Streamers with jobs

Zoom has a "Suppress background noise" option in the Audio settings. Have you played with that at all? Looks similar to OBS's Noise Suppression filter.

You can also turn down the gain of the mic so it won't pick up every damned thing. I did that with my Blue Yeti and it worked great.

the closer you can get the mic to your mouth, the lower the gain can be and it won't pick up nearly as much stuff. Throw in a good noise cancelling filter and it is rarely a problem. Regarding not wanting to wear headphones, I use earbuds over bluetooth when on calls. No worries about causing echo.

Chaz wrote:

This is maybe less of a game streaming question, but there's probably a lot of overlap, and I couldn't find a better place to ask.

I decided to finally pick up some stuff to improve the quality of my Zoom calls for work. I've been using the MBP's built in camera and mic, so the bar is low. I just ordered a Razer Kiyo for my camera. Now I'm trying to figure out a USB microphone.

I don't really like wearing headphones in meetings. I'd like to keep the mic out of the camera shot, so it'd probably be sitting on my desk under my monitor, so a bit below and about 20" from my face. At that distance, is it worth it, or will be picking up a bunch of background noise kind of no matter what, and I'd really want the mic right in front of me on a boom?

Any recommendations in the $50-75 range? Blue mics seem to be the default, with the Snowball in that range, but then I hear stuff like "they pick up all the background noise ever." I'm kind of looking at the HyperX Solocast and the Samson Q2U, but if any mic will be about the same for my setup, then maybe I can get away with a $45 amazonbasics condenser mic?

Plz help me stop overthinking this.

I would suggest a Lavalier Microphone ? Some are wired, and got a nice range. So you hide the wire in your shirt. I have one wireless, and it's fantastic so far. I even ordered a second one, with a built in-battery.

I need a hobby and a way to cultivate some skills that I've developed at a basic level, such as video editing and well, talking into a microphone for an audience. I don't think I want to exclusively stream live commentary on top of gameplay but not ruling out that may be a piece of what I end up doing as a content creator. I've been thinking about resurrecting my long dormant Youtube channel where I used to post Destiny videos.

I'm short on a lot of equipment right now: a beefy computer, a good microphone, an audio mixer, a capture card, an external webcam and possibly a green screen. Basically almost everything. I have decent video software - CyberLink PowerDirector - but that's about it! Although I'm not setting a minimum hardware level of entry for myself before getting started, I'll definitely be piecing things together as I go and probably begin with getting a good microphone. I've done the aforementioned Destiny videos and been a part of podcasts with friends and I've always struggled with microphone. None of the ones I've used in the past have cut it.

I'll be digging through the backlog of this thread to try and tease out some good recommendations!

Streaming hardware has advanced decently enough these days that you can get a decent headset/mic setup for $150 or less. OBS is free, and virtual mixers like voicemeeter can be free to use indefinitely. A decent quality webcam that can properly read colors is ideal.

Greenscreening is fine, but I find it to be tedious to set up because they greenscreen is the least important part of the process - it's setting up the lighting around you so the light will bounce off the screen properly. so as a backup keeping the space behind you tidy for the event of no green screen helps to maintain streaming consistency so it's not an even longer process than it already is!

Re: capture cards.... After many reviews and feedback, you may find some diamonds in the rough out there, but if you want something consistent and with good visual fidelity just save up for an Elgato h60

Thanks Amoebic!
In my previous post I seemed to be very intent on mentioning everything except the kitchen sink, haha. I can probably get started with a lot less and spend more time planning my content and developing some good practices.

What I'd like to do is a weekly podcast / interactive talk show where live stream the episode for 1 -2 hours then chop it up into a few bit-sized standalone segments for archive viewing. I may edit in gameplay segments on top of the audio if I'm discussing news or a specific game but I'm definitely not intending for my gameplay prowess being the showcase of the channel. My initial feeling is Youtube is best suited for this since it was built on video file uploads and also supports streaming although I know it's not uncommon for creators to reformat their content to live on both Youtube and Twitch. As a relative novice I'd just want to keep things as simple as possible at the outset.

