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Hey, several of you have been taking advantage of "live streaming" lessons/performances during this crazy year; our high school just streamed a band concert with "cheap/lousy gear," and the experience was fairly bad (and I've heard the kids rehearse -- they were fine!). It's a small, private school, so I wanted to look into some vid/mic gear for them.
What are you using (and without a million-dollar budget)??
Thanks for any tips!
Marc
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12-13-2020 02:49 PM
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marc, if there are photocameras at the school the elgato cam link is great.
I use it with my sony a7r3 but i tried it with an old canon dslr and the results are still way better then any webcam i found.
In the beginning of the pandemic i bought a new pricey webcam and was astounded how little these have evolved.
I have also seen people stream with their phone with great results.
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Nice - thanks!
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Marc, if you don't mind, I'll pass this on to my son who does live streaming professionally. The reply may take some time, because these services are in high demand due to the pandemic, and he's totally overworked.
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I just got a Logitech C920 and it seems pretty solid. The mic is good too.
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Thanks!
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Documenting live music is one thing and live streaming is another.
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Originally Posted by christianm77
Razer Kiyo- Webcam and Logitech c920 are quite interesting.
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Originally Posted by Gitterbug
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oh if you arent already using obs, it’s great. Also for audio. You can just output your daw.
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Hi all! Here's what my son Tuomas put together in a hurry. I hope you'll find some useful nuggets here.
"If you want to significantly improve the audio of your live streams, one solution is to get an USB audio interface such as Focusrite Scarlett or Steinberg UR22. Thus you can record with a good stereo pair or use an extra mixer with all the mics you want.
The camera department will benefit from a “camcorder” - style camera that can be plugged into AC supply and stay on for as long as you wanto without any battery fuss. Consumer cameras have HDMI out and professional ones have a SDI out that allows easily 50 + meters of cable between the camera and the capture device, HDMI is max 5-10 meters. A camcorder can also have a motor zoom Lens, which makes it easier to crop the images fast without any lens change. If more than one cameras are needed, a device such as Blackmagic mini Atem works as a mixer / hub for 4 cdmi inputs as it also provides a livestream into desired RTMP location. Getting at least a pair of good LED panel lights can also make a huge difference into the picture quality. No light, no color.
Elgato Camlink is a cheap way to import a video camera into a PC or MAC (better with PC) but platforms like ZOOM, Google Meet or Teams are quite picky in accepting anything else as an input besides the webcam of the computer. This can be overturned with NDI software, but that is maybe beyond our scope here. You didn’t specify how the livestream is made, with an encoder such as OBS (a great free encoder) into YouTube etc or Teams / Meet / Zoom that are more real-time video chat platforms than live-streaming destinations, such as YouTube or Vimeo or Facebook.
The internet speed of the streaming location can also dictate what your streaming quality will be like. To YouTube in 1920 x 1080 full HD resolution 2,5 -3 MB/s is ok for something that has no fast movement, such as a sports game. The audio can be 192 kB/s. It’s better to scale down the resolution to 720P if needed, as the local recording in OBS can always be 1920 x 1080 anyway.
Hope this helps!
Tuomas Pietinen"Last edited by Gitterbug; 12-14-2020 at 05:12 AM.
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all you need for google meet/teams/zoom to accept the elgato cam link as a source is obs virtual cam (also free). It will trick your computer into believing it’s a webcam source.
Works great.
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Thanks, all. I've been wanting to upgrade from the laptop cam for a while and y'all just saved me a ton of research :-)
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