**Setting Up a Professional-Looking Streaming Background**

Creating a professional-looking streaming background is crucial for engaging your audience and showcasing your personality. To achieve this, it's essential to declutter the space behind you and create a visually appealing environment. Consider setting up a dedicated recording or teaching area in your family room, where you can tidy up and make it look nice. Add some shelves in the background to keep things organized and add a few decorative elements to create a warm atmosphere.

Getting creative with lighting is also vital for creating a professional-looking streaming background. Natural light is always the best option, so if possible, position yourself near an open window or use a light source that simulates natural light. If this isn't feasible, consider investing in a dedicated light source, such as a rim light, hair light, or kicker light. These types of lights can help separate you from the background and create a more defined silhouette.

Using lighting to your advantage can make a significant difference in the overall quality of your stream. A well-lit setup can help reduce harsh shadows and create a more even tone. Don't be afraid to experiment with different lighting options until you find the perfect balance for your streaming setup. For example, if you're recording in front of a window, consider using a secondary light source to fill in any shadows that may have formed.

Another important aspect of creating a professional-looking streaming background is making sure it's not too distracting or cluttered. Avoid having a messy background that may take away from the focus on your content. Instead, opt for a clean and simple setup that allows your viewers to focus on what you're saying. If you're worried about maintaining a tidy background, consider investing in some green-screening equipment or using software that can help you create a seamless transition between your background and the video.

**Using Green Screens to Enhance Your Stream**

Green screens are a popular tool used by streamers to enhance their visuals and create a more professional-looking stream. By blurring out the background, you can focus attention on your face and personality, creating a more engaging viewing experience for your audience. To achieve this, take a picture of yourself with the camera in front of you, and then use software or green-screening equipment to remove the background.

However, using green screens requires some skill and practice, so it's essential to experiment with different techniques until you find what works best for you. Consider investing in some green-screening software or apps that can help you achieve a seamless transition between your background and video. Remember, the goal is to create a distraction-free viewing experience that allows your viewers to focus on what you're saying.

**Tips for Creating Engaging Visuals**

When it comes to creating engaging visuals for your stream, there are several techniques you can use to keep your audience entertained. Consider using multiple camera angles to add visual interest and keep things fresh. You can also experiment with different lighting options, such as using a secondary light source to create a more defined silhouette.

Another great way to enhance your stream is by incorporating on-screen elements, such as animations, graphics, or overlays. These types of visuals can help distract from the technical aspects of streaming and add an extra layer of engagement to your content. Just be sure not to overdo it – too much visual stimulation can be overwhelming for your viewers.

**Creating a Course: A New Project**

As mentioned earlier, I'm working on a new course that will take learners from basic streaming skills to becoming a professional streamer. This comprehensive course will cover everything from setting up a streaming setup to creating engaging visuals and promoting your channel. The goal of this course is to provide learners with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the streaming world.

The course will be released soon, but I'll have a link in the video description or through a Google Form where you can sign up for updates on its release date. I'm excited about this project and believe it has the potential to help many people achieve their streaming goals. Stay tuned for more information!

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, creating a professional-looking streaming background is crucial for engaging your audience and showcasing your personality. By decluttering the space behind you, using creative lighting options, and experimenting with green screens, you can create a distraction-free viewing experience that allows your viewers to focus on what you're saying.

