Streamers with jobs

What kind of mic is that? Some mics work best when they are close to your face so a sissor arm is best. It also helps pervent noises pressing keys and mouse buttons from being picked up by the mic.

Samson CO1U USB Condenser mic.

That little stand looks like a nice all in one jobbie, decent for $30.

Whelp, I have finally hit Affiliate status on Twitch, so I guess I really have managed to be a Streamer with a ....oh. Well, 1/2 of the equation ain't bad.

So may as well drop a link here. Highlights (need to go through the latest Smash stream, as well as the Among Us stream I did a few weeks ago), and then some Clips, though some of them don't make any sense (my buddy doesn't even remember clipping the Lost Planet 3 clip, and I never received a notification of my other buddy making a Mario Kart clip. That's just kind of a weird system, isn't it?).

I don't plan on linking here much, but maybe I'll discuss some of the more technical stuff I'm running into. I experimented last night with using OBS to stream via the El Gato capture, and I kind of like that better than streaming via El Gato itself (though video capture through El Gato is still easy enough). Going to be looking into making my own overlay soon as well.

Sadly I still can't hook up my PS4 to the system due to limitations in desk space, so those streams will be cheap amateur looking stuff still.

Of all things to get me into streaming, it was Covid.

So I decided to create my own overlay and try some additional experiments, which ultimately led to swapping from OBS to Streamlabs OBS. It's basically OBS (hurray open source) but with some additional functionality and greater variety in its visual design.

I ran an overlay test yesterday and I'm pretty happy with how it looks. I need to run some technical tweaks (drop stream res to 720p since it can't maintain a stable framerate at 1080p, drop El Gato source volume, add white background to overlay image so chat text is easier to read), but thus far I'm pretty happy with it.

The only downside is that "Preparing" graphic is tied to its own scene, and the transition happens as soon as I move from one scene to the other. So it's nice if I have to do modifications outside of OBS pre-stream, but I'm not sure I can keep that up while actively working on another scene and making tests/adjustments to that.

I've still got to work on making my own Emoticons, special graphics for when someone follows, subscribes, or donates (highly doubt the latter two will get much traction, if any at all), and would like to create artwork for my friends I regularly play Smash and Mario Kart with. You can see a really good example in this streamer's Among Us collaboration where the individual speaker's artwork lights up and even bounces. There's probably some Widget or plug-in that works with Discord, which means the majority of work will be making the cartoon caricatures of my friends, but I feel like it'd be worth it. It looks really nice and I'd like to replicate it if I can.

Unfortunately I don't get to stream as often as I'd like, especially from my computer, so I won't be able to take as much advantage of this overlay as I want. I'm also thinking of other ways to improve it since it relies heavily on a gradient. My graphic design skills are a bit sloppy so I'm thinking of how else I can create pixel-style backgrounds or something else to make it look a bit less boring without being too busy.

Hey everyone, I'm looking for recommendations or guidance on what to look for in a camera when it comes to streaming. There are a lot of models out there at all kinds of price ranges, and Amazon in particular is flooded with brands I've never heard of. At the same time, I don't know if spending $100+ for a Logitech C922 or Razer Kiyo is actually necessary, or if I can get away with spending $30-$50 on something lower end.

The office I'd be streaming from isn't the most well-lit, so something like the Razer Kiyo with the built-in ring light is appealing. I'm also not sure if 1080p resolution is really required if my face is going to be in a small panel to the side of the game source.

Anyway, any and all thoughts/recommendations appreciated.

I actually have the Logitech C922 and absolutely love it. Easy to set up, great pic, versatile as f*ck in OBS. Love it.

The Kiyo's built-in ring light isn't very big. It creates enough of a hot spot that I don't use the light on mine, but it has a pretty good auto-focus. My understanding is that you do want the extra resolution for moments when you want to stop showing the game output, to hide your Friends List or similar, and still have something other than a static image on stream.

There are ways, if you already have them on hand, to use the output from a smartphone or "real" camera or action camera instead, such as purely through software with the Elgato Screen Link or similar, or with hardware like a Cam Link or potentially questionable quality knockoff with an app like Clean Feed. Typically those lenses and sensors blow away the quality of any webcam that you could reasonably obtain.

