Every time I stream, I get a handful of questions
about the hardware and software that I use
to broadcast my Q&A sessions to YouTube.
So today, I'm making an update video on that process.
Let's get Undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody?
I'm Gerald Undone and I'm going to make you
an offer you can't refuse... maybe.
So, my streaming setup is pretty similar
to my regular shooting setup.
It's just that my feed goes somewhere else.
I made a video a little while ago explaining
all of the gear that I use to shoot my videos,
so if you want more information on my regular setup,
I recommend you go and watch that video.
But, in short, in front of me here,
I've got the Panasonic GH5
which goes to the Atomos Ninja V via its HDMI port,
and then the Atomos Ninja V also has an HDMI out
that I send to a capture card.
Now, you can't do this with every capture card and I'll get
more into that in a minute, but I like to use the Atomos
when I can because it allows me to load a LUT onto it
so that I can grade my HLG footage
before it ever hits my computer.
But during this video, I'll also show you
an alternative way to grade your stream on the fly
for when you're not using an external monitor.
First though, let's move on to the meat of this process
which is the capture cards, and to help me with this section,
I've got one of YouTube's capture card experts, EposVox.
So, most of the time I use AVerMedia's
Live Gamer HD 2. Now, it's only 1080p,
but that's all I typically need for my streams.
It's a quality card at a great value, but it is PCI Express.
This means that it needs to be installed inside your computer,
but this comes with the advantage that it can deliver
an uncompressed video stream to your computer
without the need for drivers.
Now, I'm a big fan of AVerMedia's products,
so I also have two other cards
that I use for different purposes.
One of them is another card that's installed in my computer
because it's also PCI Express, and that's the Live Gamer 4K.
As the name would suggest, it's basically a 4K overhauled
version of the Live Gamer HD 2, and it also includes HDR.
I use this one when I want to send my GH5's HLG signal
directly to the capture card with no fuss,
since it knows how to handle that HDR signal.
Now, that 4K card does have one drawback
over the Live Gamers HD 2, and that it doesn't get along
very well with the Atomos Ninja V,
no matter what I try it just won't accept a signal
coming from the Ninja, but it works immediately
if I plug it into the camera. Where the Live Gamer HD 2 works
no matter what I try, but it's only 1080p and no HDR.
Aside from that one limitation though, the Live Gamer 4K
is amazing, but I'll let EposVox tell you a little bit
more about why it's a great purchase overall, and also
about the USB alternative, the Live Gamer Ultra.
So, there's two main things that make the Live Gamer 4K
worth it over competing capture cards.
The first one being its chroma subsampling,
its colour resolution, that being 4:4:4,
supported all the way through 1440p 120Hz,
if you're doing gameplay stuff on the PC, or 4K60
if you're doing console 4K inputs, or your video camera.
Now, most capture cards, especially
of the gaming variety, typically only support
for 4:2:0, that is hard to do, which means that
certain colours are compressed and things like that.
I believe Gerald actually has a full video
on chroma subsampling and things like that.
And for most users, that's totally fine,
but if you're trying to get the most out of your
camera input as if it's a video recorder,
that's super important and can help you get a better result,
as long as your OBS settings are set
to take advantage of it. By default in NV12,
the default colour mode in the Advanced tab
of OBS' settings are only 4:2:0.
You need to change it to RGB 4:4:4, or I4:4:4
in order to take advantage of this capability.
The second is the low latency. There's an input latency
with all capture cards from your video signal
going in to what's shown in OBS
or whatever your capture card preview is.
The Live Gamer 4K is one of the lowest latency capture cards
that I have tested, which means that in terms
of syncing up with your audio from an external source like
your microphone here, it is one of the fastest options
that'll make your life a lot easier for syncing that up.
If you don't want to crack open your PC
or you're on Mac or Linux or on a laptop,
you have the Live Gamer Ultra from AVerMedia as well,
which is a great little option.
It's a tiny little USB card that connects by a USB-C,
USB type A, it is a UVC capture card,
which means it's plug-and-play even without drivers
and this capture card is great as well.
It's still fairly low latency and they just improved it
from my recent results with a firmware update,
but it also supports chroma subsampling
of 4:4:4 at 1080p60. It drops the 4:2:0
for the 4K stuff and only 4K 30 pass through in a capture
of 4K60p pass through, yada-yada but at 1080p60
you get the full RGB 4:4:4 chroma subsampling,
which is freaking fantastic at a low latency,
so you can get really good quality
as long as your computer has a good USB chipset.
Lately, I've also been using a more simplified option
from AVerMedia in their Live Gamer Mini.
Now, this newly released card is, sort of,
a no-frills USB capture card, which is great
for portable streaming or when I want to set up
an alternative camera angle quickly.