Remember, practice makes perfect, so don't be afraid to experiment with different techniques until you find what works best for you. With the right equipment and software, you can create a seamless transition between your background and video, enhancing your stream and creating a more engaging viewing experience for your audience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthings have gotten pretty crazy for everyone with regards to the working from home situation working situations in general and as a result streaming has really taken off streaming and video calling and video recording for classes for communicating with your customers with your followers with your students with your family and I've gotten an absurd amount of questions with regards to best practices for people streaming and things like that obviously that's what my whole channel is about but everything has typically had a gaming slant and it's always been on my list to make content that doesn't have a gaming slant that really focuses on other stuff but I've always appealed to the gamer as kinda the most common denominator here and you know most of my advice has been evenly applicable to everyone but I have gotten requests to cover things that were specific to non gamers and we're gonna be talking about here today this video is brought to you by Al Gatos stream deck for mobile app if you want to be able to control OVS your live streaming software your video editing software your computer in general from your smartphone instead of hitting alt tab during this broadcast or a class recording or something or just having more macros and unlimited control at your fingertips to turn on your lights to change scenes in your streaming program to play a sound effect to do anything a god or stream deck for mobile has you covered especially since so much of the streaming gear physically is sold out or being price gouged by scalpers online this gives you a much more affordable option and an option that will literally never run out since it's a software that you can use to control it I have a link in the video description below if you check that out I'm a pulse Vox your stream professor and today we're talking about streaming tips and this also applies to recording for non gamers first let's talk about resolution and frame rate settings typically I recommend you know lowering your resolution so you can increase frame rate to go for 60fps streaming and things like that however for people doing just face-to-face broadcasts for those doing painting or art streams or body paint streams or cosplay streams programming streams desktop work streams in general or classes 60fps is not only not a priority but not really relevant at all so 1080p 30 is really the resolution you should be aiming for on your streaming service now if you're doing something a little bit more low-key or you're using webcams you're not doing like drawing or painting or something involving small texts or small details 720p 30 is also a totally valid target and something that you're more likely to be able to hit due to it being less resource-intensive if you're doing something like a coding stream or a slower painting stream or some sort of desktop work increasing resolution even further if your monitor is such a resolution to 1440p it's still possible within the max bitrate of a site like twitch as there's not a whole lot changing on screen and it'll help your viewers see that tiny little detail a little bit better some desktop stuff can even be 15 FPS which is a lot easier to process in your computer instead of 30fps the sounds up say absurd and probably just completely bonkers to the gaming crowd but learning sites did 15 FPS for desktop recordings for a very long time and honestly unless you're doing a whole lot of movement on screen there's not a whole lot to notice talking about overlays and you know on-screen elements that I usually talk about that a really big for game streams at the moment desktop streaming can mostly use the same base cam habits that game streams use and that I recommend for those streams because you still mainly have a main subject that's full screen and you put your little webcam in the top right corner switch scenes to make it fullscreen things like that however you can do something totally unique and use window capture instead of display capture to capture just the window you're working on and place that more creatively in your scene and then have your fruit from your camera aligned based on that and you could even create a whole virtual desktop for your stream layout where your window capture has its own window border your webcam has its own window border and things like that I might throw up a sample on screen this is mostly gonna be a talking head video I really want to get these ideas out to you I'm recording this at 3:30 a.m. but you could do a lot of creative stuff with that music videos music stream band streams I've been seeing a lot of those those can do split screens where you're having your you know either multiple people up on screen at the same time or you're faced with your instrument over here and some lyrics over here or something like that a great example of this is the band hallow scene they do like three times a week streams on Twitch and their production value is insane they have cameras for each all three of their band members as well as overhead views of like the drums and things like that and they regularly switch between them this is a very creative and engaging way to keep your audience involved and to show the audience everything that's going on overall split-screen picture-in-picture and multi cam setups should be used a plenty if you want to keep people engaged obviously if you're just sitting here teaching and you're teaching a course maybe that much production value isn't a necessity by all means and I totally get that but if you're trying to do like a more mass appeal kind of live