Long-time viewers and anyone who’s watched our archive footage can tell you: our streaming setup works (most of the time), but it ain’t always pretty. The unique challenges of our charity marathon stream (changing games every hour, on the hour, with less than 10 minutes’ warning as to what game & system to switch to) have led to a lot of “just make it work” type solutions to get us on the air.
This month, we’re changing that. My co-founder (Grant) and I (Stephonee) scrounged together some money to build a brand new, designed-for-the-UPickVG-stream, powerful PC with a built-in capture card that can handle direct capture of all the consoles we use, plus putting more PC games into the mix.
While we wait for all the parts we ordered to come in, we thought it might be fun to do a tour of the old setup – what we have been using to broadcast “After Hours” rehearsal broadcasts to you (Sundays at 4pm EST!).
Here are our “Before” pictures:
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- In the foreground, our TV camera and the pile o’ stuff that it rests on. In the background (left to right): our room camera “Gerald” on his tripod, the Chat monitor, and our streaming laptop.
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- A nice view of what our chat/twitter monitor and streaming laptop look like.
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- This is pretty much what we, the players, see when we are streaming a rehearsal.
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- Gerald, our room camera, is ready for his close-up.
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- Our streaming laptop is so old, one of the USB ports works fine, one half-works, and one is completely dead. This is the half-working one – taping the cord down prevents it from disconnecting the camera in the middle of a stream.