Big Sur keeps defaulting to camera of 2nd display.

[TimWellens]

Hi there!
I have a late intel iMac2020 that came with Catalina and it has a second older Led Cinema Display attached to it as second monitor (salvaged from my old 2010 Mac tower).
It worked great under Catalina without any problems,camera on iMac worked and I could control brightness on both screens separately and I could use the Led Cinema Display as USB hub too.
Yesterday I finally upgraded Catalina to Big Sur (days before the arriving of Monterey,yes I play it safe).
Now Big Sur always defaults to the lower quality camera of the Led Cinema Display rendering it useless as its the wrong angle and less quality.It seems that Big Sur doesn’t have a default camera setting in the system preferences.
I can only use the camera of the iMac when I unplug the USB of the Led Cinema Display,which is a shame as that way I can’t control the brightness on the Led Cinema Display nor can I use it as an USB hub.
Any workaround? Please don’t tell me to wait for Monterey,I’m a Logic Pro X user with almost 1000 plugins and a lot of external gear it was already a lot of work to upgrade from Catalina to Big Sur,I always wait until the very end before upgrading the OS.I plan to upgrade to Monterey September next year

thnx,love this forum!

 

[ferrarr]

Did you see this?

Choose a camera or microphone for FaceTime calls on Mac

In FaceTime on your Mac, choose which camera or microphone to use for FaceTime calls.

support.apple.com

 

[Raz0rEdge]

To Bob's point, you'll have to set the default camera in each video application you use, there isn't a global setting for that.

I use Teams(ick, I know) and Zoom on a daily basis for audio/video conferencing and each of these apps are set to use my webcam for video and microphone and my BT headphones for audio.

A lot of my colleagues have multiple webcams and if they don't configure it properly, I see them flipping between cameras. Additionally, each upgrade sometimes (often in case of Zoom) makes it forget your settings, so the first video call is wrong until you reset it back.

 

[TimWellens]

To Bob's point, you'll have to set the default camera in each video application you use, there isn't a global setting for that.

I use Teams(ick, I know) and Zoom on a daily basis for audio/video conferencing and each of these apps are set to use my webcam for video and microphone and my BT headphones for audio.

A lot of my colleagues have multiple webcams and if they don't configure it properly, I see them flipping between cameras. Additionally, each upgrade sometimes (often in case of Zoom) makes it forget your settings, so the first video call is wrong until you reset it back.

Thanks! So in fact Catalina did a better job as I didn’t have a problem with Catalina defaulting to the external camera like Big Sur does..There should be a dedicated Camera setting in the system preferences,like display,sound,printers etc…
Anyway I ended up unplugging the secondary display from the USB chain so that I don’t have to mess around with settings everytime I want to use the camera.Downside is I can’t control the brightness anymore and can’t access its camera (but I don’t want to access that one anyway).I also used the second monitor as usb hub so that’s now also not possible anymore.
Strange that Catalina handled this better than Big Sur.

thank you all !