Use your Sony Mirrorless as Webcam

So you own Sony Mirrorless camera and want to use it as webcam while you work remotely and communicate with your teammates via Zoom, Teams or Skype?

**This works with newer cameras like A6100/A6300/A6400/A6500/A6600 and probably all newer A7 series. Heard that Remote application doesn’t work with A6000 and A7 first series (didn’t test).

Already having Sony A6400 with Sigma 30mm I knew I wanted to improve video quality of my meetings. Only thing was that I didn’t know how and looking at some videos on Youtube about streaming were all mentioning using that camera to Stream on Youtube / Facebook / Twitch but hardly was anyone mentioning Zoom / Teams / Skype.

I decided to figure out how and after researching and trying different software I managed to get it to work. Computer I’m using is Macbook Pro but I think it should work on Windows as well since there are a lot more options available ;)

What you need:

• Sony Camera A6xxx or A7x Series
• Sony Imaging Desktop (Remote) Software
• CamTwist
• USB cable to connect your camera to PC / Laptop

How it works?

You create virtual camera that is tethering Live View of your camera and use that virtual camera as source of video for Zoom / Teams / Skype.

Step by Step tutorial:

1. Change setting on your camera: USB Connection set to PC Remote (Watch first 3 minutes of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCbt7GujmE4)
2. Install Sony Imaging Desktop and Remote
3. Connect your camera with USB and select your camera from list in Remote application (Follow video above: 2.38 — 3.02)
4. Once you have Live View of your camera on your computer you should continue on downloading CamTwist (http://camtwiststudio.com)
5. CamTwist will allow you to create Virtual Camera you will be able to choose on your app of choice

Settings and details of CamTwist

This part is most important and I suggest to follow it carefully.

After launching CamTwist and Remote you should have screen looking something like this:

In CamTwist you have 4 small tabs where first one represents Video Source which we are going to choose as Desktop+. Second and third tab are not important now. Last tab is asking us for settings of that video source.

Choose settings as they are set in this picture:

Choose Main screen and instead of selecting Full Screen which will stream your whole screen, we choose Confine to Application Window and Remote application which has Live View under Select from existing windows.

With this settings CamTwist is streaming whole Remote Application and we want to cut out outer part of application and only select Live View area.

Click on Select capture area and crop your area to only what you want to show as Webcam.

After selecting capture area click on Done selecting and you should have inner part of Remote application as Virtual Webcam.

To have best video quality possible, go to CamTwist preferences and change settings to 1280–720 and 24–30 FPS. After you make a change you need to restart CamTwist.

**Note: Remote application and CamTwist have to remain on same window meaning that if you move Remote app to other window, Virtual Webcam will freeze and in order to continue working you must keep all applications in same window. You can put apps behind and not on other window or screen.

After Webcam is set you can go to your app of choice and set your new webcam, example of Zoom Settings:

Now that everything is properly set you can start using any of communication apps and have the best possible quality.

Hope this little tutorial helped you set up professional looking Webcam. Ignore apple, currently looks much more beatiful than me :)

**If you encounter issue with USB Connection being disabled because of Ctrl w/ Smartphone, you should go to Network tab under Settings: Network/Ctrl w Smartphone/Ctrl w Smartphone and set to Off.