The code of conduct stuff. Yeah, let me get let's go ahead and get started here All right So a few few housekeeping items before we get started during the webinar You are not able to talk as an attendee. Sorry But there is a Q&A box if you have questions We'll also be monitoring the chat as well if You Need you know anything from us. Let us know in chat or you know DM Send us a private message. This is an official CNCF webinar As such it is subject to the CNCF code of conduct Please do not do or say or chat or question anything that would be in violation of the code of conduct Basically be respectful of all of your fellow participants and presenters Please note The recording and slides there are no slides. So the recording will be posted later today Probably tomorrow to the CNCF webinar page at CNCF that IO slash webinars. I'd like to also mention that we just created the Streaming channel in these CNCF slacks. So go to CNCF that slack that IO if you're not already a member Join that channel. We will be sharing tips and tricks there as time goes on There is also a doc that will be shared in chat That is kind of like this OBR or OBS webinar Thingy so with that just pasted it in thank you George with that I'll hand it over to George to kick off today's presentation. Take it away George. Awesome. So let me give you all the logistics first So in this I just Toss this link hack that MD or hack MD IO with the OBS webinar. Those are basically gonna be our notes So we want Information so when we get to hardware recommendations or whatever if you have anything I know Spencer's been putting information in there I get the feeling that eventually we are going to commit this to GitHub somewhere It'd be kind of like a general resource So this is a good place to start as well as we have the hash streaming channel on CNCF So I'm just gonna give you a quick TLDR on why we're doing this So I was hanging out last Friday with Chris Anna check just talking about different things and we were talking about I was like man. I'm really busy this week. It feels that with What's going on in the world? A lot of people have been reaching out to me saying hey I need tips on how to use the software I don't know what I'm doing or you know I'm an expert but there's always something you can learn in a lot of ways the things you're gonna learn today are like Linux like you'll spend your whole adult life learning OBS and not know everything So in my brain, I was thinking, you know, I know a lot of great streamers in the open source community, right? My co-workers at Tgik and the podlets Lockies channel. I've you know, I've watched I've watched Holden's twitch stream I watched Spencer's twitch stream and I was like, you know what wouldn't be great If we just had a place where we can hang out and swap tips we see each other cube con But we don't really like sit down and say, you know what? How do I make my audio better or do a little thing and as this has been happening in the world? I'm starting to come to realize that for a lot of us these skills are becoming pretty much a common place And if you follow how gamers Gaining streams and things like that. There's this whole world of community interaction.  Oh neat They have a stream I get the feeling that in the next few years as people are looking at open source projects and things like that They're gonna see things like a stream or an office hours or something like that be as common as a mailing list or something like that So this is very much the beginning of that organization In hindsight, I kind of wish I would have made this a panel. So we are all talking and discussing So what we're gonna do here is get an intro Understand what your requirements are what you need So in a lot of ways, we're gonna be covering some things that I think might be beginner for some of you And some might not but for me I determined success is are we gonna start hanging out in the streaming? Are we gonna start to basically form a little community so that when someone is being told? Hey dev rel person or community manager guess what streaming is expected of you now They kind of have us here to do that. So that's kind of like the reason I wanted to do this And why I've invited a lot of you even though you're experienced already To kind of just let you know that you know, this this could be a good idea. So What does everybody think feel free to type that in slack or with that? Um, and I I've been leveraging Alex for years. Hey, what kind of microphone do I buy? How do I set this up and he's been giving me a lot of recommendations that I've been sharing with a lot of people But I really just wanted to get a baseline down from a person who actually knows audio engineer professionally To help us apply that to kind of like what we're doing on the side. So with that I'd like to thank you all for showing up as well And with that, let's get our learn on if at the end if people don't have any places to go We can always fire up another zoom meeting. Just a normal one. We can hop on there and swap tips So basically we can make this whatever we want to be. I am talking way too long with that Alex Yeah, thanks George. We're just ran this thing out another extra minute Yeah, all my time codes now are off. Thanks. Yeah We are gonna time box certain things because I don't want to talk about microphones for like two hours So we definitely want to those of you as you're listening Please tell us if you need us to talk about other things or if we're daddling too long Yeah, there's certain topics you need to hear about let us know in the chat, please Yep, and Spencer. That's hash streaming on slack.cncf.io and I see people joining us there. Thank you. All right Alex take it away. All right. Well, thank you George for the wonderful introduction. I appreciate going through all the little stuff here I kind of really want to open with you know, you sort of touched on who the the attendees are here And there's kind of a mix of pro versus not so pro First thing out of the way, I am not a professional sound engineer. I've been paid to do sound engineering So I guess that picks me up pro But I highly recommend finding a local audio professional if you have some more in-depth about this because You know find a local buddy who actually does the stuff day in and day out They can actually give you some really nice tips that we might not know Because this is a very wide and deep subject I could talk about audio stuff for days And not even scratch the surface So George, I guess we're gonna presume these are gonna be mostly people who are doing this on the regular Have a bit of a budget and are gonna be You know pretty much doing this At least monthly if not weekly. Is that a good assumption? Yeah, looking at the chat it looks like so I know some of the people here do have regular shows I know Carlisi and Duffy do Spencer obviously does Justin says I'm more interested in the OBS restreaming platforms than in the hardware, but keep it up. I'm here to learn Okay And I know Chris you've been doing some stuff around red hat streaming Yeah, we're doing a lot of OBS and twitching Yep, and it looks like Stacy's a beginner. Yeah, so let's just start and then I think you know We've got some time boxes there in the notes and as we go if we find ourselves rabbit-holing too much. We'll we'll move on And then I will I'll be on chat helping people join Slack here in a sec Well, I guess the big thing here is then first two questions are well, there's only really one question here What's your budget? we were talking before the show went up here and There is you can get things going on a very very shoestring budget or you can make a you can dig a big money hole and throw money into it Really depends on how much you want to do So starting up We're all technical people here We've been involved open source, you know, I'm assuming most of you have actually been doing some code work or at least, you know, computer competency Delegate out your task. You're not in this alone. Like George said, we have the streaming channel We'll be in there keeping things going back in there in conversation. You have questions asked If you want to try something ask people have experiences here There has been so many times where I wish I had someone else just to bounce questions off of where I want to try this new setup with a microphone. Can someone spot check me? I want to check out this new video camera. Has anyone tried it? You know open up communication ask questions um I've had many times where someone's came into me and asked me about the certain, you know, certain piece of hardware and it's like I don't know but I think I might know someone who does and You know, you start the phone tree up or the email tree or the rc tree or the slack tree or, you know Whatever the cool kids are doing now and Someone will find out And if they can't find out well Maybe I'll just be suckered in to buying it myself and giving a try Like this pre-app I bought yesterday So, yeah Second step safety first We didn't really do the the intro here's but my history here has been in system administration as well as scuba diving And both of those have a very long history of checklist and safety In system administration, you know, you you don't cross your t's and dot your i's you got server downtime And you got your boss yelling at you and diving if you don't cross your t's and dot your i's well It's a little bit worse so Safety first, uh, we're going to be bringing in a lot of equipment depending on how big you go in here You got computer rigs. You got monitors. You got lighting. You got microphone rigs Some of the stuff doesn't have power switches.   But if you do It's nice to know Modern podcasting is a little bit better than it used to be if you go back about 20 years Before led panels were kind of the convention It was pretty easy to rack up a kilowatt or two kilowatts of lighting That is a lot of power Usually you're talking dedicated circuits and dedicated heat extractors Modern stuff, you know, you get those foot by foot, you know, one foot by one foot led panels I think they're george. You got one of those where like 15 watt 10 watt maybe It's nothing Modern stuff is is a lot more power efficient. It runs a whole lot cooler um So you could probably get away with running a pair of lighting panels a camera desktop couple monitors a good microphone setup On a single 20 amp circuit Uh, you might get a little bit iffy. Oh, there there you go, george. What is it? He doesn't know if that's that on So usually a 20 amp home circuit's fine Uh, a lot of modern houses have 15 amp circuits. You might Like you pushing it. What was it george 5 5 watt 10 watt I got a I got 11 you got 11 a little say there's like a brick. I'm still learning Yeah, so I mean that's less than an amp on the mains. You know, that's that's nothing So, yeah led lighting is is changed things considerably uh, having said that you still might have cooling problems, um Heets the enemy here no matter what you do heat is going to be a problem Uh, and if you throw some fans at the problem, you're going to have sound problems. So Good luck and godspeed on that Yeah, Duffy has our first question. Um, any concern here with modern equipment and things like line noise and ace like why Kind of thing going through your mics. Um, I've not had trouble with ground loops on balanced equipment, you know professional xlr stuff You get into the ground hum a lot of times when you have like multiple panels and multiple mixers running on separate circuits That are like slightly at a phase on the mains power um And I honestly I haven't ran into a situation where it was a ground loop on a rig in many years Uh, that was a constant problem on doing onsite shoots where we had multiple power generators running multiple grids And our our sub panel would have a ground loop going back to the main panel And for that all we had to do is just cut one of the grounds and you know Run a main run a main ground a chassis's ground out and then lift the grounds on the signals so I don't think