Today, I'm gonna attempt to give you a more definitive answer on
what the best capture card is,
and how to use it to its fullest potential.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What is happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone,
and it's been a while since I've done a streaming video,
but after a full day of testing, I'm happy to report
that I have some answers for you.
So when I was researching the best capture card,
I kept coming up with list after list that would have,
like, eight to ten items on them,
all geared towards gamers, and this wasn't really
that helpful when I'm trying to figure out
how to record the purest signal possible
from my camera. And it also doesn't really make
any sense that there could be ten "best" capture cards.
So, I spent most of the last couple days
trying different products in different configurations
with different cameras to try and figure out
what the best possible setup is for my usage scenario.
So if you're anything like me,
I hope this information will be really helpful to you.
Anyway, I've got my notes that I wrote down
during the testing, and I think I've got this
pretty well figured out. So, first up, here's my scenario:
I've got a Windows 10 64-bit custom-built PC
over here, and inside of it I've got--
I'm still running the i7-2600K Sandy Bridge,
I've got that overclocked to 4.5 gigahertz,
and my graphics card is from NVIDIA--
which is important and we'll get to that in a minute--
but it's a GTX 970. So what I'm trying to do
is capture one, maybe two, high-end cameras
into my PC for streaming, so 1080p30 will be fine.
I don't plan on doing any actual recording
into the computer, so I don't really need 4K cards.
And the only thing I will be recording is maybe,
like, menus or setup configurations in case
I want to do a tutorial on that,
and I think 1080p will be fine for including
that in videos. Now, for any of you gamers out there,
that isn't to say that this information isn't going
to be useful to you, it's just that there's other
considerations you're gonna have to make based on
price and software. The options that I'm recommending
might be a little bit pricey for a hobbyist gamer/streamer,
and I'm making no considerations
for HDCP Content Protection, which I know that
a lot of gamer/streamers run into
when they're trying to stream stuff from
their PlayStations or whatever,
and it's violating the content protection on HDCP,
I--this isn't gonna address any of those issues.
The cameras I tested this on was the Panasonic GH5
and the Sony a7 III and I'm gonna be making
a follow-up video shortly that sort of talks about
my experiences between those two cameras,
so if you're using one of those cameras
or you're thinking about getting or using one
of those for streaming, you might want to check
that video out when it's posted.
Lastly, because this is a custom-built PC,
I was targeting PCI Express cards over USB
to help with latency, reduce cordage,
and also reduce some reliance on drivers.
For those that don't have this option,
I will include some recommendations for USB devices
at the end of the video.
OK, so with that scenario painted,
with all of my usage cases laid out for you
and what I was trying to do,
the best capture card I can recommend for the money
is the AVerMedia Live Gamer HD 2 PCI Express.
[funky electronic music]
♪
And the best 1080p capture card I can recommend
period would be the Magewell Pro Capture HDMI,
which also comes with a Dual Pro Capture HDMI
if you want to run two cameras, and there's even a quad version,
but that's a bit overkill for what I was looking for.
The Magewells are just the best, open and shut,
but the pricing is significantly higher
than the AVerMedia recommendation.
For instance, if you're looking for
just the HDMI one-port one, it's $300 USD or $400 CAD
and the dual HDMI is $580 USD or $770 CAD.
and the quad is, like, twice that,
so let's not even talk about that.
And they also have 4K cards, which start at $500 USD
or $650 CAD, for, like, their basic 4K card.
But the AVerMedia, on the other hand,
you get a lot of the same important features
as the Magewell, but it's only $200 USD or $270 CAD.
So now let's talk about what those important features
are for people who want to capture
a high-quality feed from their nice cameras,
and why that hardware that I mentioned inside
the computer earlier is important.
What's good about these specific cards
that I mentioned is their ability to deliver
an uncompressed signal into your computer.
A lot of the other popular lines that you might see--
like the ones from Elgato, for instance--
they do a compressed signal when it comes
into your computer. This is why the system
requirements for those cards are generally higher
and a lot more specified versus the cards
that I'm recommending, because Elgato
and the companies like them need to make sure
that your computer is powerful enough
to handle the compression that they have built
into the card. They also rely heavily
on their bundled software and drivers,
which is why people have sort of varying degrees
of success and compatibility.
