Broadcast quality live video from your Mac with mimoLive
Last week I offered easy and inexpensive tips for making your streaming video look and sound more professional for meetings and other business, and more fun for keeping in touch with friends and relatives.
This week I want to take it to the next level and show you how your Mac can produce broadcast-quality streaming video with multiple input sources (cameras, videos, your desktop, etc.), beautiful transitions and fades, scrolling credits, titles, lower-thirds, onscreen crawls, and more.
All you need to turn your Mac into a live video production powerhouse is Boinx Software’s mimoLive, one of my favorite apps of all time. According to
Boinx, it’s “designed to make professional broadcast tools accessible for everyone.”
MimoLive (“mimo”
stands for Multiple Inputs/ Multiple Outputs) does all that and more and does it better than any other Mac app I know of regardless of price.
MimoLive is relatively easy to learn and comes with nearly 100 ready-to-use templates called “layers,” such as Picture-in-Picture, Lower Third, Breaking
News Crawl, Scrolling Credits, Live Video, Facebook Reactions, and many more.
Layers make it easy to put whatever you want — text, graphics, live or recorded video, your Mac screen, and such — wherever you want it on the screen. And they’re easy to use, with myriad pop-up menus filled with pre-made effects and pixel-level control over positioning.
You control everything on the screen and where on the screen it appears during your broadcast. Want your picture-in-picture bigger and nearer the top of the screen? No problem. Want to edit the text in your onscreen news crawl while you’re on the air? That’s a breeze, too. Want viewers to see Facebook reactions to your live video in real-time? Just add a Facebook Reactions layer.
MimoCam ($4.99) lets you use almost any iDevice as a source in mimoLive. This not only saves you from buying additional video cameras or webcams, but the quality of video shot using most iDevices will be more than sufficient for most productions.
Another cool feature is the ability to send the same stream to multiple destinations. So, for example, you could broadcast a Zoom meeting on Facebook Live and/or YouTube or other destinations in realtime.That’s pretty sweet.
Now for the bad news — mimoLive isn’t cheap. Although there’s a 14-day free trial, after that, you’ll need a subscription for $20 a month for educational and nonprofit use; $70 a month for commercial use; or
$200 a month for mass media broadcasts.
One last thing: Boinx also offers a free app for iDevices called mimoLive Reporter, which lets you layer text, scrolling banners, still images, and more onto your live stream.