anything that we're doing in this context is going to be big enough where you're going to have A situation where a ground loop is going to be a problem. Uh, that doesn't say that can't happen um But clean power is good power. Uh, I run ups on everything that have What's the term for it's not a droop protection or is it line conditioning? That's it. Thank you. Yeah Yeah, full line conditioning on the ups and it's never been a problem Thank you bob active line filtering. That's it so And we can get into stuff like power factors and no Yeah, let's let's just move on to audio hardware and just start to get to the meat here Yep. Yep. Perfect. So Big choice up front. Um usb or pro That's going to be for the most people here. I figure we're going to go pro Uh, if you have very little space if you have a very small desk if you're Doing stuff where you need to be mobile if you're going to shoot on location Uh Look at usb For many years i ran just a usb interface It's the next to you Just the usb interface and i'm like That's it. Um, there's stuff like the uh, which we're talking about this early the at the at 2020 audio technica Beautiful. Yeah, that's a microphone. Yeah usb, uh all integrated The pro or i think it's the at 2020 plus has a zero latency line monitor on it So you can self monitor what you're how you're sounding going out and mix with your mix master um Any kind of usb mic you're looking at i highly highly recommend Getting the monitor option if it's if it's available. Um, I know the so what does word monitor mean in this context to find that for people Yeah, okay, so a monitor is just a loopback You know, I have in my audio chain here. I have the microphone here Which has a preamp. We're getting that going up That then runs into a signal. Um, it's a dbx 286 s And then I run it into my interface, which is that x2 you sure Now normally when you're listening to a recording, you'll go, you know, all through your audio chain Hit the analog digital converter the interface Uh, that then goes into your computer magic happens in the computer And then that comes out at your computer monitor Now while that latency is a couple milliseconds What's the usb polling interface is like five milliseconds and you know, it might be another 10 on top of that for your software chain um That's not that much But it can change things So what a mic monitor does is it gives you directly what is going into the interface Uh, not what's coming out not what's being tweaked by your eqs or anything like that. It's straight. What's coming in Um, so in my I monitor your phones on right now as well. So I'm hearing my voice directly with Effectively zero latency um, if you go back and forth between the computer you can It's generally not that bad, but it's just enough latency that it drives me up the wall So so having an actual loopback monitor so you can self check things um Is I think a central piece of podcasting equipment Yeah, it just makes it really nice to naturally monitor your voice without having that slight delay Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah having it on right now. Let's me know that I sound okay Yeah, and carlesa can we get an example of that gear? So the the options that you put in as far as the microphones and stuff um, I'm assuming most of them have a monitoring option or So now now i'm going completely off script here Let's do it. Uh, this is my x2 u interface here Here's my headphone monitor out This is my usb out going To the computer. Oh, this is awkward And then this is my out from my processor over here So I can adjust my mix between what you guys are saying like now. I don't even hear myself Or I can just listen to myself. I don't want to hear what you guys are saying Um, I I just got this in a couple days ago. So I don't have a rack mount unit for it or anything like that yet But when it comes to gear, I don't know it's one of those things just you know, use what works if it's what's the saying I always say, um, if it's dumb and it works. It's not dumb Yeah, so generally speaking as long as you have a direct monitor Thing and the things that we've recommended here in this Have that right Say again Yeah, the the recommendations that you've put in the document have that right so Yes, yes, all the interfaces have the loopback monitor and The recommended models on the blue yeti and the audio technica also have the loopback Okay, good to know. Um related question here from duffy's asking Um Also dynamic versus condenser microphones. What are the trade-offs? I've seen dynamic pickup way too much personally All right, I love when people ask questions that are right into the next segment. It keeps things moving That's right. Yeah, so the difference between a dynamic and a condenser mic is I mean, it's really kind of the same thing, you know, you have a diaphragm and then you have a signal that comes out of it Uh with a dynamic mic that is through a voice coil. It's basically a speaker in reverse Uh a condenser mic and this this is something I'm gonna get wrong because it's it's weird They use the capacitance of a charged plate versus a an anoid cathode Basically, it's instead of detecting the movement of a coil through a magnetic field a condenser mic has a induced current through the plate gap and then the actual vibration Causes magic Or you could just tell us what the properties are of each and I don't need to know exactly The condenser mics generally have a a lighter I'm looking for the term here diaphragm. They have a lighter flying weight or flying piece Um, so the condenser mics they have the the coil wrapped around it and or the dynamic mics have a coil and a magnet and a condenser mic has just a plate and a grid and the Generally speaking your your big broad strokes is dynamic mics are going to be a little bit more robust um, I have Personally, I've seen this thing. It's got dense in it and just I've taken sure sm58 dynamic microphones and beat in nails with them and they still work the the sm58 is a well known just tank of a microphone And then definitely saying oh, sorry go ahead Yeah, is a condenser also a smaller cone through it to receive me because I know my blue yeti I had to talk across it and then that's when you recommended this mic. I have to talk into it Yep So the blue yeti those are clearly one is one is one and one is the other kind right the the blue yeti is its own particular thing Because I believe it's a multi element condenser mic And so you can adjust the pickups on it Like I know you can do like a a cardioid and then you can do an omni and then you got a a buy Um, no Chris is gonna go fetch his isn't he? Yep. All right, Chris. Thank you Chris Yeah, so there's four settings on it. I don't know what they mean But here I'll just show them to you and alex you can explain them Those those of you that are using this one Here's a tip read the manual that comes with it because for my first few sessions I had it picking up everything 360 and he actually has a mode just to pick up the Just to pick up what's the back or both or things like that Yeah side by side front and then all around And that works great for all I've heard. Um, yeah, I used to use this all the time. Mm-hmm I for me personally anything that's magic like that. I don't trust Um, yeah, but from what I've heard it does work really well, especially for the price point the price point the blue yeti is really hard to beat Yeah, that's what I started with. Yeah I always say, you know, if if you're starting out the blue yeti is like a good choice And then at some point you'll realize when you want to switch XLR, you'll have the expertise I don't want to take up too much time on microphones because I kind of send of time Does anybody else have questions on microphones because we are moving on to Uh, do you have any opinions on lav mics before we move on away from microphones? Because I I wanted to touch on lav mics before we move forward. Yeah, so what's a lav mic real quick? So I never asked me to pronounce stuff because I'm going to do it wrong It's like lavalier or something like that. It's lavalier. Yeah. Thank you. I got you. All right So so lav mics are those ones you see pinned on to someone's shirt And those are particularly great for when you're trying to look good Um, any kind of talking heads Uh, newscast Um, anything where you're standing around you're going to use a lav mic They work well for what they do Um, but for doing a podcast or just talking in general. I don't like them Uh, they pick up any sort of motion on the clothing Uh, you can rig them you tie them off and then you tape You can tape the the wire down a little bit better But if you're talent or if you're the talent, uh, if you don't have good mic control, you're going to hear just The entire time it's going to be like this Um So use them if you need them. I don't think that are a general use case Uh, same thing goes for shotgun mics. Ellen was bringing that up Uh, if you have a quiet set And a nicely dampen set shotgun mics could be a good option Traditionally in like a tech podcast you have a hard desk. You have a hard monitor Um, the shotgun mics in my experience pick up a lot more room echo Just from how Direct their their pickup pattern is Um, you'll see on stuff like tiny desk concerts. They use shotgun mics for their primary vocals And it sounds amazing But they have that set up in the same way we have our microphone set up It's just like this, but it's a shotgun mic shooting up straight into the mouth Um works great that helps segue us into mic placement actually, which is our next our next subject here I know I do want to cover the top down versus bottom up at one point as well Yep.  It comes out of the the shot is great for that Uh The downside for technical people who are doing technical podcasts is it's going to pick up every single switch on your keyboard Every single one um Was it Oh, who who top mics with an s and 58? But there's one streamer one of the tech streamers. Um, I think gamers nexus does it. I think Or he switched to a an actual traditional He might have he might have used to do it that way. Um Don't but anyway, though. Anyway, sorry Yeah, he's the top mic.  Yeah As you feel like we're live Yeah, I started off top mic-ing and then you were the one to flip it over and that totally made a huge difference Especially when we get to noise cancellation. So, um, yeah Yeah, I like bottom mic-ing it. Um long arm stand. This is pretty easy to adjust around They stay input. Uh, as you can see all three of us here are bottom liked with a close mic sm7 One thing you got to watch out for this and and chris you can probably illustrate does a little better than I can is the uh If it's close range effect as you get closer to the mic you get the nice bass pickup from your voice Hello, everyone. How are you today? Um, which makes you sound really good Um, but the problem with that is is if you're talking for a long period of time and you have that bass It really gets tiring to listeners ears Having that extra energy in the vocals It sounds so good But just as right off the crank when I mess them up microphones on someone talking over I'll immediately take off six to ten db off at 80 Hertz. Just right off the bottom take it out Yeah, and I want you to ask the side mic help here because I've seen people going like this like on espn Side mic-ing does help considerably But the problem with that is did you get that room echo? So So side mic-ing right now there's an echo. No, sorry. Um, I side mic by looking forward Oh, okay. So yeah, that but yeah, if you're doing it this way It just changes it and I can hear the echo in the room for me this way You can probably hear it too Yeah, and Duffy says that one's also tough because you turn away from it, right? Whereas if it's bottom mic then center right underneath typically And a tip someone gave me as well is when you're wearing a black shirt It totally helps hide the mic as well. So it kind of yes Helps with the presentation a little bit drawn a hoodie or something. Yeah, yep Okay, moving moving