I was using the C922. It works great but you need good lighting otherwise it will look like crap. When the pandemic started, my wife needed a webcam so I had to give it up. But I got creative and found my Sony Handicam from 10 years ago. With an HDMI capture, it actually works really well. I even get zoom functionality. So I guess the long story short is if you have a video camcorder, consider it, though you would need to get an HDMI capture card.

Thanks for the info everyone!

Kurrelgyre, thanks in particular for the idea/links about smartphone capture. The Screen Link app was too laggy to be useful, but their EpocCam app did the trick. You download the app on your phone, install a webcam driver on your PC, and connect the two via USB (or wifi). Then you just add it to OBS. Pretty painless, though the one trade-off is I had to put iTunes on my PC for the USB connection to work. $8 for the non-watermarked version and higher video quality is worth it to me, and I'll stick with this for the near term.

Those of you using Streamlabs... how difficult is it to migrate from OBS? Because I've put a lot of work into my scenes, hot keys, profiles, and everything with OBS, and I just don't want to lose that by moving to Streamlabs, but having it autotweet when you go live is super handy...

Edit: Welp, never mind, think I found my answers on Reddit...
But some really regret taking that step. (though I think their webcam settings issue is due to the Logitech software taking over, I had the same issue)

I imported from OBS and it brought everything over perfectly. However, I've done more experimentation and modification while in Streamlabs than I did OBS, so I can't say for certain whether it's good to do that or not if you've spent a lot of time modifying things like webcam settings or other tweaks.

Yeah Streamlabs imported everything I had set up as far as scenes, but I didn’t have any hot keys set up.

I am looking to make some transition scenes (Be Right Back, Starting Soon, etc) for Twitch streaming (using OBS).

Anyone have any good (free ideally) resources on how to make them?

I paid for mine but it didn't cost much, like $60 in total, and totally worth it. If you'd like I can put you in touch with the artist.

No thanks. If I get regular, maybe. For now, this is just for funsies.

I have a very simple one I made in Photoshop Elements. You can save several layers as an animated GIF, though you gotta be careful of the quality since you're dealing with some high-rez images.

I feel like there's supposed to be a way you can have one scene active while messing with another behind the scenes, based on what I've seen in other streams, but I haven't figured all that out yet. Haven't had as much time to look up tutorials or other info. So right now the "Preparing" scene I have is mostly used for sending links to specific Discords I'm in.

I found some Javascript which creates a Star Trek Warp effect and put a "Stream is starting soon" message in the middle. It works pretty well. In the end, all these overlays are is HTML/JS pages.

ccesarano wrote:

I feel like there's supposed to be a way you can have one scene active while messing with another behind the scenes, based on what I've seen in other streams, but I haven't figured all that out yet.

There is a "Studio Mode" button in OBS which lets you transition scenes manually so you can mess with other scenes without switching to them.

mudbunny wrote:

I am looking to make some transition scenes (Be Right Back, Starting Soon, etc) for Twitch streaming (using OBS).

Anyone have any good (free ideally) resources on how to make them?

I use a background and slap some text in front of it in OBS. Easy peasy.

Eleima wrote:
mudbunny wrote:

I am looking to make some transition scenes (Be Right Back, Starting Soon, etc) for Twitch streaming (using OBS).

Anyone have any good (free ideally) resources on how to make them?

I use a background and slap some text in front of it in OBS. Easy peasy. :D

Heh. I **may** be overthinking it some. Given I can not really plan a schedule (new puppy makes that difficult) and I have 1s of followers.

Eleima wrote:
mudbunny wrote:

I am looking to make some transition scenes (Be Right Back, Starting Soon, etc) for Twitch streaming (using OBS).

Anyone have any good (free ideally) resources on how to make them?

I use a background and slap some text in front of it in OBS. Easy peasy. :D

This is what I did too, along with some music. I don't need anything too fancy at the moment.

mudbunny wrote:
Eleima wrote:
mudbunny wrote:

I am looking to make some transition scenes (Be Right Back, Starting Soon, etc) for Twitch streaming (using OBS).

Anyone have any good (free ideally) resources on how to make them?