stream experience or you're really trying to make sure that everyone is engaged you know the rule with TV shows and movies is that angles are changing like every three to five seconds I don't expect you to do that for a live stream please don't but for TV shows and movies angles change like every three to five seconds because attention spans don't like long held shots and the same thing with a live stream if you're trying to keep a live stream audience engaged for multiple hours at a time and you just have it on this one scene they're gonna get bored and - now that's also why even educational videos are constantly showing on-screen graphics and things like that so have some slides prepared ahead of time use the slide so feature in OBS I have some graphics of prepared switch to plane backup video for a little bit or have multicam setups based on what you're talking about so for like painting you can have different camera angles you mess them with your tools has a little focused angle your face when you're talking about something and switch between them and use something like the stream deck or stream deck for mobile our sponsor for controlling it also for a lot of these non gaming streams I highly recommend utilizing the periphery for your alerts for your overlays for things like that because most of your focus is probably on the center of the screen and especially if you're using a camera view like I have right now most of what on the edges here is just for flair it's my living room it's a mess right now cuz we're preparing for a baby I can cover this in my alerts and my panels and my overlays and make more use of that instead of doing anything centered where you want your focus to be which in this case is my 3:30 a.m. face maybe I should cover that up too as far as managing chat if you are doing a live stream to the public anyone of you chat messages or show it on stream obviously the number rule of thumb is to not block your content I see that way too often even in game streams where people have chat overlay and it just covers up so much of the screen most people are just watching chat in the chat window and services like YouTube and twitch both now have a chat replay feature to where if you're watching the video after the fact and it's just the vaad from the live stream the chat will replay with the vaad so you don't even need to have it on-screen in a lot of cases but if you do want to show it make sure it's not covering the screen if you are doing more of an IRL stream a painting stream something like that try integrating chat natively for example with the virtual desktop stream layout I was talking about you could have chat going in like its own little window that's appeared in your virtual desktop and you can have different scenes where that isn't always showing if you're doing a drawing or painting stream you can actually just you know mark out part of your canvas or your paper and have your chat overlay be there and just make sure you mark that out every time or you could have a little whiteboard where you have chat overlaid things like that little creative uses that makes it more natively integrated into your scene and doesn't just feel like you're slapping text overtop what your viewers are supposed to be seeing depending on how focused your content is you may not want chat on-screen at all other than specific times where you're doing a Q&A segment that's usually called a just chatting segment of a game stream where it's just you're responding to the audience directly then you switch to a scene where you have you in a picture-in-picture mode and chat on the side that way they can see what Chet you're actually responding to at any given time talking about audio and audio balance for teaching for programming streams where you're doing talking or explanations for art streams anything where you are communicating directly to your audience your microphone audio quality needs to be number one that being said if you are doing teaching or drawing or any kind of those kinds of on camera streams my typical recommendation for microphones probably doesn't apply to you unless you are sitting at a desk segment like I am right now I do all of these desktop tutorials with the same microphone I recommend for game streaming and things like that because I am at my desk and the same physics rules of audio reflections and things like that apply here I don't want it to pick up my keyboard I don't want it to pick up the reflections off of my desk and my walls and my monitors so I use a dynamic microphone and I have lots of videos on these I'll try to link as much as I can't relevant to these subjects in the description below but if you are presenting on camera and you are away from the desk or you are at a drawing or painting or art station or you are away from the camera or you're trying to do something maybe more professional seeming where you don't want your equipment showing like a online course you may not want a big giant microphone in your face this is smaller compared to my usual setup but it's still on screen and potentially distracting depending on your audience and in that case I would recommend making sure you're not up against a desk or a wall or whatever and utilizing a shotgun microphone a small pencil condenser microphone or a lavalier microphone you know run up on your shirt here that way you're still getting audio to you but you don't have the big microphone in your face and in fact where did it go you can get some of these super cheap shocked little mini shotgun microphones that are meant to go on top of your camera and they are very high quality now these work best like any microphone the closer they are to you so if you don't want it on camera try to you know keep your video preview up and reach it just as far out of frame as possible and find a way to mount it there so for example in this kind of setup you can literally just get a clamp that mounts it