on because this list is large and I'm sorry Actually before you where we're uh, we're before we move off to side mic-ing Um, the one Gotcha there where side mic-ing does help considerably is we don't have a pop filter These have integrated pop filters if you have a mic that doesn't have a pop filter no foam no screen If you get those nasty pops side mic it right So I didn't know this until I switched to it the foam is actually a pop filter Because I had one of these and I was like, I don't have a pop filter. I know I need one Yeah And you can actually get a bigger pop filter than these two Yeah, I came mine came with one it came I assume that's an outdoor one if it's like a big puffer Yeah, it was a big puffy one, but as you can see it's Very very much just this little cone in here. Yeah I don't know if he says use a clean doubled up sock if you don't have a pop filter That works too. Yeah. Yeah, the dead cat filters Yeah, so uh, this one's important because this is one that you taught me. Let's let's talk about um Push to mute push to talk here just real quickly. Um, because I'm cognizant of time Audience, how do you feel we moving too fast not fast enough? Just let us know um But you Alex continue while I get the feedback continue on No, I open the Yeah, sorry. So yeah, uh noise suppression. Uh, there's two ways of going about this and One makes me more happy than the other. Uh, the first one is through a gate Uh, those are generally included with something called a compressor gate unit um Sometimes depending on how nice the unit is you also might have an expander So what a gate does is once your voice once your signal drops to a certain point it drops So I have a gate on here And of course everyone's being quiet now in the background so you can't notice it This is what I'm gonna talk more. I could know I'm liking the background here Oh, okay So you can kind of hear the fan running in the background.  Yeah, I just probably can't notice it here Yeah, so Gemini's asking what brands and stuff of mics. We're putting I'm just going to go ahead and put the link to the hack and Dio there And med I've got the amazon list. Let me grab that Yeah, we're going to toss that in there and then for the for the mute mic. I wanted to show everyone this Yeah, the other option here if you're not using a A gate and this is actually something different is a is a it's a cough drop A mic mute pedal is something that when you push that button that he's showing there with your foot it shuts it down So if you're coughing sneezing Um having to swallow those things are wonderful The the gate will generally take care of any kind of like Russell in your clothes ambient noise, right ambient noise Um, but a cough, you know, if you cut, you know, my gate set up like this, but if I sneeze You're gonna hear it. Uh, you're gonna blow right through that gate So they they don't replace each other. They augment each other So and someone asked about that it's in the list. We all three of us are running sure sm7b's with cloud lifters and or Fed heads I dropped the link to uh, the wishlist that I heard the amazon ideal list that I created george in the chat Yeah, and and one of the things I want to add because I added added the pedal recently as well is Especially in a work from home environment that pedal will save your life if you have a dog Or in my case when a toddler decides to You know, it's like an I can right, you know, it kind of saved the day DM DM you that link and I'll add to this list. Yeah, I'll definitely add that there. Um Okay, so gates and compressors and stuff like you're gonna show us some of this stuff in obs So I don't I don't want to I don't want to talk. Let's just talk about interfaces real quick And then maybe room prep and then get on to the video stuff with the webcam and you whatnot How does that sound with a the usb mic? There is no interface. That's turnkey plug it in rock and roll um and then with With a pro interface with the next little interface you can run all the signal chain and then you have to get into your computer somehow And that's when you get into what's called the interface Um old school's guys will call them ADCs audio digital converters Um, some people call them DACs even though it's both So interface, uh, these are going to be anywhere from I think the smallest ones can start about 60 dollars and you can go up to thousands of dollars Um There's there's a couple main ones that are are pretty pretty unique and ubiquitous. That's the the Scarlet 2i2 Which george you have? Yeah, it's a little red box. You might have seen me recommending it to people. I'm gonna toss a link in chat here. Yep. The um Yeah, the scarlets are nice. They they're just workhorses Um, I love mine by the way. Thank you for that. Mm-hmm. I the knobs on them are so chunky Love them. Uh, there's a really nice feature about the scarlets is they have a very very large knob I don't know if you either guys can pull yours out right now But um, they have a master gain control And then they have channel input gain controls And behind the gain control is an actual led to show the screen here Oh, there you go. Look at that. Um, yeah, those green and red behind the dials. Those are your levels Um as you're recording, it'll be green and I believe it goes yellow and then red Um red's clipping. You don't want to clip Uh, you generally want to be peeking into your yellows I'll bet Yeah, yeah red's bad Um Now another really cool thing about this and if you look at between the scarlet solo And the two i2 and actually all the other ones as well On the left, there's a standard xlr jack That is what every single microphone is going to output using balanced outputs On the two i2 I don't know what the term for these jacks are Um, I've always just called them pro plugs Because as we call them on scuba industry where you can have the convertible inputs. It's just a pro plug So that can take what's known as a a quarter inch trs input as well Now I can't show this here without tearing my stuff apart and going through it but On the stage most of your stuff is run through xlr On the rack once you get your signals into the rack your your signals are mostly passed through using trs And actually when I set up my new audio processor here, I didn't get the adapter cable So I had a run around since natty yesterday find it a three foot trs adapter cable Yeah, and Uh a common term for like those of you who know these plugs but don't know the actual Engineering term is with the two one you can plug in a guitar style plug right like a one. What is that one quarter inch? Like the quarter inch the big one. Yeah, actually, so that might be an option there However, you don't need this if you have a usb mic right usb is directly to your usb plug on the computer Yep usb eliminates everything. So if you get xlr that's going to add more parts usb is going to be dead simple Yeah, but then let's talk about let's talk about room prep here because we're uh We're 40 minutes in and I do want to get into the obs tips and yeah and all that stuff Because we could always Talk gear later. Let's just talk about room prep real quick and then we'll get to the webcams Yeah, I mean and then to the content itself Yeah, ryan. Thank you. I believe it is called new trick for the the switchable ones room prep The biggest thing you're going to deal with dealing with is echo suppression um Throw rugs. Uh, I am very very fond of the moving blankets from moving companies Uh, just because you can Launder them a little bit easier. They fold up a little bit better um You can get the you can go all out if you're talking a lot and doing a lot of voice recording You can get the the egg crate and the foam foam egg rig stuff. Those work really well. They're pretty cheap um If I was to set up a new basement studio this day like if I had to set one up tomorrow I would probably start with dropping moving blankets from the ceiling and Then putting up any kind of backdrop in front of that because they'll just disappear in the back and it'll take that That dry echo right out of it Um, I don't have any sound dampening here because I generally don't record or anything like that in here This is my home office. Um, so it's the hearing this echo In my monitor is like driving up the wall right now Nice Because we're talking about it's like Yeah, I I just put up cheap blankets You know, and I figured a void You know, like when you move when you buy it, you know, when you go into a house it has no furniture in it It tends to be boomy. You know, and I just kind of shove as much non-reflective Stuff into that room as possible. I think I have a very open unfinished basement and that's why there's flags I've got old curtains around the furnace over there right like so The the quality that you get is because of the gear I have Right like I've had to buy the gear to get rid of all this audio You know ambience as opposed to putting up foam or walls or whatever because it was just not cost prohibitive Or it was cost prohibitive You can have the most Wonderful audio chain in the world the best one in the world And if your environment's noisy Right, it's not gonna work Also something to think about as well Your guests or if you're in a meeting and you have 20 other people the best audio is not going to You know, you still have to be aggressive as far as ensuring people are muted and things like that Because that's just always going to bite you anything else on audio before we move on I want to get to cameras here real quick But then I want to get into some meat of obs itself Audience are you finding this useful any any is there anything that we've skipped audio wise that you'd like us to talk about Um The only other thing I got on my list was if you're doing questions There are questions Um, okay, if you're doing like serious serious audio voiceover where you don't have to do video recording over it Um, one of the best ad hoc sound booth closet All the clothing in the background deadens all the audio You can go online and look up on youtube where you get the you can make a an echo box Which is just a basically a cardboard box with foam in it And it is hard to beat that for a recording booth Yeah, I've I've I've recorded in uh, uh Hotel room bathroom with just a bunch of comforters and pillows and stuff around me before If that makes sense. Yeah What's a good one? Yeah Yeah Use what you got Yeah, and james strong is linking to some acoustic panel egg carton fingers, what do we call those? Little triangle looking things. Yeah, those are awesome by the way Yeah, and he's got some foam panel links there um Okay, let's let's go into webcams here real quick. Okay Not that one Not the one that you're using right now. Yeah. No, no I So with everyone being stuck at home, it's impossible to get an actual decent webcam now um, I saw a Logitech 922 That was on sale for 350 dollars yesterday. Yeah Yeah, so I I have a 920. Yeah, I could sell mine for 300 easy Yeah, I have a 920 originally when I bought it. It's because it's a webcam, but it has double mics So I was like, oh cool noise cancellation um But it's not something I've been using as far as You know, I'm using this actual audio, but I feel like For a lot of these webcams. They're kind of a solve problem right at 1080p Right is it and they're all usb and And generic unless you're actually doing like the whole dslr thing, which I don't know if that's It's That's the thing people are doing here Well, that that's a whole other thing.  