It's kind of like a miniature version
of the Ultra that EposVox was just explaining,
and it's similar in purpose to the Live Gamer HD 2
in the sense that it's a 1080p capture card
and not 4K, like the Ultra.
But, it doesn't deliver an uncompressed signal
like the Live Gamer HD 2 does, because that requires
more bandwidth than USB 2.0 can provide.
In fact, that's probably the only major limitation
of this card is that it's USB 2.0 only,
so you're going to be limited in your throughput
and it too also doesn't get along very well
with the Atomos, so you're going to have
to connect your camera directly, but it pairs
very nicely with my Sony cameras for up to 1080p60.
Now, before we jump into the software side of things,
it's important to note that even with the lighter cards
like the Live Gamer Mini, you still need
a reasonably powerful computer to stream
and it's also generally recommended that
you have a somewhat current, dedicated graphics card.
Alright, so for software, I use OBS open broadcaster
and I'll give you a quick little rundown of my settings,
but if you want to get more detailed
or get into specific things,
there's quite a few quality guides out there,
many of which are by our guest, EposVox.
So, you start by adding a source, which will be
a video capture device in our case,
and then you choose the capture card that you have.
For AVerMedia cards, at this step, you don't always
have to install the software in order to get it working,
but it sometimes helps to get the latest firmware,
and also they have their own streaming and recording package
called RECentral, which you can use if you don't like OBS.
But for the cards I recommend, usually you can just
select them here, and then choose your resolution,
frame rate and so on.
You can pause the video here and use my settings
if you want, they've been working fine for me,
but I'm sure that if I'm doing something wrong,
-EposVox will tell us. -The only thing I would suggest
is if you're live streaming, to drop the full RGB range
down to Limited, as OBS by default is set
to take advantage of that and if you don't have them
matched up perfectly, that's the 16 to 235 range,
you're going to end up with washed out colours
and Twitch seems to not like, uh, the full range
if you're streaming to Twitch, and things like that.
So, for a lot of uses that's what you'd want to do,
but in your case settings are good.
You'll also want to make sure that you have the right
audio device listed here, if you have a USB microphone
or audio interface, and then check your levels.
And you might have to put a delay on the sync
of your microphone as you can see here with Sync Offset,
if you were to make your lips match your sound
in case your audio and your video are taking
different routes to your computer like mine are,
but if you're recording the audio directly
into your camera, you might not have to do this.
And, if you're using a mono XLR style microphone,
you're probably going to want to check this box
to make sure that your voice comes out
of both channels on the viewer side.
Now, I'm not going to go into the rest of the Settings menu,
because like I said, that is a whole another video
that people with a lot more knowledge
than me on this topic have already covered,
but I will put a link to EposVox's playlist
on the subject in the description below,
in case you're interested in going further through
optimizing your OBS settings.
But I will give you my final tip, which as promised,
is how to grade your stream
while it's being broadcasted through OBS.
Now for my tutorial on this, I am going to use
Adobe products like Premiere Pro and Photoshop,
but if you know the alternative ways of doing this,
well, let me know in the comments below
for other people, but it's pretty straightforward.
You just need to have a program that you can apply LUTs with,
and another one that you can grade your footage with,
and then export a LUT. But if you don't make your own
LUTs and you already have one downloaded,
you can probably just use that as well.
So, we're going to go over to video capture device here
and if we right click on it, we can go to filters.
And these are the filters for the video stream
and you know we can add all kinds of different ones here,
like Chroma Key and we can just do
simple colour corrections as well, if we wanna, you know,
come in here and adjust the contrast or whatever.
Uh, basic stuff, but we're not going to do that for a LUT.
What we're going to do is if we hit Apply LUT at the top.
And then when we choose OK, and we choose the path.
It brings us to OBS's default LUTs, and, you know,
they're black-and-white, original Posterize,
whatever; if we choose the Posterize one,
we can see now we have a Posterized effect.
What we want out of this is the original,
this is an unedited image, so we're going to take
the original and I recommend that you make a copy of it
and save it somewhere, like, say on your desktop.
So you're going to open up that original PNG LUT file
in Photoshop, and then over on the side here,
you'll notice that there's a Color Lookup table,
and if you choose that and the first one that says
'Load 3D LUT', if we choose that, we're going to be able
to apply a LUT to this image and save it.
Now, I don't have any LUTs saved, so I'll just do
a quick exporting one in Premiere Pro, so that
you can use that as well, so, let's pop open Premiere.
Okay, so now here we are in Premiere Pro and I've got
our sample image loaded up here, and this is a capture
from the stream which is important because sometimes
the stream can look different than recorded from your camera,
so you generally want to grade it
to the way that the OBS looks.