to your computer monitor and that gets us as close as it can get to you without actually being on camera in this particular instance I actually have my camera mounted above my monitor so I could still mount it on top my camera like it's meant to and more or less it would get the same audio you might need depending on how far you're running it an extension cable you can get three point five millimeter extension cables for these microphones that run into your camera and then you're good to go I'm holding it in my hand but this is a quick sample of what that little shotgun microphone sitting on top of my monitor run into the camera sounds like there's different ones this one's actually the avermedia livestream mic really really good microphone sounds really phenomenal for the price especially once you get it up close to you but even the cheap twenty forty dollar ones on Amazon that are just like knockoff mobo ones and things like that or the rode little video micro or whatever these are all pretty good but the further they get away from you the more tinny and just really crappy they sound like they sound their absolute best as close as you can get them to you music streams you must spend as much time as possible even if that's hours balancing your music beforehand do not let your background tracks overbear your microphones do not let your instruments overbear your microphones the most amateur sign I watch a lot of cover bands on YouTube it's just a passion of mine that's how I discovered hallo scene a lot of them have really bad mixing and the music you know it rounds out the vocals or just doesn't mix right with the vocals you need to make sure that is set especially if you're a big band or a DJ or whatever live here DJ you probably don't have separate vocals but whatever you know if you're a well known group there's a lot of them out there that are looking for streaming tips you have to make sure that's ready to go before your audience sees it they're gonna be like ah this is not what I'm used to expecting now plenty of them will be forgiving because hey they're getting to see you live but keep that in mind a couple obvious notes that no one actually follows close your door turn off your phone ringer let your family know that you're about to record or stream or teach or whatever even come up with a little red sign that you hang on your door or put outside your window or whatever that says hey I'm live now you know like the little radio on-air lights or whatever so that they don't bust in in their underwear or they don't knock on the door real loudly or they don't call you in the middle of it or you don't get text and have to turn it off fumbly real quick while you're streaming and just just do it but make yourself a checklist check your stream settings check your audio levels closed or turn off ringer let family know just make yourself a checklist check all of those off every time every time lastly let's talk about cameras real quick for a lot of these purposes a webcam is totally fine in fact I just watched a multi hour DJ set from Alice in Wonderland and I'm 99% sure it was just on a basic Logitech c920 and that was totally fine the focus was on the music and you just got to see her dancing around and performing it and that was fine the one thing I noticed about it was none of the lighting or the exposure or the framerate or anything like that was changing on the fly she had it set to manual settings I've came to find but set it to manual focus set it to manual settings so if your lighting changes or something like that especially for like a drawing stream or painting stream or art stream of some sort your exposure levels aren't changing because you're gonna blind your viewers it's gonna be really exhausting to watch I have a whole video on webcam optimization and manual settings tuning it will be linked in the video description of course go check it out it is incredibly important to those kinds of streams especially with a webcam that has much worse of a time handling auto settings I also recommend instead of just like you know having although I say this at my living room behind me but that's because this is literally the only place I can record this kind of video unless I'm doing a whole production set up with this as the button this desk of the background create a little corner especially if you're working from home and you're gonna be here a while create a little corner in your office in your living room in your family room wherever you're doing your recording or teaching and just make it look nice just you know tidy it up get some shelves in the background and keep it playing keep it simple but make it look nice that way you don't just have a big mess in the background and have to explain it or feel self-conscious about it like I do worse comes to worse clean it up real nice once take a picture with the camera you plan on using in this position right now and then you can like green-screen yourself blur it out a bit and use that as a background don't leave it full focus like you want it blur it out even take the picture blurry if you need to but not too blurry just slightly blurry and you can green-screen yourself in if you're good at making green screens because it's better than just having a complete wreck in the background as lots of my comments will tell you also a tip I recommend is getting some sort of light not only on your face I've talked about lighting yourself on camera quite a bit in fact I may need to turn this light up I don't know that I'm as evenly lit as I used to maybe it got turned down at some point I'm not sure that might look a little better I don't know but not only do you want even light on your face and in fact I could use another light over here to fill in this shadow it's a little harsher than I'd like but you want a tertiary light hitting the back of you in some capacity it could be an open window it could be a light that's