Some people are gonna hate the other ones And you're gonna ask five people and you get six answers um The 920 series logitech no hesitation if you can find them they rock Um, I've used mine for years, but I disassembled it foolishly to try to hook it up for my telescope Uh, that didn't work by the way. You can't fit it in there And I couldn't get it back together Besides that just trust your reviews on webcams Um, the one I have right now is actually the number one recommended webcam on amazon right now It's the elp industrial camera With the 5 to 50 lens Um, it's not a webcam. It's an industrial camera. Don't get it. Yeah, that's why you look yellow That's why he looks yellow today everyone. Yep You have something in here. I want white balance and actually when we started Talking you helped me adjust my camera because I was very purple and wasn't realizing it So can you talk a little bit about About because I don't know anything about like calibrating your monitor colors or anything like that. I'm I'm kind of just like Do I want to calibrate it either? That's why I trust it. Um, white balance is just telling what telling the camera what's white Uh, it depends on your lighting your your ambient walls Um, like the issue here is I have two lights going on and I have off-color walls So the auto white balance is just confused Um, so when I'm actually doing like professional podcasting like a pc perspective All of our cameras were set to manual white balance And before the show started everyone would hold up a piece of white paper That's right, bo. Um, and then you would just go through in v mix and say This is white this right here. It's white um And you can sit here and talk about the numbers about it like, uh in the studio I know we we white balanced all the cameras to 3,800 k Just because that's what we were using for ambient light um For the most part if you just hit the auto white balance and you know, give it a nice white Uh, to balance off of it'll work just fine Okay Um, and then let's see. So I feel I feel like from watching everybody A lot of people who's on here watching their shows. I feel like cameras are pretty much um Ryan has a link for folks are considering going with an hdmi camera He has an iwa hd 100 Um, so that's good. So let's get into let's get a little bit into like the nitty gritty here So, um, if we want to have follow-up things about just nothing but hardware I think that would be great. We could probably do that But let's get a little bit into like the general podcasting layout and things like that. I know Um in my initial ones, I tried to host and stream at the same time and that led to disaster Um, so let's let's go through some of this especially when you're talking about local groups I do want to talk a little bit about a little bit about doing remote groups as well I know some people have told me that they're very interested in that and then we can get into some of the more OBSI things Um, how does that sound for everybody? That sounds good to me Um, I did want to touch on before we move on to that If you are looking at doing a standalone video camera or DSLR for your main camera What you're looking for online is something called clean hdmi um And then also Some cameras notably cannons Uh tend to not like being ran for a long time Uh, personally, I use the gh5 series. I believe was a panasonic and I've left those things run for days and they're fine um my cannon You let it run for 30 minutes and it's just all sorts of noisy Okay, so just don't assume a camera can run all day if it's not designed to be a webcam. Wow. Okay Yeah, okay. I didn't know that I just this yeah, I didn't either no I've been a cannon guy forever. So that's yeah, I I love my cannon cameras, but I would use it for podcasting interesting There's just better options out there for it Yeah, exactly what they fall asleep. Sometimes they go to Yeah, yeah All right, so yeah, so general podcast layout here. We have in the notes here Let's talk about single hot seats and having how we actually Do that and then james has been mentioning noise gates and obs which I specifically wrote down that I do want to cover um because Yeah, like yeah We've been wanting to do that a long time. So let's keep going. All right. So yeah So, yeah, um I mean you got a couple options here. You got the single hot seat, which is basically what we're doing What we're kind of doing a remote group right now Um single hot seats probably gonna be what most people are doing in and out throughout here That's like your your standard tech demos Going through any tutorial videos You know documentation videos as much as I despise them Yeah, I'm totally a text documentation guys. I don't want to watch a video to learn how to do something right That's yeah, I mean that's pretty much let's set it up rock and roll You know, you can do your standards rumor setup where you have your screen share and then you're down in the bottom corner there And it's pretty much just run it There's there's no gotchas there After that you're talking local group local group settings Um, that's going to be kind of rare right now with all the quarantine stuff going on um Really the biggest issues in a local group setting is miking by far um We always use the lav mics for the group like when we're doing interviews like when amd came down to use lav mics there Uh, the problem is when you got two people and then if they're talking forward, it's fine But if they turn towards each other when they're talking They talk into each other's microphones, right and you get this weird phasing effect um That was not that was the problem. I never could get fixed Um, and it was just a you know You can't if people who don't Sit in front of a camera and talk in front of a microphone all day are not going to understand mic control um So you just got to you just got to prevent them from being able to shoot themselves in the foot Okay, so let's talk more freeform remote and directed remote here because you know, it's not like we're interviewing groups currently Yeah, freeform remote is what we're doing now.  Um For the most part it is going to be on zoom And it's going to be just a freeform discussion Uh Things to be concerned about here are going to be latency I mean it no matter what you do You're going to have telephone latency And we've had a couple cases actually on this this webinar right now where we started to talk over each other And that is something you have to be very very cognizant of um It's really easy, especially when you have higher latencies um with directed remotes where Some people know if you have two remotes that are coming into a central location a studio um And each one's 500 milliseconds Person a It's 500 milliseconds to the studio and then it's another 500 milliseconds student to person b And they're not going to hear it for a full second and it's going to take their brain 500 milliseconds to realize All i'm talking over them Yeah, so you got two and a half seconds of just talk over um Chris raised your hand you Very, yeah Yeah, something i've noticed very specifically is when i'm in a meeting with this mic and this audio setup Versus everyone else with whatever they're using kind of they're not crappy usb But some of them are using like air pause which introduce even more latency Or you know, just a standard even wired uh your prod, you know, the stock thing Like i have much faster latency than they do and i can easily talk over any of them Mm-hmm And then duffy says zoom does compression also and you can't really post process audio on a single channel source And compress the audio and video. So uh, this is a question I've seen people talking about is it true that if you wanted to do this You know, I don't have any game in the streaming competition horse or whatever But is it i've heard people say that if you're doing this kind of style that skype works a lot better than a Tool like zoom does anyone have a strong opinion there or is it? Because sometimes I see some people doing remote like on pc perspective that looks like they're in the same room almost and You know, I don't know how much of that is post processing or they just figured that out But then sometimes you hop into our calls and we're just a hot mess So I don't know what jim is using now Um, he's still using v mix for switching Um v mix is a is a switching software. It's not obs. So that's kind of where We deviate from the the talk here V mix if you have the specific version of it It supports remote dialing it does ip what is it called Basically audio video over ip And it it works pretty well, but it's using the browser plugin and You're gonna hear this so many times Auto gain control is the devil And if you can't turn auto gain control off, you're gonna have a bad time And the biggest issue with the v mix remote thing is that you can't turn off the auto gain control Um, this is like if you have someone in a meeting when they talk and it comes in really loud at the beginning and then it backs off That's the auto gain control kicking in right um, there's there settings in windows and mac os where you can turn that off sometimes Sometimes the auto drivers won't let you turn them off, which is even okay awesome. Yeah, so Noise gating especially on zoom calls is it's a problem You know any kind of background noise if you don't have a noise gate It's you're just gonna get that flicker. You're just gonna get that five frames someone jumping up and going. Oh um Yeah Skype um Skype if the network is reliable works great um The biggest issue we had at pc per using the skype setup was Uh getting the audio sync We would have We actually had a dedicated monitor off to the side on the switcher which was running Uh irc and then three skype clients And then on v mix we set up these are all 4k monitors So we actually had skype running for three 1080p skype instances, which was so nice Um, and then we took that screen and cut it in the corners my capture board And so we were actually capturing off the skype client running on the second monitor So that worked out really well But in order to get the audio into our we had a hardware mixer board So the skype audio was routed to these little pv usb to xlr dac's Which for then ran into the mixing board Which then ran all that stuff through the compressor chain and all that other stuff um, and it became Pretty obvious that the the additional round trip out to the audio board and back was just enough to be noticeable Where the audio was lagging like three or four frames behind the video and Honestly, we just left it be If you're not looking for it, it's really hard to notice if you're looking for it. You'll notice it every time So I I have not found a good solution for remote Remote video honestly. Yeah, it does feel like the holy grail. I know that we've You know Joe and I have talked about doing that and having just run red hat summit this week. Mm-hmm Sorry, go ahead George. Oh no, go ahead Yeah, having just run red hat summit this week We had you know multiple platforms that we were using and there was just nothing great So like blue jeans prime time was actually the the best thing that we found for workshops specifically um, but You know, a lot of our talks were done on another platform that was Not as great of an experience and I won't name them just you know out of politeness Yeah, any kind of remote setting you're just going to be dealing with latency in the network and the network is never reliable All right, so in the notes next week We have the obs settings here and the first thing you put is 1080p Am I being bad for Streaming at 1440 or whatever. Also, I've had people ask me Especially specifically on max what the tldr is on hardware and coding Um Because that's an area i'm not familiar with so if you could touch on that So that'd be fantastic This is one of those things where you hear multiple views on this. Um I'm in this i'm a steadfast in the 1080p target camp um Most of your monitors are going to be at least 1080p Most of your newer phones are capable of scaling it recently um I think targeting 720p is a little bit outdated um Having said that that other link that's in that article is freaking amazing. That's a wonderful link that's in that Notes for setting things up. Um, yeah One one note on 720p. That is what facebook is using right now for facebook live They cap it out at 720p. Yeah, and I feel like 720 for a lot of us 1080p or higher Sorry, I feel like between me and chris's house despite living only 20 miles apart the the audio is causing us the delays causing us to step on each other Um, but a lot of us are doing terminals and things like that on the screen and I think 720p The presentation gets a little iffy there if you're trying to do like, you know, your tax editor or a terminal Um, you know cranking up the video bit rate and the 1080p on that seems to be working for a lot of people Yeah, there's it's all trade-offs.  