When to Ditch the Webcam
By Adam Noyes
StreamingMedia.com recently posted an excellent article titled: “When to Ditch the Webcam”, which could function as a useful tool for those looking to dive head first into live streaming. This article is a guide to multi-camera streaming, and how to get started and elevate past a simple webcam setup.
We’re taking a look at some of the highlights from this article, below.
Many of us participate in video conferences several times a week, making the convenience of a webcam—as opposed to other options—paramount. I produce most of my live training with a webcam because the quality delta between a webcam and other options is negligible when presented in postage-stamp-sized videos. But what setup should you use for a really important conference or a call that will be distributed to many viewers live or on demand? That’s where things get interesting.
Such was the case for a recent interview with marketing personnel from BaishanCloud, a leading global cloud data service provider with more than 500 points of presence in China. The conversation focused on best practices for live streaming and global distribution and involved technologies like hardware H.264/H.265 encoders, QoS and QoE, and multiple CDN delivery.
Unfortunately, I was in the middle of shooting some video tutorials on the ATEM Mini Pro and my office was a mess, so I couldn’t use my normal webcam-based setup. First, I tried the embedded webcam on my Mac display, but I was unable to make the exposure work. Specifically, I was lighting the training set with LCD lights, and the Mac webcam always seemed a touch brighter than I wanted. I tried reducing the intensity of the light panels, but the webcam kept compensating by boosting the gain.
I switched to my Logitech C922 Pro Stream webcam and got the same result: overexposure to an almost garish level. To be clear, both webcams have been serviceable in the past, but something about the lights I set up for the training shoot was freaking them out. We actually filmed a couple of takes with the Logitech webcam, but when the BaishanCloud marketing folks started editing the recordings, they asked if I had another alternative.
Fortunately, I was shooting one camera angle of the ATEM tutorial with a Sony a6300 DSLR, which of course was connected to the ATEM Mini Pro. I tried connecting the ATEM Mini Pro output to the Mac Mini I was using for the Zoom conference, but the Zoom software didn’t recognize the input. I’m sure that was a glitch that I would have been able to correct, but rather than debug while others were waiting, I switched to a
solution I knew would work: the Epiphan AV.io 4K, which is my go-to USB capture device.
I connected the a6300, AV.io, and Mac Mini, and Zoom recognized the AV.io immediately. The quality improvement was staggering, compared not only to the overexposed output from the webcams but to most other webcam output I’ve seen in the past. After re-recording the interview, my host, Evelyne Kuo, took a frame grab for the company’s marketing purposes. She sent a copy for my review, and I was impressed with the quality of her video. I asked about the source and, not surprisingly, learned that they were using a Sony a6400 DSLR.