naturally in your room as long as it's not too classy with the colors or you could set up and mount a dedicated light this is called a rim light a hair light or a kicker light and it lights the edge of you help separate you from the background which is incredibly important for green screens and just helps you stand out and look more natural to your viewers like there's there's just this weird connection where you actually end up looking more natural this way I actually have one right now and I can turn it off real quick and you can see here the shadow wrapping around my face just totally throws me into the background and I recorded in years of videos like this and I was like this is fine there's no point and like for the most part it's okay but immediately you turn that back on and you see more of you and it looks quite a bit better and you can get like this is meant to be used in a different purpose too but you can get more directional lights so it's not filling in your background if you want or you can tape some flags on it whatever it's just it just adds the extra bit of flare or maybe you know if you're Quarantine hair is just losing itself like mine is and maybe you don't want your hair showing and then you turn it off and bleed into the background so they don't see how messed up the back of your hair is that's an option too ultimately I do recommend keeping it lively with less the watch you know your viewers aren't watching gameplay something that's already stimulating all the senses a lot of people kids especially and you know have short attention spans and will get bored by seeing the same thing over and over and over use on-screen elements use multiple camera angles make sure things are changing relatively frequently without distracting from the point that you're making and you're gonna have a successful stream as mentioned pretty much everything I've always talked about has been applicable to non-gaming streams in some way but I just wanted to get this out here and this is also a call for a part two what do you want to learn about streaming from a non gaming perspective I'm not really surveyed that part of my audience before I'm just running with the ideas that I have so I want to make a part two and answer questions that you directly have in the meantime I am working on a new course I actually had this plan before and I'm you know certain world events are trying to make me speed it up here it's not quite ready yet but I have a big huge course which will take you from every possible basic with you're a gamer whether you're an artist a teacher whatever with live streaming and video online video making to being a professional at it I am super stoked for this it is not ready yet but I will have a link in the video description I honestly don't know what it is yet it'll be on screen too it may even just be a Google Form to get your email signed up so that you can find out more about it because you're really not gonna want to miss it I mean postbox your stream professor hope this video has been helpful hit the like button if it was subscribe for more tech education CNM we'll see you next time it is now almost 4:00 I amthings have gotten pretty crazy for everyone with regards to the working from home situation working situations in general and as a result streaming has really taken off streaming and video calling and video recording for classes for communicating with your customers with your followers with your students with your family and I've gotten an absurd amount of questions with regards to best practices for people streaming and things like that obviously that's what my whole channel is about but everything has typically had a gaming slant and it's always been on my list to make content that doesn't have a gaming slant that really focuses on other stuff but I've always appealed to the gamer as kinda the most common denominator here and you know most of my advice has been evenly applicable to everyone but I have gotten requests to cover things that were specific to non gamers and we're gonna be talking about here today this video is brought to you by Al Gatos stream deck for mobile app if you want to be able to control OVS your live streaming software your video editing software your computer in general from your smartphone instead of hitting alt tab during this broadcast or a class recording or something or just having more macros and unlimited control at your fingertips to turn on your lights to change scenes in your streaming program to play a sound effect to do anything a god or stream deck for mobile has you covered especially since so much of the streaming gear physically is sold out or being price gouged by scalpers online this gives you a much more affordable option and an option that will literally never run out since it's a software that you can use to control it I have a link in the video description below if you check that out I'm a pulse Vox your stream professor and today we're talking about streaming tips and this also applies to recording for non gamers first let's talk about resolution and frame rate settings typically I recommend you know lowering your resolution so you can increase frame rate to go for 60fps streaming and things like that however for people doing just face-to-face broadcasts for those doing painting or art streams or body paint streams or cosplay streams programming streams desktop work streams in general or classes 60fps is not only not a priority but not really relevant at all so 1080p 30 is really the resolution you should be aiming for on your streaming service now if you're doing something a little bit more low-key or you're using webcams you're not doing like drawing or painting or something involving small texts or small details 720p 30 is also a totally valid target and something that you're more likely to be able to hit due to it being less resource-intensive if you're doing something like a coding stream or a