You're going to have issues with blocking this on a terminal um, you know video compression is designed for video it's it's not designed to do Screen sharing it's it's a totally different use case um So you either need to just crank the bit rate up and deal with it or You know do it in post Um, there's a there's a definite gotcha there.  I don't really have a post Thing going on and ryan has a good point. Um For as far as settings, uh, since you're not if you're not playing video games 30 frames per second seems to be fine. Oh, that's plenty. I think it's a good default. Yeah Um, yeah, that's so for mech people. How do they actually get in obs the hardware? I want to make sure that Uh, because on on a windows or linux machine it literally just says, you know, you have an intel quicksink Or you have an nvidia encoder or whatever That is something I do don't know Duffy, I think i've seen duffy do this before the drop down in max and ob s should be the same, right? Uh, it is but it's it's kind of Buried and to be honest with you, I have an e gpu on this mac and like This mac is a old macbook air and i'm getting rid of it because it's just it's just pointless to try to do anything with it Yeah, and I have uh I actually have a dedicated streaming machine So when i'm joining zoom I actually join with this account that I participate in and then I do another account on a machine whose entire job is to do the stream because the whole kind of You know alt tabbing looking stuff up in google and all that kind of stuff while you're doing a stream is the machine will just Sweat Yep kill over Yeah, so I actually uh, I participate in the streams on this box and then I stream on another box back here So generally speaking, I think there is no escape a separate machine for most people if if they're going to be doing it on a regular Is probably should be on your Yeah, if you can dedicate a capture and streaming device versus your presentation machine do it Yeah, and just one thing to know for everybody is if you're looking at an intel knock or one of those kind of like small um PCs the feature you're looking for is called quicksync and most Mode not all but most intel chips have it So make sure that if you're getting it that that quicksync is supported and you look that up because Um that will just offload the whole thing. Otherwise, it's churning it through software through the cpu and that creates You know a lot of fan noise. I've noticed unless it's in another room So hopefully that will uh That will be a good tip. I I even prefer to always use the hardware encoding even if I have my powerful machine So Um, so next here you have audio chains if not in hardware and then noise gates Can can we talk a little bit on how to do this in obs? I don't know if you can you can you share your obs? Uh, I don't know. Is that on a separate machine or if we could we could talk through it? All right, who wants who wants to drive here? I'm not sure of mine I could share my if you're gonna walk through how to do it. I could I have a I have a brand new obs. Yeah, go ahead, george. Uh setup that I wanted to install so that we could start from scratch and not Uh, not to do that. So I will share this.  I was like actually that's kind of hard um Let me share my screen here and I know that at least in kubernetes We do we are making an effort and we are pushing our obs configs into github So that is a thing that I learned from chris nova and jobita, which is a great idea If you have a team of people that are going to be doing layouts and you want to share Does everybody see that you should be you should see my blank obs Oh, I can see it Thing here. Let me just show you all the old sources Um, so go ahead alex Just give me a quick tl. They aren't what a noise gate is again So noise gate we were talking about earlier in the audio hardware side of things Um, all a noise gate is is once the input level drops below a threshold It will decrease its volume even more Okay, so once you get over the threshold it'll let it right through so Like me talking opens the gate when i'm not talking It drops down and shuts everything off. So there should be pretty much no audio coming from my signal when i'm not talking And So what do you do? Are you just throwing away everything under 20 000 hertz and everything above? You're thinking of a low pass filter Okay, all right A low pass filter is when you cut out something below a certain threshold in a frequency um This is strictly level Okay, so it's either on or off and then you get you know that This is the thing about audio gear is you can have two manufacturers with four different ways of telling things Um Like I know the compressor and the gate at pc purr is an acp unit It has five controls for the inputs for its gates Um, this thing I have right here. It has two Guess what? None of the things are named the same You know, um But in software it's a little bit more consistent Uh, at least in obs and pulse audio they name them the same things which is great That's good to know Yep So what we're talking about here if you go to your your audio mixer and you click on a little control next to the mic input That's right here this gear.  Uh, no, I'm not streaming anything right now. No, okay, but I could turn this mic on like this Oh, yeah, now we can actually see what you're doing. Good deal. Yeah. Okay. All right.  I've never seen this before. Okay. So noise gate. Yep And I'm just call it noise gate. Yeah, I think you already have you already have a gate in your chain, don't you? On the hardware. No, no, I stop I I wanted to do it in front of everyone instead of so I could learn it Yeah, I don't have a gate or anything at all on any of my audio That's kind of why I wanted I wanted to do this is to to learn those kind of tips Right. So there's two things here. You have the opening closed threshold. This is Okay Yeah, this is something that I think a lot of people are interested in. So let's talk So, yeah, there's a This is pretty much set up the same way as the acp is there's the the opening closed thresholds Which are the levels it'll open above a certain level to close below a certain level And those are in Uh, what decibel decibel below unity So they're all negative numbers. So you gotta think backwards Okay, um, I think on mine. I usually set gates around negative 30 to negative 25 Is my usual starting I remember from high school decibels are logarithmic, right? They are so so What's the noise difference between a 32 and a 26? Is that a lot? That's a lot So it's a it's a log scale and a a three decibel Oh, I'm still gonna get so much rage on this I'm not sure on the terminology here, but a three db change Is twice the power A 10 db change is an order of magnitude 10 times and Help me if I get this wrong please My understanding is that a 10 decibel Change in volume while being a 10x intensity and power Is only heard as being twice as loud I am 98% on that but someone i'm sure if i'm wrong and that someone's gonna point it out um So yeah, a 10 db change or a 12 db change is a lot Yeah, because this is an 8 db difference. So this is actually a lot Is this a very large gate? Is that how you describe these? Oh, well, the yeah, you're talking terminology. It's like, how do you? Yeah, sorry. Okay. Sorry. I didn't mean to do that It's like, you know, just hey, man. My car is making a funny sound. What kind of noises make is making? A weird one. Yeah, I get it. Okay. So uh, so what's the difference in between closed threshold and open threshold? So the open threshold would be what kicks it open Okay, so you gotta give it a little bit of a punch to punch it open And then as it decays back the closed threshold will kick in once it drops low back there So you have a little bit of hysteria between the open and closed so it doesn't it doesn't uh flat Okay And then you have the attack hold and release these are the the old school standard You look at any kind of synthesizer or any kind of rack mount audio gear They're gonna have an attack a hold a release and a sustain And the attack is how fast it kicks in So if you turn the attack time down Your your gate opening is going to be a lot more abrupt It's going to go from nothing to everything real fast Um, if you increase that it'll it'll be a little bit less aggressive So that'll prevent things like a a really hard you can hear the gate slam open if you have a noisy background times so You can kind of slow that attack down if you get a if you get a punchy cut in So, uh, you know attack times usually I I keep those pretty low Because the our background noise is generally pretty low so you can you can have it kick in pretty hard Um, so how do I figure out what this is this? This isn't just as simple as going with the defaults because it never is that simple or is it? Um, you start you start playing it with okay, so I Okay, so what do you what do you have set chris for yours? Uh, I don't right and like I was hoping to get that out of this because I know okay, so Okay, so look at the uh, you have your don't don't close it down the bottom there. You have your audio mixer And you have your levels Yep, I said we're talking earlier about the green yellow red Yep, that's pretty much the same thing Now I can't see it on your screen, but I think it goes from green to yellow at what negative 20 Yes, that's minus 20 minus 20 Okay, so As you can see when you're talking it's pumping out about negative 20 Maybe negative 18 give or take Uh, so what I would do I would just put those right around the same area You know you're you're open sitting around 26 Um, I'd probably you know make that up to about 22 maybe And then bringing the the clothes back up a little bit below it Okay And then just Record and listen to yourself. This is something where there's no right answer Um, there is very much a a feeling to this Um, you just have to sit here and play with it So but this will prevent me from however, I'm talking and I still see the yellow spiking above the minus 20 So that's because that's normal right because there's like a roll-off Based on the attack time Like uh, well now you're getting into the uh, the instantaneous BU and then you have the weighted average BU and I honestly Don't know enough about that to give a okay. So so a good first step is Get the open threshold to about where you want to be And then the close threshold a few db Under yeah, call it is a good place to start six to ten below it. Is it generally a good six to ten? Okay, all right.  