I would be interested to see what others use but in my experience you’re going to need external lighting for any camera you use. I always just have my trusty LED lights with me when I go to a dark location. They are cheap and easy to travel with and add to your rig.
But the auto exposure setting on the CX405 is way better than any webcam that’s for sure.
Oh yeah definitely planning on bringing a few lights. I’ve got a led panel I’m using for now but am planning on more panels.
I’m looking for a camcorder or camera system with Lumix GX85 / Panasonic V770 quality or better at 60FPS
Some friends swear by the Sony A6400. Dontpanicflip uses this for his playfield cam.
Logitech Brio 4k or cx405 with an older camlink, but mostly a set of brios.
If your only light source is the pinball machine you will struggle with a lot of cameras. 405 is great bang for buck with decent ambient light - it works well.
anything else it’s a “how much do you want to spend “discussion? I just got canon M6 2 amazing performance but not sure I’d have spent that for my first stream. Sony Alpha’s are used by a lot of streamers as they are very video friendly.
Cheers,
Neil
I just tried using my iPhone as a playfield cam using OBS and OBS Camera and it looks pretty damn good! Only thing is it’s a $16 app, but it’s totally worth it for how easy it was and how good it looks. Be sure to explore all the settings in the app to force it to 1080/60fps
I believe if you have Mac I don’t think you need to buy the app as the iPhone just shows up as a source automatically
How does your computer recognize the phone? Can you go wireless?
I believe the app has NDI and wireless options but I just use my iPhone cable. Also helps it stay charged
It says it can broadcast over the network to NewTek NDI Capable receivers, whatever that means, although I think you lose the built in OBS integration
Does anybody have any tips on getting two Blackbird transmitters to work simultaneously? The manual isn’t much help but says it’ll support up to 16 devices at once. One of mine keeps going black when I turn the other one on. I’ve tried changing the channel but that doesn’t seem to do much. Is there a channel select on these things somewhere?
My best advice is to completely reset both. Then only turn one of them on and get it working. Then unplug both ends of the working one and then get the other one working on it’s own. Then try both at the same time.
It’s tricking getting them paired the first time, but once you do, it should be smooth sailing after that.
Thank you. I will give that method a try on Saturday. Fingers crossed because I’m supposed to be covering our Turtles tournament.
We are 8 days away from our next tournament in Delaware, the NO WPPR August Edition!!! We have 24-players signed to play in a 4-player match play format with a guaranteed 7 rounds of qualifying. For those of you that won’t be in attendance, we will be streaming this entire event along with the finals! For the qualifying rounds the stream will be isolated to Hot Wheels only and we are going to have that game featured in all 7 rounds of qualifying as well as the first round of the finals. Once we get down to our final 4 in the “A” division, we will then relocate the stream to follow the top 4 players! Special thanks to Delaware Pinball for providing the streaming gear!
Catch all the action on 8/15 starting at 10am for practice with the first round of qualifying starting at 11am!
Tried a “cheap” capture card but sadly was not impressed with the video quality I got out of it (see edit, it’s fine).
This one does jpg video compression (no raw output), which should save your USB bandwidth a bit.
edit:
OK, I may have spoken too soon. Looks like it was a little bit of user error on my part. I originally had my A6000 in a stills mode which was terrible quality, but changing it to movie mode made a huge difference in the HDMI output quality. This one is actually usable in my opinion. I’m going to try and make a sample video this weekend for it.
Also it looks like it will actually work off USB2.0 ports as well and since the device is doing the jpeg encoding it should work fine with my picam software. So, yay, but just like the camlink, only one per device since it chews up quite a bit of bus power and they all have the same serial but that’s OK.
Sweet. It totally works on the Raspberry Pi 3A+ with my CX405. So that means at least any Pi 3 series should be able to work. I need to update the picam software now in order to take advantage of it but that should be pretty quick and easy. Going to play around with audio input too and see about making a generic UVC camera type to support any of these kinds of cheaper options.
Edit:
Also seems to work on the PiZeroW with the CX405 so that’s pretty cool if you’re good with just a 2.4ghz network connection. For the money though I generally recommend the 3A+ over the ZeroW since it’s pretty close in price after buying all the adapters that are needed, but it works.
Karl-For the Mobile Rig parts list from 8020, is there any special ordering requirements, such as noting the counterbore locations or do they know this particular order package?
Although I am a newbie, I already feel myself wanting to stream less do to the hassle of moving around camera, mic stands, and cables. This and a wireless setup seems like the way to go long term. Also, wondering if you or someone else can post detailed pics of their mobile setup. Thanks.
I just send Karl’s spreadsheet to a Canadian 8020 supplier, they sent me back a quote and it all worked out.
Although, I think the bores might actually be the wrong distance, but it worked out.
This thread has all the info you need. Good luck!
Yes, most of the counterbores in the design should be for butt fasteners (7041) instead of anchor fasteners (7040) but the web shop interface won’t let you choose the 7041 machining service option — probably a bug on their end.