slower painting stream or some sort of desktop work increasing resolution even further if your monitor is such a resolution to 1440p it's still possible within the max bitrate of a site like twitch as there's not a whole lot changing on screen and it'll help your viewers see that tiny little detail a little bit better some desktop stuff can even be 15 FPS which is a lot easier to process in your computer instead of 30fps the sounds up say absurd and probably just completely bonkers to the gaming crowd but learning sites did 15 FPS for desktop recordings for a very long time and honestly unless you're doing a whole lot of movement on screen there's not a whole lot to notice talking about overlays and you know on-screen elements that I usually talk about that a really big for game streams at the moment desktop streaming can mostly use the same base cam habits that game streams use and that I recommend for those streams because you still mainly have a main subject that's full screen and you put your little webcam in the top right corner switch scenes to make it fullscreen things like that however you can do something totally unique and use window capture instead of display capture to capture just the window you're working on and place that more creatively in your scene and then have your fruit from your camera aligned based on that and you could even create a whole virtual desktop for your stream layout where your window capture has its own window border your webcam has its own window border and things like that I might throw up a sample on screen this is mostly gonna be a talking head video I really want to get these ideas out to you I'm recording this at 3:30 a.m. but you could do a lot of creative stuff with that music videos music stream band streams I've been seeing a lot of those those can do split screens where you're having your you know either multiple people up on screen at the same time or you're faced with your instrument over here and some lyrics over here or something like that a great example of this is the band hallow scene they do like three times a week streams on Twitch and their production value is insane they have cameras for each all three of their band members as well as overhead views of like the drums and things like that and they regularly switch between them this is a very creative and engaging way to keep your audience involved and to show the audience everything that's going on overall split-screen picture-in-picture and multi cam setups should be used a plenty if you want to keep people engaged obviously if you're just sitting here teaching and you're teaching a course maybe that much production value isn't a necessity by all means and I totally get that but if you're trying to do like a more mass appeal kind of live stream experience or you're really trying to make sure that everyone is engaged you know the rule with TV shows and movies is that angles are changing like every three to five seconds I don't expect you to do that for a live stream please don't but for TV shows and movies angles change like every three to five seconds because attention spans don't like long held shots and the same thing with a live stream if you're trying to keep a live stream audience engaged for multiple hours at a time and you just have it on this one scene they're gonna get bored and - now that's also why even educational videos are constantly showing on-screen graphics and things like that so have some slides prepared ahead of time use the slide so feature in OBS I have some graphics of prepared switch to plane backup video for a little bit or have multicam setups based on what you're talking about so for like painting you can have different camera angles you mess them with your tools has a little focused angle your face when you're talking about something and switch between them and use something like the stream deck or stream deck for mobile our sponsor for controlling it also for a lot of these non gaming streams I highly recommend utilizing the periphery for your alerts for your overlays for things like that because most of your focus is probably on the center of the screen and especially if you're using a camera view like I have right now most of what on the edges here is just for flair it's my living room it's a mess right now cuz we're preparing for a baby I can cover this in my alerts and my panels and my overlays and make more use of that instead of doing anything centered where you want your focus to be which in this case is my 3:30 a.m. face maybe I should cover that up too as far as managing chat if you are doing a live stream to the public anyone of you chat messages or show it on stream obviously the number rule of thumb is to not block your content I see that way too often even in game streams where people have chat overlay and it just covers up so much of the screen most people are just watching chat in the chat window and services like YouTube and twitch both now have a chat replay feature to where if you're watching the video after the fact and it's just the vaad from the live stream the chat will replay with the vaad so you don't even need to have it on-screen in a lot of cases but if you do want to show it make sure it's not covering the screen if you are doing more of an IRL stream a painting stream something like that try integrating chat natively for example with the virtual desktop stream layout I was talking about you could have chat going in like its own little window that's appeared in your virtual desktop and you can have different scenes where that isn't always showing if you're doing a drawing or painting stream you can actually just you know mark out part of your canvas or your paper and have your chat overlay be there and just make sure you mark that out every time or you could have a little whiteboard where you have chat overlaid things like that little creative uses that makes it more natively integrated into your