This video is brought to you by Curiosity Stream and Nebula.
Let’s say you want to produce a multi-cam stream or podcast,
maybe with a couple of guests. What would you think you need for this? A few cameras,
a couple microphones, sure. But what about to capture it all? A big mixer,
multiple capture cards, a powerful PC to switch through all of that in OBS,
right? Well, Roland has thrown their hat into the ring to provide an all in one solution that
you just plug into your computer and stream with and be off to the races. Let’s see if it holds up.
I’m EposVox the Stream Professor and we’ve now looked at quite a few audio interfaces,
multi-input capture cards, and all-in-one units like the BlackMagic ATEM Mini
and the embarrassment that is the Cooler Master StreamEnjin. How does the Roland VR-1HD hold up?
Before we answer that question, I wanted to give a huge thanks to Micro Center for sending this over
for review. There’s a lot of higher-end gear like this that I can’t always cover on my own budget,
so having retailers like Micro Center who can send review samples helps me show more to you all.
Physically, this is the most impressive-feeling unit I’ve reviewed in
this [category.](http://category.it) This thing is built like a tank.
For video inputs, we have 3 HDMI inputs which will accept anywhere from 480i up to 1080p60,
a hardware passthrough port for real-time passthrough for presentations or gaming
without input latency, as well as a main video feed output to send to a recorder or
preview monitor, and a control room monitor output that shows the menus and controls.
For audio, we get two XLR jacks with 48V of phantom power available,
as well as stereo RCA line in and output. The first XLR jack is on the top of
unit for ease of access and in case you want to use a gooseneck microphone while presenting.
The second XLR, the RCA jacks and a headphone jack are on the left side.
The back also features DC Power with a power switch and a securing clip for the cord and USB
3.0 A to B for streaming. This shows up as a webcam on your computer.
There’s also a USB 2.0 type A port for super basic sound effect or still image graphics loading.
The controls give you audio levels and mixing, separate USB and main audio output levels,
sound effects and voice changer controls, auto switching either on a set interval or based on
audio activity, and compositing modes for split views and picture in picture modes.
Let’s set up a two person podcast setup with this. For this, I set up
two main cameras for the two hosts of the podcast, as well as a third wide angle that shows us both,
all running into the HDMI inputs. Two XLR mics are used to capture our voices,
and all the switching is handled pretty easily. Here’s a demo.
The mistake made here was not muting the audio coming in from one of the cameras over HDMI. I
found this to be annoying because not only is this probably not desirable to be a default behavior,
but finding that particular section of the mixer involved a lot of digging.
For this second setup, I’m giving a presentation. Think of this like an
educational stream I do sometimes, but also in a classroom. I’ve got my main camera,
a PC input for slides, and a gooseneck mic for me at my... uh, podium. Totally.
For our last setup, here’s a basic game stream. I’ve got my game console ran through the HDMI
passthrough back to my TV, a main camera input for me, an iPad capture just to show
social media things I’m referencing, and a XLR headset mic connected for my audio.
The Roland control program for your computer lets you customize
the split and picture-in-picture modes to tweak to your liking. This won’t do full, layered scene
compositing with graphics and such like you could do on a high end Tricaster or ATEM unit,
but combined with some basic graphics in OBS should be good enough for a lot of use cases.
Here you can also adjust the voice changer, choose your audio samples, etc. Though a lot
of this can be done with the setup menu dial and the Menu Monitor output HDMI feed, too.
The software is, however...
quite ancient looking. It doesn’t scale with Windows DPI scaling and even with the 150%
zoom option in the menus it’s nothing but TINY on a 4K display and the controls are super cramped
and hidden behind sub-windows or menus. There’s a lot of secrets in this software when it comes to
super in-depth control over everything about your sources, audio gain, post-processing,
signal tweaking, all sorts of stuff - they just bury everything. The initial product concept
and first time setup is super user-friendly but the software is weirdly dated feeling.
I’m going to be using this bad boy to produce a fair bit of content in the coming months,
many of it content that you won’t see here on this YouTube channel.
Extended interviews with other creators, supplemental educational content - a lot
of this is going up on my own streaming site I built with my creator friends.
The site is called Nebula and we've partnered with Curiosity Stream. Nebula features
YouTube's top education creators such as LowSpecGamer, Thomas Frank, and MKBHD.
My videos are higher quality there, ad free, and often extended from the YouTube versions.
Curiosity Stream saw what we were doing for education and wanted to form an alliance.
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So what’s the catch? Well, as mentioned the HDMI feeds only take up to 1080p60,
and the USB stream is locked to 1080p30 or lower. This is fine for a LOT of broadcasts,
but things are moving higher spec these days, so it does feel a bit.. behind. Thankfully you can
output 720p60 if you need to stream 60fps for game streams. THAT BEING SAID, if you supply your own
capture card - such as a cheap one like the EVGA XR1 Lite which can be had anywhere from $40 to
65 usually - you can take the Main HDMI output at 1080p60 for a full stream that way, which is nice.
Of course, no PC gaming formats will work - no 1440p, high refresh rates,
ultrawide, etc. Those rarely work with broadcast gear.
While the USB output is limited to 1080p30 instead of 60, which I find silly,
it IS in YUY2 format, which is fantastic. This means it’s uncompressed so there’s not
any artifacting or blocking baked in before you compress it for streaming, and it’s low latency,
making it easy to sync up with additional audio or video sources. Plus it’s in the proper legal
RGB range. Contrast this to something like the ATEM Mini line of products which only output
MJPEG over USB - which only needs USB 2.0 bandwidth by the way - AND is in Full RGB
range meaning using anything except a program like OBS and manually correcting this will result in
way too dark and contrasty of an image. Kudos to Roland for doing it right here.
For audio, you’re given up to 60db of analog gain plus additional digital gain and
levels, etc. This will struggle a bit to cleanly power high-gain mics like
the RE20 or SM7b without mic activators, but should sound clean for most use cases.
You also get post-processing controls with basic EQ and dynamics for compressor etc.
And again, loading graphics from the USB port
is super limited to 2 files at a time in bitmap format, which is... eh.
The device does do luminance and chroma keying though, which is neat.
At the original price of $1000, this might be a bit of a tough buy in 2021
-especially as BlackMagic continues to churn out incremental changes to their ATEM Mini line,
but with regular “sale” prices below $600 - such as at your local Micro Center,
this is quite competitive with both video mixers and multiple capture card combinations
(plus a stream deck and audio interface) that you’d need to re-create this functionality with.
By the way, huge shouts out to Micro Center for sending over this review unit. Often I
only get to review cool expensive stuff like this because of awesome retailers
like Micro Center. They’re one of the best places to shop for your tech needs - they have
just about everything, including a custom PC Builder tool with same day assembly and pickup
available, too. I’ll have a link to the Roland VR-1HD on their site or stop in one of their 25
locations across the US and you can even get a free 128GB flash drive and micro SD card, too.
If you’re planning on streaming, you probably want to know how to balance that with existing
YouTube content, maybe even shorts. I have a full YouTube channel management 101 video linked here
or down below. Go check it out. Remember: Be kind, rewind.