Is this something that you're like? Okay, pull on the new settings and then type in your numbers that you have saved right Is that like something that you would manage on your own independently? Yeah gates are pretty much set them up for get them Okay, once you get it set up. It's it's generally okay Um, so so generally speaking just by setting this I've improved my audio quality with I think So yeah, I mean you you could see right there where if you're not talking there's no nothing coming in Right, right Okay, so if you're now just while we're talking about chains here You generally you have uh, you don't just run a gate. You also run a compressor Ooh, we're gonna do that. Okay, so I could just add because I saw this earlier and I saw the stuff I hadn't Yeah, yeah, you want a compressor compressors are good. Oh, yeah It's a compressor ratio. Okay a whole bunch of other numbers here. Oh, yeah, this is the same thing So what are we doing here? You have attack and release the same kind of situation as with the gate Uh, what a compressor does is it it'll increase the the lower You know the quiet sections and it'll bring down the higher sections Okay So that threshold is where it kicks in And that threshold is going to be a little bit higher than what your gate is because You know your gate's kicking in a negative 20 Then you want to start kind of backing things off a couple db above that and You know what you're doing with a hardware one of these you you kind of playing a little bit different so Would you say below or above? Because these are negative So is that above is it minus 21 or minus 18? Uh, what's your gate set to 20? Uh, I'd set your yeah, I said the compressor probably like negative negative 18 or negative 16. Okay Because your your gate's gonna open up I think yeah And then you're going to be linear from like negative 20 to you know 16 or 14 or so And then your compressor is going to kick in Okay So this is not something you're really going to be doing on a live stream because you have to you have to really push your inputs to kind of see what's going on here But your your thresholds where it starts And your ratio is how much it takes out Okay, so if if you have a a threshold of negative 18 and a ratio of 10 10 to 1 Um It will be less of a roll-off than if you have it like five to one or reverse that 21 So like on mine, uh, my skills are really messing with me. I'm sorry. It's like I'm totally confused It totally makes sense now why my stereo receiver The volume isn't just a percentage. It's always like a minus thing going in the opposite direction. So that's why that is Okay, good. Yeah, there's there's are always values that are below max Got you got you And let's see if I can actually do this with my compressor here So like if I take my compressor completely out you know, I I can I can talk here and it's it's it's there's less presence to it, right? I'm kind of backed out a little bit And this is me increasing my this thing's called drive on this. I don't know why they call it drive But even if I'm really quiet it brings it up or if I'm really loud it still keeps it pretty nominal Right So that's what the whole thing for compressor is right so compressor is actually basically smushing The dynamic the dynamic range um However, I I I know this, you know from being like an audio person I know that when audio is over compressed, however, that leads to fatigue on the listener. So how Like obviously i'm not going to do this at like, you know, all the way over here or something like that, right? Right We actually might want to sidebar this and actually go into a more in-depth We can make it in more in-depth video going into gates and compressors where we're not Recording live audio often it would actually show you what's going on because yeah, yeah I think I think just knowing that this filters thing existed I think is a lot is a lot. I get a lot of the um, you know nothing against the obs people But I I do get a 1990s windows ui Here i'm always finding stuff that like I was like I didn't even know that was like a button You know kind of kind of vibe so it's it's good to know To keep track of that stuff. All right. So am I showing more obs? Are we moving on to what are we? I can't see the slack chat anymore when I'm When I'm sharing so yeah, you can I think let's see here. We got the uh, it's pretty quiet right now. Okay. Yeah, what do people think about this? Is this useful for you or Oh, um, yeah, like I I would love more obs to be honest with you Yeah, the one thing I did want to mention Uh on audio chains while we're talking about that kind of stuff. Okay. Um Now and these filters I'm doing here are only applying to my microphone here I have a separate one for desktop audio. So if I was capturing You know other footage or something just a window Yeah, right. This is going to be a whole another set of filters. Yep, right now. Okay, got it Thank you george for segwaying right into this because that's what I was going to talk about Um, go into your desktop audio filters again Okay The the blank one you mean okay And so I don't think this will be applying too much to people Screaming through this, but if you're doing audio on the desktop and you're streaming over it Yep, there's something you need to know something called a side channel Okay, so add a compressor again or a gate I should say Oh, and you can't do this in obs Are you sure it wasn't in compressor because I saw something that said is there a side chain in the compressor? Yeah side chain a ducking source, whatever that. Yep. That's it. Sorry. It's not like it is in compressor So what a side chain is a side chain is Where you have an audio component that normally takes an input and an output And it does something to it like in this case a compressor is going to compress the audio from the input to the output Normally it does this based on the input But with a side chain You can give it a different input to drive the function Okay, then the input So if you take your if you have a compressor running your desktop audio And you set your side chain to be the microphone Right when you start talking it will drown the audio onto desktop So that'll stop all feedback Well, it'll which is what you want though, right? Well, if you're sitting here like watching an intro video you'll have full volume But if you start talking it'll duck the audio behind it while you're talking Right, so this is how streamers can show a full video game And you can hear the music and blah blah blah blah, but when they talk you can still understand what they're talking about And it's not blasting, you know the full. So, okay So I need to get this figured out because this is something that I'm going to use all the time Yeah Yeah, I could see that side chain is amazing if you're doing any kind of thing with audio on the desktop That is good to know. Okay. I'm definitely said Uh, because I'm going to start game streaming on the side as well to like learn more stuff. It works I'm like how to how are people able to do you know Games with shooting guns and stuff and then when they're talking they sound perfect Um, so that's using the side chain ducking source. Yep. That is a side chain on a compressor Okay, good to know quick question programming little modules these thinking together Yeah, quick question. So we are doing this in software, but you know, I dabble around in a bass and a bass player usually always has a compression pedal Um, is there is and I've noticed that you're doing this in the software Wouldn't it make sense to do it before you even get here? Or why not?  Um If you can okay, so I had a barringer unit that I really wanted to it wasn't a barringer. It was a uh What was it? There was a nice integrated unit that was external and had everything. It looked like it would be ready rock and roll And it was the uh Took it off because every single review said it was terrible Yeah, I took it off the list Yeah, if you can do a hardware gate and compressor it is so so much preferable than doing it in software Right, but you're looking first you have to use a pro audio chain. You have to be on xlr You have to have a preamp, you know, you're probably going to have to have some kind of rack to mount this thing in And you're going to be spending another 150 bucks but Yeah, I was just wondering if it's like a guitar where you could just keep adding effects pedals until you get the sound you want Yeah, I mean that's that's mindset up.  We're talking about condensers versus dynamic mics um Some microphones are more sensitive than others Like these shers notoriously low These things are designed for rock vocals But they sound so good a lot of podcasters use them but Like this and also the uh the hyal, uh, what are those pr40s also notoriously low um You got to run a preamp on them cloud lefter or a uh bedhead and that's that'll give you 20 20 to 26 db of gain clean um God clean gain is so hard to come by yeah, so um anything else on gates and compressor and What what what's this class of thing called plugins? Like what are these? Um, you'll you see a lot of people refer to them as vsts Okay, um plugins pedals modules Yeah, I definitely for hardware, but you know you can do it in software too Yeah pulse audio supports this kind of stuff. Um, I I've tried to do it in there, but it just caused latency issues interesting All right, right after noise gates. We've had a lot of people asking about layouts and overlays and things like that. I This is an area where I definitely want to improve so Is this the thing that allows all those cool graphics that people have on their streams? If you could talk about this a little bit and I do want to talk about things like the rundown Ah the rundown. Yes. Yeah the rundown because um, I've seen people use that and I think it's really cool To describe that for the audience. It's like when you watch your favorite thing on youtube and they have A table of contents basically on the side where it tells you what they're going to talk about So that you can fast forward and be like, okay, I don't care about this part But I care about that part and as they talk this thing is going through so you can kind of know where in the podcast you are Um, can you talk a little bit about how you do that and is anybody? I'm sorry. My kid's running all over the place speaking about noise gates Um, or are you got to talk about your rtx stuff towards while we're there? At the very end the very end saving it for the very end. I know you're super giddy about that Let's talk layouts because that is that is kind of cool. I love how people integrate tax and things like that Yeah, um, now, how does this work a little bit disclaimer here? Uh, we at pcver. We did this in vmix So this is not going to be a straight translation, but you can do this here um So the rundown, uh, the rundown is what we're talking about whatever you see Uh on the side or on the top or on the bottom, you know, what's coming up? That's there's a couple ways to do that. Usually you'll take that and mask it So you have some sort of source, you know something to create the rundown Uh, we can use just the a standard web page. It was literally html body div or uh unword list li div li div li div. That's it. Yeah, all things it was. Um, and then we use css classes to highlight it You know and then it uh on key input it would go to the next div and remove the classes and go forward I mean literally it was less than 20 lines of code And I don't know carlesia is asking for an example and I am working on that now Here so I could show it to everybody And uh a lot of people do that if they're doing it live um A lot of people won't show it live We did it live because it was just easy enough to do it that way. Um A lot of times it's just done in post Yeah, let me just share this screen here. Sure So what I'm talking about this thing on the side here Where they talk about So what they're talking about currently on the show is this in the green box As you fast forward you can see what's coming up in the next segments of the show Um, so if you have a long like this this this show is like an hour and a half, right? Yeah, and you're like, uh, oh I'm interested in this thing over here and you could basically fast forward And this is especially useful on a tv Um, because the tv will kind of give you a better thumbnail update refresh rate Where I've gotten down to me on my tv I can fast forward to exactly where I need to be on the show um Based on this like little sidebar thing and I always thought this was some incredible magical thing, but you're telling me that this is just It's just a web page just a little bit. So so what happens you just add it as another element in in your obs That well we had it as I said we were using vmax not obs for this Um, so in in obs you would do this you would take your your capture You know would have your video capture input Uh, that would be your base layer And then you would have oh how are you gonna do this? Uh, we were using ndi ndi is from new tech obs vmix, uh, it's a I think it's open standard My obs has as ndi inputs and outputs. I know there's a plugin for obs, but I want to I'm confused about ndi and I was gonna ask questions like that at the end. Yeah. Um, yeah, so ndi That is I forget the term for it So prior to ndi there's