scene and doesn't just feel like you're slapping text overtop what your viewers are supposed to be seeing depending on how focused your content is you may not want chat on-screen at all other than specific times where you're doing a Q&A segment that's usually called a just chatting segment of a game stream where it's just you're responding to the audience directly then you switch to a scene where you have you in a picture-in-picture mode and chat on the side that way they can see what Chet you're actually responding to at any given time talking about audio and audio balance for teaching for programming streams where you're doing talking or explanations for art streams anything where you are communicating directly to your audience your microphone audio quality needs to be number one that being said if you are doing teaching or drawing or any kind of those kinds of on camera streams my typical recommendation for microphones probably doesn't apply to you unless you are sitting at a desk segment like I am right now I do all of these desktop tutorials with the same microphone I recommend for game streaming and things like that because I am at my desk and the same physics rules of audio reflections and things like that apply here I don't want it to pick up my keyboard I don't want it to pick up the reflections off of my desk and my walls and my monitors so I use a dynamic microphone and I have lots of videos on these I'll try to link as much as I can't relevant to these subjects in the description below but if you are presenting on camera and you are away from the desk or you are at a drawing or painting or art station or you are away from the camera or you're trying to do something maybe more professional seeming where you don't want your equipment showing like a online course you may not want a big giant microphone in your face this is smaller compared to my usual setup but it's still on screen and potentially distracting depending on your audience and in that case I would recommend making sure you're not up against a desk or a wall or whatever and utilizing a shotgun microphone a small pencil condenser microphone or a lavalier microphone you know run up on your shirt here that way you're still getting audio to you but you don't have the big microphone in your face and in fact where did it go you can get some of these super cheap shocked little mini shotgun microphones that are meant to go on top of your camera and they are very high quality now these work best like any microphone the closer they are to you so if you don't want it on camera try to you know keep your video preview up and reach it just as far out of frame as possible and find a way to mount it there so for example in this kind of setup you can literally just get a clamp that mounts it to your computer monitor and that gets us as close as it can get to you without actually being on camera in this particular instance I actually have my camera mounted above my monitor so I could still mount it on top my camera like it's meant to and more or less it would get the same audio you might need depending on how far you're running it an extension cable you can get three point five millimeter extension cables for these microphones that run into your camera and then you're good to go I'm holding it in my hand but this is a quick sample of what that little shotgun microphone sitting on top of my monitor run into the camera sounds like there's different ones this one's actually the avermedia livestream mic really really good microphone sounds really phenomenal for the price especially once you get it up close to you but even the cheap twenty forty dollar ones on Amazon that are just like knockoff mobo ones and things like that or the rode little video micro or whatever these are all pretty good but the further they get away from you the more tinny and just really crappy they sound like they sound their absolute best as close as you can get them to you music streams you must spend as much time as possible even if that's hours balancing your music beforehand do not let your background tracks overbear your microphones do not let your instruments overbear your microphones the most amateur sign I watch a lot of cover bands on YouTube it's just a passion of mine that's how I discovered hallo scene a lot of them have really bad mixing and the music you know it rounds out the vocals or just doesn't mix right with the vocals you need to make sure that is set especially if you're a big band or a DJ or whatever live here DJ you probably don't have separate vocals but whatever you know if you're a well known group there's a lot of them out there that are looking for streaming tips you have to make sure that's ready to go before your audience sees it they're gonna be like ah this is not what I'm used to expecting now plenty of them will be forgiving because hey they're getting to see you live but keep that in mind a couple obvious notes that no one actually follows close your door turn off your phone ringer let your family know that you're about to record or stream or teach or whatever even come up with a little red sign that you hang on your door or put outside your window or whatever that says hey I'm live now you know like the little radio on-air lights or whatever so that they don't bust in in their underwear or they don't knock on the door real loudly or they don't call you in the middle of it or you don't get text and have to turn it off fumbly real quick while you're streaming and just just do it but make yourself a checklist check your stream settings check your audio levels closed or turn off ringer let family know just make yourself a checklist check all of those off every time every time lastly let's talk about cameras real quick for a lot of these purposes a webcam is totally fine in fact I just watched a multi hour DJ set from Alice in Wonderland and I'm 99% sure it was just on a basic Logitech c920 and that was