is a video switcher, to explore the possibility of upgrading to video, but never ended up moving in that direction. So, I have enough equipment, with some tweaking to set up a little recording studio.

I also am a remote participant, so I want to be able to monitor 3 rooms, while actively participating in one, but I don’t want to run around disconnecting cameras and reconnecting them. My camera is an HDMI camera, hooked into an original Atem Mini. So, I realized after trying to deal with this, I could split the HDMI output from the Atem MIni into multiple HDMI cables, running into multiple USB capture devices.

I use a separate XLR microphones, which I could do the same with…feed the audio into the Atem Mini and carry it along with the video to the secondary systems.

The confusing part here is the sheer number of combinations for use. For convenience, I’m going to refer to my primary computer as #1, the Zoom computer as #2, and the theoretical old laptop docked in place of my work computer as #3. Some of these are not scenarios I’ve ever needed, but have considered for future.

• I am a solo participant in a single Zoom room, and I want to be able to use #2 to control the Atem Mini, and have it display on either the little screen above my desk or the television. I want the camera and microphone to feed into #2, but split off to feed the other computers for other use cases. Here, there are issues because I may want to screen share from #1, my primary computer, where I have things to share. The screen share issue is why I haven’t tried this configuration.
• I am a solo participant, and therefore, will only use #1 for my meeting, where I can screen share. The Atem Mini will be connected to #1, however, it will split off to feed the audio/video into #2 and #3 as needed.
• I am trying to run 3 separate Zoom rooms, and therefore need all three computers running separate Zoom clients so they can record sessions, but I need to feed my audio/video to each one. I also need to monitor audio levels in each room somehow and see if there is a problem.
• I want to record a video podcast, where #2 is feeding in a remote host, #1 is recording and hooked to the Atem Mini to allow in ‘studio’ participants to be mixed with the remote ones. In this scenario, I also need to be able to share from #3 as a video feed, to mix into the final recording.

Trying to figure out a wiring diagram to cover all these use cases so I don’t keep patching and repatching cabling. I’m starting by laying out the problem, and then, over time, hoping to document how I explored each option and implemented it.