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A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

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Re: A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

#101

Post by crazygringo »

zests wrote: post #84
crazygringo wrote: post #55

As someone who records nearly daily, I'm going to critique: > What’s required for an impeccable streaming setup? > 1) Good lighting that can be precisely calibrated, both in brightness and in colour temperature For most uses, fixed brightness is fine as long as you can adjust the light's distance. Lighting doesn't need to be color-temperature adjustable because that's what the white balance on your camera is for -- j…

There doesn't seem to be a great consensus on the best microphones to use on my usual sources (HN). This is surprising because the difference between laptop mic or bluetooth mic and a good microphone is enormous. I also don't mind spending a bit more $$$ because this is for my day job. But when buying a mic, I've read many types of good microphones (bluetooth streamer/podcaster looking mics vs XLR traditional looking…

I think your main choice is primarily just condenser vs dynamic -- for budget, that means something like a Blue Snowball vs an AT2005 (similar to the Shure you mentioned).

And that's ultimately a question these days mainly of aesthetics -- how do you want your voice to sound? I personally prefer the condenser for being a bit more "full-range" (brighter, more sensitive = more realistic) but plenty prefer the dynamic precisely for being less sensitive so it picks up less background noise.

Re: A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

#102

Post by ghaff »

handrous wrote: post #32
xwdv wrote: post #15

I write off anyone who video conferences with a bookshelf behind them as a fool trying to pass off as more intelligent than they actually are. It’s so cringey because of how blatantly manipulative it is.

The best position for filming in my office gives me a blank wall as a backdrop. Looks great, helps the lighting, end up with a wonderful, natural backdrop gradient around me in kind of a "halo". People've commented on it, unprompted. It's nice. However, the most functional and useful layout of my room fills my whole camera backdrop with bookcases, edge-to-edge. Here I was, right this moment, trying to decide between…

Personally, I think bookcases look fine as a backdrop. I tidied mine up a little bit but otherwise it's just what's in the background from the external webcam on my desktop system. The only "stage management" I've done is that I draped a fabric print wall hanging over some ugly metal file cabinets. I thought of getting a background Japanese screen sort of thing early on but it would be perpetually in the way.

Re: A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

#103

Post by ghaff »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #19
xwdv wrote: post #15

I write off anyone who video conferences with a bookshelf behind them as a fool trying to pass off as more intelligent than they actually are. It’s so cringey because of how blatantly manipulative it is.

Some people have only one workspace, and also actually happen to have some books they don't want to stack on the floor.

When I was getting my office video properly set up I thought about more deliberately putting some other objects there and so forth. But the thing is that it's my office bookcase and I'd have ended up having to pile a bunch of books in the floor in another room. So I decided it wasn't worth it.

Re: A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

#104

Post by handrous »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #92
handrous wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but we the same applies to any other skill or practice. Like learning to program. Or bathing. Or showing up to work on time (a much, much bigger problem than, say, not owning a suit, for the actually-poor—ask them, or their employers, and you'll get an earful). In the case of management, specifically, I'd think if someone's reached the point where they have a realistic shot at a management position, but haven't…

> In the case of management, specifically, I'd think if someone's reached the point where they have a realistic shot at a management position, but haven't figured out they need to dress for it, and also found the time & willpower to do so, that's signaling working as intended It's signalling working as intended from the perspective of people who think they can tell everything they need to know about someone by how th…

> It's signalling working as intended from the perspective of people who think they can tell everything they need to know about someone by how they dress.

Everything? No. It's a somewhat noisy signal. It is a signal, though, and absolutely does carry useful information. For instance, the poorly-dressed are one of, or some combination of: poor; ignorant of fashion; aware of fashion, but nonetheless not putting effort into it despite knowing its benefits; or are deliberately choosing not to dress well. The well-dressed are one of, or some combination of, the opposites of those. Clearly, then, you can tell some things about people from how they dress, or at least narrow down the possibilities.

Someone choosing to communicate deliberately over that signaling channel, or deliberately trying not to is, itself, information, as is someone trying to but missing their intended message, or someone plainly not understanding that it's a method of communication, or communicating with a message tuned for the wrong audience. This is how you end up with things like computer-nerd "uniforms"—they must make it clear they're trying to be non-conformist, as that's the signal they want to send, distinct from "I'm very poor", "my background is, in fact, low-class, and so my attitudes continue to follow", or "I don't know how to dress well even if I wanted to".

