You aren't gonna want miss these seven USB accessories for live
streaming and video production.
Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki.
Everything in this video that you're gonna see is based on my experience
doing livestreams and video production for years, and everything here
has found its way into my daily workflow in some way or another.
I wanted to share these things with you to give you some ideas of how
to streamline your own workflows.
Most of these things are things I've bought myself.
There are a couple of exceptions, which I'll mention later in the video,
and of course, links to everything will be in the description below.
First, the number one USB accessory you need is a DC coupler for your camera.
What is the DC coupler?
It is a way to power your camera over usb, even if your camera
doesn't have a USB port itself.
There are versions of this for nearly every camera out there.
It'll slide into the battery slot of your camera, and then it has a little cord
that comes out with a USB port on the end.
This way, you don't have to worry about running out of batteries when you're
filming anymore, which is of course super useful if you're also live streaming.
No more stopping midstream to change batteries or worrying about
your camera suddenly shutting down.
You can connect the USB to a power brick, or you can even connect it to a large USB
battery if you want it to be portable.
I can't overstate how nice it is to not worry about batteries anymore.
I have one of these for all of my cameras. Speaking of which, I
don't have any particular one to recommend, but I'll leave links to
the ones I've bought down below.
I haven't had any trouble with just searching Amazon for a reasonably
well reviewed one for the specific type of camera that I need.
One other note is that some cameras have a USB port for transferring
data, and some also say they can be powered from USB directly.
I've had pretty mixed success with that, even on the cameras that
say they can be powered over USB.
What I found is that the cameras tend to overheat more with a
USB cord plugged in directly.
And it'll sometimes think that the battery is low and just
shut itself off automatically.
On the other hand, I've never had any overheating problems on using
these DC couplers instead, and I've left some of my cameras powered on
for thousands of hours at a time.
I suspect some of the newer cameras with USB-C probably do okay over USB, but
anything older than a couple years ago, I would definitely go with the DC coupler.
Moving on to number two, short usb cables.
These cables are great.
They are a lot more flexible than the ones that you usually get with your SSDs.
They're really handy for connecting a USB drive to an ATEM Mini or to your
camera, and you can even use them to power devices on a rig with a USB battery.
This keeps things nice and tidy instead of having a long cord wrapped around.
One note about these, make sure you pay attention to the actual specs of the cable
depending on what you're using it for.
The names USB 3.2,
3.1 and 3.0 are pretty confusing, but that is a topic for another video.
What you need to look for is whether the device you're connecting needs a
cable that supports a certain speed and how much power it needs for charging.
The cables I have are rated for a hundred watts and 10 gigabits per
second, which means this is not the newest 3.2 standard, but I've used
these with a bunch of different drives and they are great for hooking up a
drive onto your ATEM Mini rig, also.
Next up is this UNI USB-C dongle.
This one's actually one they sent me to share on my live streams,
but I've bought a bunch of other UNI dongles and cables in the
past, so I do trust this brand.
This is one of their latest dongles, and it has basically everything
you need with one USB cable.
It has USB power delivery in and out, so you can plug in the
dongle to a power brick, and it'll charge your laptop or iPad.
It has gigabit ethernet to give you a fast, hardwired
connection to your network,
which I always recommend for live streaming.
Wifi is great, but it can be unreliable, especially if you're in a dense part
of town with other wifi nearby, so it's always better to go hardwired if you can.
There's also an HDMI output that supports up to 4K resolution, and
it has an SD and micro SD reader.
The dongle is basically everything you need, and you can use it with an iPad
to run LiveApp for playing out video clips to your atam, or you can draw
on top of your video with LiveApp.
LiveApp is a great tool
by the way, I will link some other videos I've done about that below too.
Another great UNI accessory is this USB-C HDMI Cable.
This is their newest one that they sent me along with the USB hub.
It's called Screen++ It's a great way to connect a laptop
or an iPad into your streaming kit without a lot of clutter.
I like this cable because it is cleaner than a dongle and a separate HDMI cable
if all you need is an HDMI connection. It is worth noting that, of course,
this won't power your device.
So you need to run on battery power or use a second USB
port on your laptop for power.
Speaking of power.
Next up is this Anker GaNPrime USB power brick.
I've bought a ton of Anker chargers before, but this is one of the new
ones they sent me to do a video on.
I will link that video down below too, where I went over the details of
their whole GaNPrime product lineup.
This one is 65 watts, which I found is more than enough to charge
my laptop and it's nice and small, so I keep in my bag all the time.
They also have a larger 120 watt and 150 watt versions if you have a bigger laptop.
I really like that there are two USB-C ports and one USB-A on it
since more and more devices are finally making the switch to USB-C.
Next up is this SD card reader.
I actually was using an anchor USB-C SD card reader for a long time, but I
wanted to find one that had a lightning port for my iPhone too, and that's when
I stumbled across this one on Amazon.
I've never heard of this brand before, but it wasn't super expensive, so I
decided to give it a try, and frankly, I've been totally happy with it.
Really no complaints.
On this end is a regular USB-C port, and on the other end is a
USB-A. So where's the lightning port?
Well, you fold down the USB-A port, and that reveals the
lightning port underneath.
It is so clever I don't know how they figured out how to make that work.
It keeps it all nice and small instead of some of the other Y shaped ones.
I've been using this to download photos from my cameras and my drone
onto my iPhone, and then I flip it around to transfer stuff onto
my computer for video editing.
Lastly, I want to talk about this USB extension cable.
Sometimes you need to connect something farther away than
your longest regular USB cord.
For example, my Raspberry Pi is back in that rack at the back of the room, but
my Stream Deck is up here on the desk, and that is way longer than the USB
cable that comes with the stream deck.
So I connect this USB extension in between and it reaches no problem.
This is an active cable so it can reach farther than a plain USB cable can.
There's actually two versions of this: one is powered from the USB bus and
the other is even longer and has to be powered with a little AC adapter.
Both of them can power the stream deck no problem, which is the
main thing I'm using it for.
And there you have it.
My top seven USB accessories for live streaming.
Let me know down on the comments if you have any interesting USB
gadgets that you use in your work.
As always, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.