So, I've taken a screen grab from OBS.
I've already done a quick little grade based on
my camera, but as you can see, it's a bit different,
and this is using the Paul Leeming Leeming LUT
for HLG, which I highly recommend.
But we're going to make some small tweaks here.
I'm going to take a bit of that magenta away, because
it's a bit strong and this one, may be warm it up a notch,
lower the saturation... quite a bit as well.
And then I think I'll add a little bit more contrast...
and...
maybe I can put a little bit more saturation to this,
I don't know, so something like that, it doesn't--
we're just gonna-- you make it the way that you like,
adjust your sliders, but if we hit the little
hamburger menu up here, next to Lumetri Color
and we choose Export Cube-- let me just give it a name.
Let's call it "Undone," and then we save that.
That is now, we've just now made a LUT.
We've just exported a cube file, that's a LUT,
but now if we jump back over to Photoshop
and we have our LUT default look here,
and we choose the Color Lookup table option,
choose Load 3D LUT, and then click on Load 3D LUT,
it asks you to choose a file on our computer,
so we're going to choose that Undone cube,
and then we can see right away that
it's changed the gradations, and made a different look here
and we can hide it and turn it back on,
so you can see the difference.
Now, we're going to want to save this out,
keep it as a PNG. So we'll go File, Save As
and we'll give it a name like,
uh... "Undone Stream Grade."
I've already done this before, that's how it knows
to save it like that, and then we'll replace that one
and press "OK", and so now we've saved that as a PNG.
And now if we jump back into OBS and go back
to our Video Capture Device, right click on it,
choose Filters, and now where we had this Apply LUT
thing before, if we bring this up and we choose Browse,
it shows us where the default location was.
But instead if we choose Desktop,
and then choose the Undone Stream Grade LUT, boom!
It immediately grades it to the way that we just had it looking
in Premiere, and if we hide this and turn it back on,
we can see, there you go!
So now, when we go to broadcast our stream,
it's going to look like this, instead of the way that HLG
looks straight out of camera, and that's pretty much it.
Once I have the image looking the way that I like,
and I make sure that my audio levels are good,
I just hit "Start Streaming" and then the rest
is what you see when you watch my streams.
Lastly, I mainly covered AVerMedia cards in this video,
because that's what I use and I'm comfortable with them
and I think they offer really great value, but there are
some alternatives out there like ones from Elgato
and Blackmagic make some really great cards as well.
And Magewell probably makes the best cards in the business,
but they're at a significantly higher price point,
so in my opinion, I think that AVerMedia
offers the best bang for the buck
of the capture cards that are out there.
But I'll let EposVox weigh in on this one
and see what he thinks is the best value option.
In my opinion, the AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K
is actually one of the best "bang-for-the-buck"
capture devices that you can get on the market right now,
which is pretty cool, especially
with all the quality options that it supports.
If you want to go higher-end and have specific needs,
there are much higher end capture cards
from Magewell and Blackmagic Design.
I actually use for a lot of my camera "webcam" inputs,
the Blackmagic Deck Link Mini Recorder 4K.
It only does 4K30, but takes HDMI or SDI
and allows me to record completely uncompressed,
so 4:4:4 at, in Blackmagic's crazy 10-bit, 1 GB/second--
1 "giga-byte" per second, not gigabit--
codecs and crazy things like that.
And if you're looking for a competitor
to the Live Gamer 4K, Elgato has their 4K60 Pro.
It tends to be a little more expensive and only supports,
uh, chroma subsampling of 4:2:0,
but it is an option and now does support HDR tone mapping.
You can't record the actual HDR, but it does do
HDR pass-through and HDR to SDR tone mapping
and the software for video game stuff.
But for the best bang-for-the-buck,
if you're willing to install a PCIe capture card,
Live Gamer 4K, good to go.
By the way, have you ever wondered if AVerMedia
is supposed to be pronounced "AVier media" like somebody
who's into audio/video, they're an AV-ier, because
they did capitalize the first two letters?
[groaning] Actually, you're not wrong.
I double-checked that with AVerMedia,
it is actually AV-er and they actually have a sister
company that's just called 'AVer', which does,
like, audio/video stuff and then it's AVerMedia.
So, you're actually right on that one.
You and your dang pronunciations.
Alright, well, thanks again for sharing your input, EposVox,
and I highly recommend that you guys all go check out
his channel, and it's not just all about capture cards
and streaming, which he does an excellent job of,
but there's also camera gear videos and just other,
sort of, tech geekery that I'm sure you'll enjoy.
But that's going to be it for me, I hope you found
this video helpful or at least entertaining
and if you did, make sure you leave 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.