something called sdi Sdi is an actual hardware interface which is used for video It's a professional format It's pretty much an hdmi transport over uh multilink So What we were doing we had a dedicated laptop running the ndi Screenshare utility and this is all free stuff. You can get it from new tech's website. Uh, it's the ndi toolkit um And I think there's like a runtime library for linux as well So You would do a full screen capture on the ndi for the laptop that was running the browser that was running the web page for the run down Uh, that was then shipped over to vmix through ndi as an input Which was then added as a second layer on top of The this is where it gets weird between obs and vmix because with vmix you can set up layers on the output And I don't know if you can do that with the scene switcher and obs or not You can't yeah But I was gonna yeah what I was just gonna try the the html web widget So on the side like a slack chat, right? Yeah Yeah, you can do that So the way it works, uh, the layers work just basically in the order that the element is in in that Switcher deal So if you want to overlay a web page on top of your video, it has to just be above that in the list Yeah Yeah, another one of those 90s not intuitive things that you just discover kind of deal Yeah, this is one thing I definitely want to add to ours because I feel that Yeah, it's more work, but the amount of usefulness that the user gets is just Probably worth it It is so slick and it looks so good when it comes out. Yeah Yeah, so yeah, you just mask it down You can use a chroma key. We were actually talking about those a few days ago You can do a chroma key on that Where you punch out like a green screen kind of background Like our background on the the web page was pink. So it was really easy to chrome out It got you there is that if you ever if you have a blue screen the browser It's gonna blue screen your entire string Because the chroma goes away Got you Yeah, and then we were talking a little bit about overlays and that gets us into wipes and transitions and stuff So in here you say you could buy a good set of graphics on fiverr for surprisingly cheap So this is just one of those things where it's like Like I've thought about well, I work. I have a design team. Can I ask them to make an overlay kind of thing? Like Like what do you search for you just search for obs overlay on fiverr and you just Find something you like because all the ones I found are like super glitzy gamey like crazy ones. Yeah I haven't found like any very nice dude one professional ones Yeah, if you're looking for a company, I would think your marketing department probably has a standard Standard kind of graphics cut for you guys, don't you right? Yeah, and I suspect most they have no idea what twitch is, right? Yeah, well, I suspect most of them are figuring this out now like hey wait a minute exactly Like I should have this is just as important my creative team to do this right right all of a sudden This is as important as your company's like powerpoint template, right? So um, you could probably actually You could probably get really far with just the powerpoint template. Oh, I'm sure you could yeah It's just like your virtual background. Yeah Yeah So, you know, and you could do that with um, you know, if your graphics department or your marketing department has Transparent graphics you can easily put that as a layer, you know, just just your logo with transparency on a nice alpha channel With a nice alpha channel Yeah, that's a key point there And then someone mentioned this i'm going to leave it again because in this section There's a video here and they say the first four minutes of this video for scene setup and creation is the tldr So yeah, that looks like it's going to be the go. Um, you say here sharing these layouts between teams. So this might be important for some people Um, so screen and layouts can be exported as json files But image and assets aren't exported use a well-known paths to fix this Like c colon back slash obs or slash slash op. So yeah, we always use op Okay. Yeah, that's interesting And anybody else have tips here, I know that for tgik we the obs setup in Um in github in the github repo And then we've tried to do that for kubernetes, but We had an issue where you know, I was on linux and it had specific files that weren't working on jeff's mac and the other way around and we were just like Maybe it's taking screenshots is a better idea in this place so Yeah, the way the way we've done it with linux and mac users since that's our predominant use case we have like One scene where the linux stuff works And you just turn all those on and then we have a in that same scene is that same stuff for mac users Where the they we just did it on the mac because for whatever reason when you open Like a profile that was created in linux everything is just like blank. You can't change anything It's literally just like no description close button. That's it So we ended up creating a set of things for linux to turn on and a set of things for mac to turn on I imagine it would be the same way for windows to be honest with you Yeah, and some some of the information y'all are leaving or you could just have different profiles of the exact same thing We could write obs in a container Yeah So speaking of the next section, I was going to say a lot of you're really a container That's an amazing idea. Sorry it was interrupting The delay is killing me today chris. Is your internet rabbit's working? Um My it's gotta be your shit right now Yeah, it's pretty blocky So this next section you're talking about the plugins for obs and stuff and So the browser source is one that we've talked about that lets you just embed an html widget into your stream That's obviously useful And someone's mentioning this automatic scene switch switcher is dope reg x powered Um, who added that one that that that one looks interesting Let me just look at that one here What does that even do? Yeah, it wasn't me put that in there Here it is i'm gonna i'm gonna toss this in chat Like I saw it I read it and I was like I'm not sure where this oh, I think it does automatic scene switching based on Based on what? Spencer put it in That's interesting. Spencer had to leave. So we'll definitely follow back up on this one. Um But if he says it's dope, it's definitely worth Worth talking about here and then I do want to mention something here as well Uh, someone put in managing or streaming keys One of one of my pet peeves of obs is so I have to do multiple channels and things like that Um, and there's only one Place for you to put your key I can't have like my kubernetes key my vmr key my personal key and just toggle easily I always have to do that. Does anyone have any tips there or Is it just one of those things where uh, that's just what the tool gives us I know I know we do try to rotate Uh streaming keys and the youtube team for kubernetes, for example regularly Hi, uh Bob's got a good there's an option in obs to go get the stream key And then there's another like another method of just keeping them in your password save Yeah Bob's suggestion is brilliant. Yeah, just give me a hint. Yeah, just put it in the kit like seriously like Nailed it. We're done Yeah Oh man kit kit fixes everything all right So, uh, we were definitely going to check out this And uh, someone put here node cg.com, which looks interesting which is related to the thing we were talking about about doing Spencer, I mentioned that. Yeah, I think that looks like broadcast Yeah, we need to drag him on the next one and get him up on the there are so many good So for the next one, here's what we're going to do. I think we're going to open this up to more of a Um, instead of us talking more of like a discussion Uh, that has many to many conversations as opposed to Broadcasting, this is the thing that we just decided to put together On the cncf was like really fast on this. We were like on friday. We were like we should figure this out And uh, so I mostly wanted to use this to get the basics out of the way and doing that um Next I do want to talk a little bit here. We're kind of starting to Uh, run out of time here about studio setup. We're right on time, man. We we started 10 minutes late We are right on time. Oh, okay. I I I missed that Okay, wow, that's disturbing. Yeah, I got I got a big big marker here. Plus 10. So talk talk back So obviously for a lot of us, right? We engaging with the community. So this has to be correct Um, so in here we have discord. We have slack. We have mumble Um, there's there's two things there there. There's talk back and there's community engagement Okay, um talk back is explicitly one thing uh talk back is a private channel for any kind of communication channel From the technical director or producer or whoever's behind the camera to the talent Oh, so this is the back. I've called this the back channel. Yeah, so Okay, got it. Okay. So You can use slack and you have to hit slack channel that can be kind of if you if you're doing the whole sharing screen thing um We use slack at pc per At platform we used uh, they didn't do production work, but they had a a program in place. They're called mumble Uh, which was amazing for this kind of stuff because you could key up with key single key like alt Um purely it's all four based worked great Uh, just something where you have, you know feedback off camera to your talent from behind the camera You know and sometime in the studio if you're like three people in a studio sometimes that's slapping their mics to mute and yelling at them I've I've cut channels before and and said hey, dude, you you got something going on I I've frantically texted someone because in the pad we're like, okay.  So okay, so definitely having a back channel or Yeah, talk back. Um Yeah, but it's important there Yeah, you know, that doesn't really matter too much for the the single seats or stuff like that, but it's more religious to cool Okay, uh, and you you have stuff in here like lighting. Uh, do we want to get into that at this point? um Lighting you need to have enough of it. Yeah Yeah, that's pretty much it more lights better basically Um, yeah, I don't like the panels Okay, that's personal. I don't like the panels, but Ah I upset you by buying something without talking No, no, no This panel's are great. Um, talk to me like talk to me about panels So The issue I have with those panels is they are very discreet, you know, there's just a very tight amount of light Um, if you have like six or seven or eight of them, they work great Uh, if you have like two of them see the little led there Yeah, that's that's the thing with them if you don't run the diffuser in front of it You get these really weird gritty shadows behind you Um, which looks kind of cool, but it's distracting um With the diffusers it makes a little bit better, but it's still kind of off um I prefer To turn my ringer off um I prefer soft boxes The the bigger, you know, you can run a panel and then run them in a soft box diffuser Okay, oh those huge white box Yep Oh, they look so much better Yeah, I know they look great, but like it would look yeah in my office Yeah, I think you have the same thing where it's like this is also my home office So i'm trying to get the best bang for the buck without right You know Those umbrellas with the light reflecting on them and stuff and then you know, um, what have I done? Well, you can emulate that too if you have if you are using those light panels Flip them around Okay, and that'll do a more ambient Yeah, you can you can kind of kick them back like on this wall here. I have like up or down or the shadow now Yeah, I have one over here Yeah, so you can kind of reflect them off the wall that helps a little bit um But just just kind of gets the space behind them. They it's so They can just get so weird in the lighting, especially they make a really hard shadow so Just one thing. Yeah, one thing I learned. I got a light And then I set it up and then it's like half my face I realized that you need two in order to evenly you either need two or you need to put it in a place And this is something you have to think about everything from where you put your desk and I was like, uh This is starting to get really complicated And then I set it up and then you told me Just open two browser windows on my computer screens and that was the difference Um, we're actually I'm actually reusing And if I close those you can tell by um You know, my face looks different Right because he just told me he was like do me a favor open two browser windows onto a blank screen And I'm basically using my my work monitors as like extra lights and that wasn't obvious to me at all until I had him looking at me and then I would mess around he would tell me there there you look okay, so I'm I kind of I have a spare square light thing now that I think I'm going to end up using for probably Lighting up my green screen, but just it wasn't obvious to me to consider Not just the panels, but the color of the thing that's displaying on your panel Like if I had red wallpapers or whatever I would look red And I wasn't cognizant of that until you pointed it out and now I added to my little checklist, you know You know make sure your face looks the right color or whatever based on that That's a good finishing topic here before we go to open q&a Yeah checklist use them Checklists are wonderful. Um I when I was running it. I had a pre-flight checklist.  