in the last 2 years the number of meetings which are held via video conferencing system have increased 10fold therefore a lot of us also have heavy Microsoft Software Usage on our Mac’s. By having a lot of advantages MS tools do have their drawbacks as a lot of memory usage, high cpu usage, high usage of your dedicated graphics card and so on. In the last time while having multiple sessions with different clients – teams over client internal, teams sessions via browser for other clients – i had repeatedly the issue that the webcam from my late 2017 MacBook Pro stopped working suddenly. No green light no image. After having done a little research it turned out that exactly these use case – concurrent usage of the camera of different applications – can cause this effect. In my case the following short terminal command resolved the problem and the camera module was back to work:
sudo killall VDCAssistant
This kills all VDCAssistant processes which are running and the blocking process is gone. Happy conferencing.
Jörg@Home's WeBlog 