totally fine the focus was on the music and you just got to see her dancing around and performing it and that was fine the one thing I noticed about it was none of the lighting or the exposure or the framerate or anything like that was changing on the fly she had it set to manual settings I've came to find but set it to manual focus set it to manual settings so if your lighting changes or something like that especially for like a drawing stream or painting stream or art stream of some sort your exposure levels aren't changing because you're gonna blind your viewers it's gonna be really exhausting to watch I have a whole video on webcam optimization and manual settings tuning it will be linked in the video description of course go check it out it is incredibly important to those kinds of streams especially with a webcam that has much worse of a time handling auto settings I also recommend instead of just like you know having although I say this at my living room behind me but that's because this is literally the only place I can record this kind of video unless I'm doing a whole production set up with this as the button this desk of the background create a little corner especially if you're working from home and you're gonna be here a while create a little corner in your office in your living room in your family room wherever you're doing your recording or teaching and just make it look nice just you know tidy it up get some shelves in the background and keep it playing keep it simple but make it look nice that way you don't just have a big mess in the background and have to explain it or feel self-conscious about it like I do worse comes to worse clean it up real nice once take a picture with the camera you plan on using in this position right now and then you can like green-screen yourself blur it out a bit and use that as a background don't leave it full focus like you want it blur it out even take the picture blurry if you need to but not too blurry just slightly blurry and you can green-screen yourself in if you're good at making green screens because it's better than just having a complete wreck in the background as lots of my comments will tell you also a tip I recommend is getting some sort of light not only on your face I've talked about lighting yourself on camera quite a bit in fact I may need to turn this light up I don't know that I'm as evenly lit as I used to maybe it got turned down at some point I'm not sure that might look a little better I don't know but not only do you want even light on your face and in fact I could use another light over here to fill in this shadow it's a little harsher than I'd like but you want a tertiary light hitting the back of you in some capacity it could be an open window it could be a light that's naturally in your room as long as it's not too classy with the colors or you could set up and mount a dedicated light this is called a rim light a hair light or a kicker light and it lights the edge of you help separate you from the background which is incredibly important for green screens and just helps you stand out and look more natural to your viewers like there's there's just this weird connection where you actually end up looking more natural this way I actually have one right now and I can turn it off real quick and you can see here the shadow wrapping around my face just totally throws me into the background and I recorded in years of videos like this and I was like this is fine there's no point and like for the most part it's okay but immediately you turn that back on and you see more of you and it looks quite a bit better and you can get like this is meant to be used in a different purpose too but you can get more directional lights so it's not filling in your background if you want or you can tape some flags on it whatever it's just it just adds the extra bit of flare or maybe you know if you're Quarantine hair is just losing itself like mine is and maybe you don't want your hair showing and then you turn it off and bleed into the background so they don't see how messed up the back of your hair is that's an option too ultimately I do recommend keeping it lively with less the watch you know your viewers aren't watching gameplay something that's already stimulating all the senses a lot of people kids especially and you know have short attention spans and will get bored by seeing the same thing over and over and over use on-screen elements use multiple camera angles make sure things are changing relatively frequently without distracting from the point that you're making and you're gonna have a successful stream as mentioned pretty much everything I've always talked about has been applicable to non-gaming streams in some way but I just wanted to get this out here and this is also a call for a part two what do you want to learn about streaming from a non gaming perspective I'm not really surveyed that part of my audience before I'm just running with the ideas that I have so I want to make a part two and answer questions that you directly have in the meantime I am working on a new course I actually had this plan before and I'm you know certain world events are trying to make me speed it up here it's not quite ready yet but I have a big huge course which will take you from every possible basic with you're a gamer whether you're an artist a teacher whatever with live streaming and video online video making to being a professional at it I am super stoked for this it is not ready yet but I will have a link in the video description I honestly don't know what it is yet it'll be on screen too it may even just be a Google Form to get your email signed up so that you can find out more about it because you're really not gonna want to miss it I mean postbox your stream professor hope this video has been helpful hit the like button if it was subscribe for more tech education CNM we'll see you next time it is now almost 4:00 I am\n"