I think yeah go ahead Chris the The checklist for me is like a killer thing because we often have It's like an intro video And then you have to like you turn on the actual like blue jeans or zoom or whatever you're using for that communication layer You turn that on as desktop audio So if you forget to do that, you're gonna have this whole three four or five minutes Whatever of just dead air because you forgot to unmute That desktop audio, which is the zoom or blue jeans window And the checklist is also great You know, if you ever need help or if Uh, I know we have rotating hosts on some of the shows that people are on where it's like, well, you know It's so-and-so's turn You know to kind of host the show Um, so having that shared checklist. I think for tgik we have that in get in github Um where it's like I am going to be the host this week And then we write it down and then every week every once in a while, you're always constantly tweaking or adding a little thing So that when someone is the get an ex-guest, they can only start not from zero Which which I feel Is really awesome Yep And something I've realized over the years is that as soon as you turn the camera on everyone's like you drops by about 40 points Yes Yeah, I find myself everyone's what IQ yep. Yeah, I told about yeah Um, that's part of the reason why I do keep the separate box To do stuff because once I click streaming, I just know to not touch that keyboard and mouse Whereas when I was doing it before You're one alt tab away from like a disaster like it feels like you know, it's like, oh no or Or whatever. Um, does anybody have any questions from the audience? We had a lot of people show up, but a lot of people also had to leave What you get past a one-hour threshold But we it looks like we do have 22 people in the streaming channel now on slack. So I feel like we're off to a good start So I'm gonna give people a few seconds there to go ahead and type George we do From Chris. Oh, oh here it is the q&a q&a No, yeah, the zoom button that says q&a. I've been just answering the the questions as I see them in chat Um, gemini is asking you chris uh sharing a link to your gear set up a wishlist Oh, sorry Did chris mentioned sharing a link? Yes, it is in the streaming channel. I can re-share it. Uh, chris hogue Or hodge uh said I was hoping to hear more about community content and promotion When you have that when you have the tech stuff dialed in what's a good way to build a program Well, I'll tell you that in like a month chris Yeah, one thing I noticed is that like it's definitely Been a learning experience for me Like one of the things one of the tips someone told me was find your favorite youtube channel that you listen to regularly And go watch the very first video that they published Um, and then you're like, whoa So I kind of use that as my benchmark as to like, okay You know, I see they're improving little by little and the very first like You know just improving audio. I think for most of us just adding these gates and compression and stuff should You know should pay good dividends um Yeah Yeah, once we have the tech stuff dialed in so I run a few shows I run one. That's a panel Um, and then we ask we receive we do an office hour. So we receive questions from the audience um, and that pretty much the tldr I learned from that one, um is Delegating and assigning one person's in charge of the notes one person's in charge of Uh, reading the questions one person's in charge of gathering the questions Um, and then we're all ready to go and as soon as we hit live like we don't do any And then we just kind of wing it. Um, but generally speaking we do but you know It's like just one of those things where it's like repetition I feel has been very good to me as far as the past two years And then just kind of watching I Hey Alex tell me if this is just a thing or anybody I hate watching videos of myself Like but you have to do it in order to realize what you're doing Um, I remember my first one. I thought I did such a great job game film Yeah, yeah, I was like I did such a great job because we answered all the people's questions the panelists were awesome They were talking they were Show they were telling the audience all the kind of technical stuff I wanted them to tell and I was so proud of this episode and then I watched it on tv and I realized that if you were watching it It was just me Typing and copying and pasting questions to each other and the actual episode itself Consumable was not awesome at all even though when I was doing it I felt the information that we got of it was good But it just wasn't an entertaining You know, it's like watching a basketball game and you know just showing you the coach the whole time like It's like, uh, so that's something I've been uh, been doing been trying to um You know get better at is is the content that we're producing actually useful for our community is You know, and that's I just watch it, you know And I think of myself if I didn't know what I was doing with the software Would this be good? Uh, ryan saying, uh, we're on the cncs laugh Uh, hey, they're at their slack limit. Wish this was on the kubernetes slack You can definitely find me on the kubernetes slack ryan. Um, hang out in the cicotrbeck channel. Just p.m. Me Yeah, we could yeah a lot of us. There's a lot. There's a venn diagram here I think of people who are on slack so we can definitely Do that, um Do we miss anything uh community wise? I mean We could probably have entire sessions on how to market your sessions how to Yeah You know how to change up formats There's so much Yeah, the only thing I took away from all those marketing discussions we had was be consistent At least on the youtube side just be consistent. You know consistently produce your content Yeah, same which which Do you all I want to address this real quick before we totally run out of time here, um analytics So in youtube I get flooded about the amount of people that have joined my channel and things like that Does anybody have any tips or tricks to share because I feel like I'm always constantly watching so when I'm on youtube and someone else is hosting. I'm always watching the analytics Um, and you know in my brain. I'm like well if a lot of people are bailing then you know We kind of need to either pick up the pace here or Do something or if like you start strong. I notice in our office hours they start weak But then they get stronger the longer you're on I think that's as people are saying and realizing that the show Is on that kind of thing. Uh, does anybody have any recommendations here or any kind of So I got some tips from spencer, uh, last week or the week before Basically saying that twitch's algorithm like starts showing you love around the two and a half hour mark So that's a very long stream Um, and then you know the shorter sessions on youtube, uh, you know, they'll start off strong and if you have an active kind of Audience that is tweeting like you're asking them to tweet and chat kind of deal.  I think cncf does a fantastic job Yeah, and then bob says twitch is tailored for extended gaming sessions, right? So two and a half hours makes kind of sense that they would optimize for that um Do I have any other questions from the audience? So I think definitely this this is off to a good start. I think what we'll do is we'll keep it We'll keep the uh slack channel going one thing I definitely want to do is also So we've talked a lot first. I'm looking forward to not talking And perhaps having all right spencer your turn to share your expertise, you know, and then they get You know to do the session like that and then you know, I'd love to see How carlesia sets up her show how duffy sets up his show that kind of thing And I think that will really help us as far as I've got a person to that Yeah, yeah, and that'll just help keep the ball rolling. Um, so I really appreciate everyone that showed up today We've got tons of notes here That I think will take me a long time to consume. So this has already been useful for me. Um Uh, but before we go Alex, do you have any closing thoughts? This is like your first time hanging out with the cloud native folks kim look you looks like you had a good time I mean closing remarks, I mean, yeah, um We've all been there, you know, we've all had show zero 12 had session zero Um, this is this is learning experience. This is going to be outside the comfort zone Yeah, um, definitely and mistakes are going to be made That happens Laugh about it move on Yeah, and I'd just like to thank everyone for showing up. Um, I know a lot of you have experience doing this So just having you showing up is also awesome. Um, and that's it for us Chris What's your plan going forward there boys? So I think what we're gonna do is hang out in the hash streaming channel. Okay Um get stuff. I think we're definitely gonna start Um posting follow-ups here. I'd like to get feedback from people Let's get people a day or two. I think to consume some stuff It's gonna take me like two days to go through this document Um, but I I I got the feeling that we're definitely doing this again. What what do you all think there? Um in chat if you can give us some more definitely Yeah, I think I think giving people more feedback or more time to give us feedback, especially those that weren't able to attend Um, stacey says yes, please Uh, lisa mary has to bounce. Yeah for sure And you want to set that up so people can talk so you can have interactive? Yeah, like a normal normal zoom thing. I don't know Normal human conversation. Yeah, I don't know if you want to set it like a recurring meeting once for a month No It's up to you whatever whatever you all decide you don't you know where to find me Yeah, yeah, and I figured just cncf hosting a streaming channel I think we'll go a long way towards helping us share our expertise. So Thanks for that the people that made that happen. All right, chris. I'll throw us Thanks, and we are um, we did record and christy's gonna get this up on youtube So she'll send Alex chris and george the link and then you all can share however you want. Yeah, that's awesome Thanks, everybody. Great. Thanks all for joining us for this wonderful presentation. Thank you so much, alex george Kim getting us together. Thank you everyone christy That's all the time we have today Thank you for joining us the webinar the recording the slides everything You know not the slides The notes will be available online will be in the streaming channel on cncf And we hope to see you again in a future cncf webinar. Have a wonderful rest of your day