That being said, Elgato is probably the best
when it comes to offering support
for their bundled software and drivers,
and trying to find solutions to the common problems
unlike something like Blackmagic Design,
which has cards that are very similar
to the major ones that are recommended,
and I considered them for this review.
I really wanted to love the Blackmagic DeckLink,
but that garbage fan that they installed
on the heatsink and the horror stories
that you hear about their support
just made it way too much to be able to recommend,
even though they do offer probably
the most competitive price for what you get.
So back to compressed versus uncompressed.
When you hook up a device to a computer
that has compression onboard on the card,
as soon as you connect it, you're gonna see
your computer react in terms of usage.
And this can be mild or significant
depending on how powerful your computer is.
This is why I mentioned having
an NVIDIA graphics card earlier. And I'm sure
this probably works on other NVIDIA graphics cards,
or even some other brands, but I've only tested it on,
like, modern generation and video GPUs
from the 900 series and beyond. But basically,
when I connect an uncompressed signal
to my computer using the AVerMedia card,
for instance, rather than see my CPU usage go up,
my GPU usage goes up by just a modest amount,
and my CPU barely changes at all.
But if I turn the GPU off, if I disable it,
then my CPU usage kind of jumps back up,
like you would see if you were plugging in a card
that had compression onboard.
But the advantage of this is that the uncompressed
signal can kind of be "pre-encoded" by the GPU
and have no effect on your CPU at all, and then,
when you actually go to record it locally or stream it,
then your encoder options there kind of get
a little bit more headroom.
For instance, if I was going to stream using x264--
the software encoder which uses just a CPU--
if I didn't have the GPU in there
and I wanted to stream using my CPU at the setting
"Very Fast," that preset, the CPU usage goes up
to like 55 or 60%, which is crazy.
Like, I couldn't possibly do that
with two different cameras at that amount.
But if I have the GPU installed,
because the sort of first stage of that is run through
the GPU and then the final one is done through x264
with no loss because it's uncompressed
coming in originally and my CPU usage goes down only, like, 35%.
So it's pretty significant on just having the GPU onboard.
And then further than that, if I also do the streaming
on the GPU using the codec NVENC,
which doesn't use the CPU at all,
all that happens basically is my GPU usage doubles
to like 30, 40% now, and my CPU still stays at, like,
under 10%, allowing me to have multiple iterations
of the setup with multiple cameras and multiple cards,
without, you know, having my CPU boil over
and not be able to work and not be able
to do anything else on my computer at the same time.
That's why I think, for this configuration
that I'm recommending, having a modern graphics card
is important to getting the best performance
if you want to have a high-quality, multi-cam setup.
But it's also why it's important to have
an uncompressed signal rather than
having multiple cards all doing compression
and sort of taking their own piece of the pie
of your CPU outside of your control.
You'd much rather have control
and have a cleaner signal coming in,
especially if you're using really nice cameras.
I should mention that I was doing all of this
with OBS Studio, by the way,
which is my favourite program when it comes
to sort of this kind of recording and streaming stuff,
and I like it because it's able to use
all these devices with very little meddling required
with bundled software and drivers.
Which is another item that I should add to my list
of usage conditions, which is that I didn't want
to have too heavy of a reliance on bundled software
or drivers. I want to just be able to plug it in,
open up OBS, and then do it from there
with less needing to launch
different third-party programs and stuff like that.
And the recommendations that I made
are all very good for that, save for a couple notes
I need to make on the AVerMedia Live Gamer HD 2
that did require some meddling with the drivers,
even though the marketing software
says it's completely driverless.
Now, they're telling the truth, it is driverless.
When I booted up my computer
after installing the device, it was detected
and it did work, but there were some things
that you couldn't do that I would say
doesn't make it completely driverless.
For instance, if I tried to run the firmware updater
to get the latest firmware on the card,
it just wouldn't detect the card,
and it's because the DirectShow Driver
that was just sort of in Windows that made it
so I didn't have to download anything.
That one didn't really integrate well
with the firmware updater.