I use a background and slap some text in front of it in OBS. Easy peasy. :D

Heh. I **may** be overthinking it some. Given I can not really plan a schedule (new puppy makes that difficult) and I have 1s of followers.

If it helps and our time zones line up, I can always show you how I did mine by screen sharing if you want. Literally took me five minutes.

I recently upgraded my mic setup. I was using the chat mic on the Arctis Steelseries 7. Good enough to enable chatting/commentary while streaming, but definitely not a "good" mic.

After some research, I decided to pick up an Elgato Wave 3. Somewhat pricey, but I wanted something good while still continuing to stick with a USB mic instead of moving into the world of XLR mics. I started with it on the desk. It was a definite upgrade, but having it a good 12 inches or more from my face led to an echoey sound despite messing around with EQ and other sound filters.

I ended up picking up a cheap mic arm and, along with Elgato's (overpriced?) pop filter and shock mount, that really made all the difference. I've still got some filters applied in SLOBS to tweak things, and I can see myself continuing to tinker with those, but overall I'm happy with it, and looking forward to streaming sometime this weekend with the new setup.

It's been surprising how much I've enjoyed diving into this stuff. In the last 12 months I went from never watching twitch, to spending money on hardware and spending several hours a week on stream myself. It helps that it's something you can dive into pretty easily and incrementally update your setup and presentation as you go, rather than needing to have a "perfect" setup right from the start.

I also upgraded to the Wave 3, actually. I went through a purchase-return phase with Best Buy a bit after researching some mics and their quality, and was shocked at how clear the Wave 3 came in without white noise in the back compared to a Yeti Blue. It's not only better than my prior mic, but also smaller. I do need to get an extension stand or something, as leaning forward like I've been has not done my back a kindness. But for the price I got it (about $140 on sale, believe MSRP is $170) I'm more than happy.

I was not fond of the Wave Link application, though. All of a sudden my audio sources doubled, and I'm constantly swapping between a wireless headset and speakers. So I just use the Wave and additional settings in Streamlabs. I did download the nVidia Broadcast, however, just so I can have a program assisting with noise removal. I might need to look into a software solution that can create a "sound limit" while I'm talking, but I'm not sure I can get the sort of real-time filtering I'm looking for as I'm hoping to eliminate some background noise while I'm talking. Broadcast basically just silences the mic until there's a loud enough noise, but after that it captures everything.

Still, I feel like if anyone was looking for a mic and willing to drop the cash, the Elgato Wave 3 is what I'd recommend.

I too switched to The Wave 3 and I too love it. I like the Link application, I just use it as the source in VoiceMeeter and it works great.

I have the Wave Link application installed, but have not really looked into it yet. I don't have a lot of sound sources I need to manage, so it seems like overkill for my setup.

OBS/SLOBS has a built in Noise Suppression filter you can add to the mic input, so I'd try that @cceserano rather than having a separate application running solely for that purpose.

I ended up downloading Reaper plugins and adding them as filters to the mic input. I used this Youtube video to help explain how to get them configured. I'm no expert by any means, but they helped improve the sound quality, I think.

I'll be experimenting with the built-in filters first, and if they find them insufficient I'll give Reaper Plugins a try. Thanks for sharing that! Between this and helping out with the AV booth at my Church, I've been learning a lot about this stuff as well. It has been quite the experience.

Also like you, though I did streams for Extra Life and stuff, I never really found myself getting into streaming until the pandemic struck. A couple friends of mine started streaming, so I decided to try streaming more, and friends started tuning in more, and then I began experimenting with an overlay and so on and so forth, and now here I am trying to see if I can create a Monday-Wednesday-Friday streaming schedule. If I can get the noise gate and suppression going, then it might be far easier than I expected.

I have been using OBS for it's virtual camera feature. So I could Zoom some Karaté classes.

Sometime, the image will freeze. I need to restart OBS for it to work again.

Do you guys have a virtual camera software option I could use to try out if it's truly OBS, or something else ?

Thanks.

Well, I was impatient, and bought this :

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08NJ24M8T/...

Seems my previous capture device might had trouble, but I'm glad I tried this new one!

It's crazy small, and the videos are snappier.

If you don't have the budget for a camlink from Elgato, go with the knockoff one.

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.