Any chance you could share a link to the lights you use?
Anyone working on an embedded ball-cam with built in gyroscope to maintain correct orientation?
Sure! I’m pretty happy with this one. You can buy rechargeable battery packs for it, or use a wall adapter.
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Cool thanks! The lights I use for our weekly streams are good but not battery powered. I also 3d printed barn doors for them that helps to control light from bouncing off the ceiling and creating glare off the PF glass (from the camera’s perspective) and keeping the light out of players eyes. However, they’re big and in no way mobile.
I’m hoping my mobile rig ships sometime this week or next and lighting is definitely something I’ve been thinking about. My design is sort of a hybrid between yours and Karl’s and meant to fit in a hard case, under TSA’s size and weight requirements. Once I have it in hand I’ll be happy to post my BOM. Likewise, if I end up using your lights and make barn doors for them, I’ll be happy to share those files as well.
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Used a Karl inspired mobile rig for the Upstate NY Championship this past weekend. I was very happy with it
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Looks good @Gizmonic. I’ve been curious about switching between games of different eras and noticed you had to screw with the score camera when going from a DMD view to full back box.
Is it easiest to set that camera at a wide angle that captures all display eras, then use OBS Studio View to scale and crop the video before transitioning scenes? What advice would anyone have for a 2-man stream crew broadcasting a tournament with EM-LCD games?
Use a camcorder with zoom for the scores. When you set up for an EM/SS, zoom all the way out to show the entire backbox. When setting up for a DMD/LCD, zoom in to the screen. It takes only a few seconds to do.
See space city open finals for example: https://youtu.be/J7T0_Wl-ir0?t=13385
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Honestly, I’d rather adjust the score camera (one toggle switch on the handicam) than mess with it in OBS.
We were using a “Please Standby” screen during the game changes, but once we got used to moving the rig, it was taking less than 10 seconds to move from game to game so we didn’t bother!! Moving the rig actually looked pretty cool on stream.
Ron…
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use that also - works well.
I think NASA have one 
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Yes, adjusting it with zoom on camcorder is way easier than fiddling in OBS. But here’s one tip when you want to zoom+pan a source in OBS:
If you hold down Alt + drag the edge of a source, it will crop it (edge turns green). BUT this is really annoying to do, you’ll screw up your layout trying to get it right.
It’s less annoying if you press Ctrl+E for Edit Transform, and change the bounding box to “Scale to inner bounds”, and set the bounding box size to the desired size in your layout. Now, when you hold Alt + drag an edge, it will zoom and pan the source in place, instead of annoyingly resizing your source.
I do this a lot when capturing scores for TNA. Maybe I could make another plugin to make this easier…!
In fact, for all of your video sources, I highly recommend turning on “Scale to inner bounds” (or some other bounding box setting). This way, if your video resolution changes, your layout stays correct.
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Plus we got to hear Bruce sing! LOL
I did my first livestream using mobile phone hotspot last night. My data estimates were really far off reality and I am trying to understand what missed.
I thought 6000kbps=6x60x60/8 =2.7GB per hour. But I blew through 4 GB in 45mins.
Now I had the twitch dashboard open, which has a “stream preview”, which I assumed does not consume much, but it is possible it it downloads the whole stream then shrinks it in JavaScript. This would account for my exceeding our data limit twice as fast as expected. Next time I will not have the dashboard open, but instead just chat somehow.
Am I missing something?
Does your phone or computer tell you what your upload and download totals were over that period?
I believe stream preview is just watching the stream normally, so if it’s on “source” quality, it’s the same bitrate as you’re uploading. So that would defintely account for it.
If you click the gear in the stream preview, you may be able to change the quality if Twitch has given you transcoding options (this is granted semi-randomly each stream based on how many viewers you have, whether you’re an affiliate, etc.).
You can load only the chat by going to e.g. https://twitch.tv/gammagoat/chat
I’ve been playing around with writing a web based version of OBS for a bit but took a short break to learn some OBS for my streaming but came back to it last night to pick up and see if I could make some progress again for a headless solution. Hunting for some help I found a video from a gstreamer conference on a project from the BBC that is very much like what I’m trying to do and they’ve made pretty good progress for a demo. While it’s still just a prototype and very early on I thought I’d share just in case anyone wants to see if it goes anywhere.
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Finished setting up my second Raspberry Pi for my new wireless overhead rigs. They work surprisingly well. I have a clamp coming today that lets me angle the backglass camera location down and play around with that and a bracket for the pi/battery on top but overall I think it’s a pretty clean setup. There are probably some improvements to be made but I’m liking it.
Great news for pinball steamers, Blackmagic is releasing a new capture card, a 4-HDMI card that can support multiple resolutions (up to 4K)- all independently. This could help expand the number of cams and angles for broadcast, really slick.
Can’t wait to pick one up!
Video of it:
BH Link (not for sale yet)
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Magewell have had a 4 port HDMI card at 1080p for ages I have three of them in my rig at Domino Arcade using a thunderbolt extension board. The magewell cards work flawlessly.
What I really want is a 4 port thunderbolt device for on location streams.
At 4K I think you’ll run into bus bandwidth problems with 4 ports esp if you use more than one.
Yeah I saw the Magewell, but the price kinda spooked me away. (Last time I looked it was 899-999). This new Blackmagic is slated to retail much cheaper. (545.00) - I totally agree on Magewell quality. (use them a lot at work).
Not too concerned on bus-bandwidth (some cams like DMD direct capture or player cams, don’t need to be 4K) plus over the winter I rebuilt my main broadcast system (which doubles as my gaming system) - I’m now running a X299 Chipset Based i7 system. It has huge headroom on PCI lanes and bandwidth with expandability. This baby is going to be my broadcasting powerhouse. 
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