Every time you correctly identify a geek from across a room, or out on a trail, or on the street, based solely on how they're dressed and how they carry themselves, that's fashion-as-signal working very well. Does that mean you can so-identify every geek? Of course not. Does that mean there's no information available in fashion? Of course not. Are the geeks who choose to make it very obvious they're a geek sending a signal you're intended to receive? Oh my god, yes. And the ways they choose to make it clear further refine that message.

Re: A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

#105

Post by EForEndeavour »

gumby wrote: post #48

I don’t know about fancy mikes but just using a phone as the webcam made a profound difference for me. And my AirPods seem to work well as microphones for me.

https://twitter.com/IanColdwater/status/1405575186691330054

"I don't know who needs to hear this, but your colleagues want to hear from you, and your AirPods sound like shit"

Re: A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

#106

Post by closeparen »

ghaff wrote: post #96
closeparen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of serious, famous people live in grand, nice houses in older neighborhoods with hopelessly oversubscribed Comcast. The CEO of my Fortune 500 company presented at a remote all-hands at about 0.25 frames/second. Now at that level, maybe you can spend the $10 million it would take to pull fiber to your house. But we’re not taking about buying some prosumer electronics here, we’re talking years of permitting and d…

Yeah. People with a spare room can spend thousands of dollars decking out a studio just so. But a lot of that money is pretty much wasted if they have glitchy Internet and there's not much they can do about other than renting a private office that has good Internet (which is probably an OK option for mid-tier famous people if they live near a city or other area with good network infrastructure).

This seems like a sort of roundabout reinvention of the television network. There are already buildings in every population center where famous people go to make their broadcast appearances.

Re: A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

#107

Post by ghaff »

crazygringo wrote: post #55

As someone who records nearly daily, I'm going to critique: > What’s required for an impeccable streaming setup? > 1) Good lighting that can be precisely calibrated, both in brightness and in colour temperature For most uses, fixed brightness is fine as long as you can adjust the light's distance. Lighting doesn't need to be color-temperature adjustable because that's what the white balance on your camera is for -- j…

re: webcam

I actually set up my Canon 5Diii after Canon updated its webcam software to support this somewhat older model. I do sometimes use it when I'm recording a video presentation but for day to day use it's more trouble than it's worth. It sits behind my desktop monitor so I end up having to reach over and fiddle with switches by hand. I have a Logitech 920 webcam as well and it just works with whatever conferencing software I'm using. Any material video quality issues are far more likely to be the fault of the network.

And I'd add that if you use a wide enough aperture to really defocus the background on a DSLR, you need to really control your motion so you're not going in and out of focus. That's fine for recording a video/interview but would be sort of a pain for random video calls.

Re: A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

#108

Post by greggh »

afit wrote: post #74
milesskorpen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found it to be super laggy and unusable, unfortunately. iPhone 12 + 2018 MBP.

Yowch. Sorry to read that. I built Camo. Can you drop us a note? Should be lower latency than a regular webcam as we can rely on device hardware to encode.

I love Camo too. I use it for my Twitch stream. Great software, thanks for the awesome stuff.

The big feature I'm waiting for is the built in chromakey / greenscreen tools.

Re: A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

#109

Post by greggh »

milesskorpen wrote: post #71
mwarkentin wrote: post #60

Lots of people have spare phones sitting around with really nice camera setups. https://reincubate.com/camo/ is a pretty cool way to use those for a quick upgrade to your camera setup.

I've found it to be super laggy and unusable, unfortunately. iPhone 12 + 2018 MBP.

I use Camo about 14 hours a week for recordings. I've never had this problem. I'd love to know what is causing it if you ever figure it out.

Re: A good livestreaming setup is a well-tailored suit

#110

Post by dubya »

periheli0n wrote: post #94
closeparen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of serious, famous people live in grand, nice houses in older neighborhoods with hopelessly oversubscribed Comcast. The CEO of my Fortune 500 company presented at a remote all-hands at about 0.25 frames/second. Now at that level, maybe you can spend the $10 million it would take to pull fiber to your house. But we’re not taking about buying some prosumer electronics here, we’re talking years of permitting and d…

I find it shocking that bad uplink in private homes is still a problem in the US. In times where a good proportion of public life happens on the web, most of shopping is done online, and media are dominated by streaming, why do people not run rampant against the lack of a decent wired uplink?

Most of the web works fine with a fast link _to_ your home, so that's what Comcast et al have optimized for. I had to upgrade during Covid to get a decent upload rate. Speedtest says I now have 238Mbps down/12Mbps up. For comparison my office has 100Mbps up and down and has never felt slow for downloads.
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