I used to have a terrible Blue Yeti Snowball microphone and got soured on the brand. It's likely the case I simply went too entry level since it seems Blue Yeti's got a great reputation today. I've got an eye on the Blackout right now but want to be able to mount it to an arm.

And for webcam, you might already have one... A cellphone. Even iPhone 6 do have good camera, and can be setup as a webcam with an app for like 10$. Android could be done for free.

Green screen, lots of option in OBS to simulate one as well, without the green shield itself.

Yeah, I mentioned it in a previous post I think, but I'm using my iPhone XR as a webcam and it works great with the EpocCam app.

Also it looks like that Yeti mic you linked should be mountable on an arm no problem.

Mmmm thank you! This EpoCam app looks great. I have a XR as well and a Canon DSLR from a couple years ago that could see a lot more use besides snapping doggo photos. Never considered using those in place of a traditional webcam.

@beanman: do you use a tripod for your iPhone/EpocCam set up? Have any recommendations?

I use an old (2009) Sony Camcorder as my camera. It is only 720p but it looks better then all the webcams I have tried.

Maclintok wrote:

@beanman: do you use a tripod for your iPhone/EpocCam set up? Have any recommendations?

I have a phone arm that clamps to the desk, and while it holds the phone well and I can bend it to the angle I like, it does shake if I bump my desk the slightest amount -> so basically whenever I touch my mouse, rest the controller on the desk, etc. So I wouldn't mind having something more stable, and would probably not recommend that specific one for that reason.

beanman101283 wrote:
Maclintok wrote:

@beanman: do you use a tripod for your iPhone/EpocCam set up? Have any recommendations?

I have a phone arm that clamps to the desk, and while it holds the phone well and I can bend it to the angle I like, it does shake if I bump my desk the slightest amount -> so basically whenever I touch my mouse, rest the controller on the desk, etc. So I wouldn't mind having something more stable, and would probably not recommend that specific one for that reason.

I bought this to hold my camera, but it has an add on for a EDIT:smartphone. It uses a standard camera screw so it should support a lot of devices. It is very sturdy. Though if yours shakes when you bump your desk, it might be more that your desk is not very sturdy ;).

Webcam Stand Camera Mount with Phone Holder

Heh, it's possible It's not wildly shaking like a documentary hand cam, you can just see a bit of screen wobble occasionally. I figured I'd need to get a floor tripod to prevent that. But maybe the bendable arm is less stable than the one you linked.

Some arms must be manufactured in a way to compensate for this kind of judder or sway caused by vibrations and the like?

Maclintok wrote:

Thanks Amoebic!
In my previous post I seemed to be very intent on mentioning everything except the kitchen sink, haha. I can probably get started with a lot less and spend more time planning my content and developing some good practices.

Yeah, don't fall for the toolbox fallacy. If there's anything I can suggest, it's to try streaming "uncut" on Twitch, with an audience its real-time interactions, and then edit things for YouTube.

Thanks Kurrelgyre. YouTube live streaming feels alien to me. Like it doesn't feel as user-friendly to get started and I have the impression they don't do as good of a job surfacing the stream to a potential audience.

If Twitch is just able to spit out a video file of my stream then yeah that definitively solves the issue of wanting to cut up bite-sized episodes for consumption after-the-fact.

Maclintok wrote:

Thanks Kurrelgyre. YouTube live streaming feels alien to me. Like it doesn't feel as user-friendly to get started and I have the impression they don't do as good of a job surfacing the stream to a potential audience.

If Twitch is just able to spit out a video file of my stream then yeah that definitively solves the issue of wanting to cut up bite-sized episodes for consumption after-the-fact.

Twitch doesn't do a great job at getting your stream attention either. Watch Harris Heller's YT channel where he gets into it on a few videos. If you really want to grow your channel, it is about being in multiple forms of social media (YT, Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, etc...). YT live streaming quality isn't as good as Twitch. They tend to do more to compress the video which makes it have a lot of artifacts. But either way, it might be better to let OBS record the video separately since it can use a higher bit rate. Might be harder to do if you have a one PC setup.