So you need to download their software driver
package, which is called, like, "RECentral 4"
or something like that, and that will update the drivers
to sort of the spec ones that the firmware updater
is expecting to see, and configuration tools
expecting to see as well. And so once you have
that installed, then you can go in and you can make
some tweaks, you can update the firmware,
you can get all that done, and then you can get rid
of the software if you want after that.
Some of the tweaks would be if you wanted
to set your HDCP settings, like I was saying earlier,
if you're doing some kind of content protection stuff.
But that shouldn't matter to anybody
that's just using their cameras to create
original content. And then the other thing
is that there's an LED problem--
or at least I have a problem with the LED on
the AVermedia. It's this bright blue light,
and I really dislike it, and the only way to actually,
I guess, disable it the right way is to use their software,
and then you can decrease the brightness
of the LED by 25% increments down to zero.
Now, once all that's done, you should be able
to safely uninstall the software and you don't need it
anymore if you plan to use OBS or something like that.
I will say, though, that this did not fix the LED problem.
Now, this is just a minor annoyance,
but that light would only be configured
when the program was running.
So as soon as you rebooted your computer,
the light would sort of recycle and be bright blue again,
and then when you returned to Windows,
it wasn't until after you launched the program again
that then you would see the settings take effect.
So unless you wanted to have that RECentral software launch
at boot every single time,
which would obviously congest your boot-up time,
then the LED was just gonna do its own thing.
And that obviously goes against the idea
I was saying earlier where it's completely softwareless
and you can just uninstall the software
once you get all the updates done.
That's not gonna allow you to do that.
So I came up with a better idea: uninstall the software
after configuring it, like I said,
and then I just took a piece of electrical tape
and laid it on the diffuser that came with the LED
so that you couldn't see the light shining through
my case. Problem solved!
♪
Anyway, other than those issues,
the Live Gamer HD 2 is basically an uncompressed,
software-less, really, really great quality PCI Express
card very similar to the Magewell Capture Pro,
but at a much reduced price.
And it also has a 4K variant with HDR coming soon
that is actually coming in at the same price
as the 1080p version of the Magewell,
which is $300 USD, or $400 CAD. So to recap,
if you're like me and you have a decent rig
with a modern NVIDIA GPU and you want to capture
a high-quality, uncompressed signal from your camera,
and you don't want to have to monkey around
with bundled software drivers,
and you want to just be able to use
your favourite program like OBS,
then get the AVerMedia Live Gamer HD 2.
And if you need to hook up two cameras
to a single card, or you just want to get
the best possible card you can,
then get the Magewell or the Magewell Dual.
You really only need to know about those three cards
that I mentioned. You can pretty much ignore
the rest when it comes to PCI Express
for this usage scenario, in my opinion.
Lastly, as promised, if PCI Express is just not an option
and the only way you can get this to work is with USB,
Magewell does have a USB variant
of the PCI Express card, and it's called
the Magewell USB Capture HDMI Gen 2,
and it'll cost you about the same as the PCI version
at $300 USD or $400 CAD. I've never personally tested it,
but the majority of the reviews are favourable.
The longevity of the device is the only thing
that's really being brought into question
in the negative reviews. I guess it won't last you
as long as the PCI Express version,
but that kind of makes sense based on
the nature of USB devices.
AVerMedia's uncompressed USB option would be
there Live Gamer Extreme, which is USB 3
and gives you 1080p60. Of course, when it comes
to USB devices, compatibility is an increased concern,
so I recommend you go to AVerMedia's website here
and you can download this thing called
the "Compatibility Test Tool," and it will let you know
if your system is a good fit.
And again, having a modern NVIDIA graphics card
will make the encoding process much smoother
when it comes to dealing with uncompressed signals.
I'm gonna include links for everything
that we talked about today in the description below,
so make sure you pop down there and take a look.
And as I said, I'm gonna be making a follow-up video
to this shortly, either later today or tomorrow,
that describes my experiences in streaming
with the GH5 and the a7 III.
So if that's something that you might want
to be considering doing, I highly recommend you
check that video out as well.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found
this video helpful, or at least entertaining
and if you did make sure you leave it the old thumbs-up.
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright! I'm done.
♪