I have to handle streaming to YouTube for my Church, and it stinks because there are some things that I feel it does better than Twitch. However, on the whole, YouTube is pretty darn terrible for streaming, especially as it can just decide no one gets any bandwidth at all at any moment of any day. The only advantage it has is every stream being archived by default, whereas Twitch requires you to go in and make highlights or clips. Editing options are few (it would be nice if they had a simple fade transition between highlight cuts). If you want to go in and make edits to your video, you'd be better off doing that on YouTube.

On the whole, I prefer Twitch for streaming since it's far more stable a service and is built with streaming in mind, but YouTube is better for everything else.

ccesarano wrote:

The only advantage it has is every stream being archived by default, whereas Twitch requires you to go in and make highlights or clips.

All my streams get saved without me having to do anything. There is a setting "Automatically save broadcasts for up to 14 days (60 days for Partners, Turbo and Prime users)". You can download them. Though something like the church videos, having OBS save the recording while it is streaming might be better, as you can get a better bitrate.

I did a few straight forward "play a game and talk over it streams" on Twitch last year. Looks like I'll do some dry runs showing my mug and playing around with having Twitch do it all or be OBS-assisted.

Twitch will let you download a recording of the whole stream within that first two weeks. I don't recall if the quality was good or bad, though. It'll also let you export recordings directly to YouTube if that's of interest. I'll second the recommendation for Harris Heller's content, but then I've not put a lot of it into practice, yet.

kazar wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

The only advantage it has is every stream being archived by default, whereas Twitch requires you to go in and make highlights or clips.

All my streams get saved without me having to do anything. There is a setting "Automatically save broadcasts for up to 14 days (60 days for Partners, Turbo and Prime users)". You can download them. Though something like the church videos, having OBS save the recording while it is streaming might be better, as you can get a better bitrate.

I should have specified that, yes, Twitch saves the broadcast, but it will expire after a time and be deleted. Nothing on Twitch is permanent unless you clip or highlight it, whereas your full stream will always be available on YouTube so long as you leave it there. Even if you download your full stream from Twitch, you can't later upload it back to Twitch (far as I know. There was some sort of video upload beta going on but it was meant for highlights and such, not full long-form videos).

The VOD for YouTube is usually good quality since it's the buffered data collected and saved, so unless there were full-blown disconnects, particularly on your end, then it'll be fine. But, yes, saving locally is not a bad idea if you got the hard drive space for it.

You can also multistream to Twitch and YouTube at the same time.

If I want to do a picture-in-picture of my face in the corner while I have screen share on my browser window or a game... is that something done in OBS or is it handled natively within Twitch when I set up my stream?

OBS handles that. You'd add a source for webcam, and another source for either your desktop or just the individual application/game you want to capture. OBS then sends the whole thing to Twitch.

Thanks beanman. Did a very quick poke around my OBS last night and made a ton of progress with just understanding the basics of setting up a scene and managing my input sources.

I've also been enjoying Harris Heller's content on youtube. I don't know why his channel is called Alpha Gaming as I haven't seen a lick of game-related content yet but I don't really care as I'm happily gobbling up his review and how-to videos. Thanks for the recommendation, all!

Hey again GWJ streamers!

I did a test stream this morning and felt reasonably comfortable with how things went. There was a big oversight though: I don't have a chat overlay in my scene. So while I was interacting with my buddy via the OBS chat window and on-stream, none of that was actually visible. What is the easiest, quickest way to integrate a Twitch chat panel display source?

Thank you.

When I was looking into it, pretty much every source and piece of advice directed me to Streamlabs, which is basically using OBS as its base. It's almost the same thing but with some added features, including the ability to place in a chat overlay.

I don't know if there's a plug-in for OBS itself that others use, but you can import all your OBS settings to Streamlabs easily (as in, it's pretty much automatic on installation), and as I said, I've been using some of its additional settings for my own streaming.