Warren Brown  
Hi, I'm Warren Brown. A lot of you want to do video streaming, you want to stream your worship services, and be able to bring people from the outside into your community without them having to actually show up at the building. But I know that a lot of you are a little bit intimidated by the technology. And I just want to share some tips that you can use to easily get online. And as you go along, maybe even become more advanced and up the up your game when it comes to video streaming. Probably the easiest way to start streaming is with an iPhone or any smartphone really, or a tablet, an iPad, they, all have these devices, they have cameras, they have microphones. And they're very simple to connect to the various streaming platforms. And within no time you can be streaming. They do have some limitations. The, the two biggest limitations are one: there, you really need to keep them up pretty close to your subject to get a good picture. You've probably seen videos where you've got this huge wide shot, and the person you're looking at is some tiny little blip in the screen. Keep them close. The other thing is audio. These microphones really aren't designed to be far away from the sound source. In fact, every microphone works best when it's close to the sound source. So those are the limitations on these. Now, probably the next step up, it's still very easy, is this Mevo camera. Now these are fairly inexpensive, but they're designed specifically for streaming. And they connect very easily and wirelessly. You do need either a laptop or a tablet in order to control them. But the great, they have a lot of features that the other ones don't have. They still need to be fairly close to your subject, but they have much better microphones. And you can mimic multiple cameras with these, they have a lot of features that the that the other ones don't have. And we'll get into the details, a little bit more detail on these as we go forward. Alright, so that covers the most basic options. Now, if you want to step it up and get a little more sophisticated, probably one of the first things you want to look at are external cameras. Here are two examples. The simplest is you probably recognize this as just a webcam. And you can plug this in directly into a laptop or a tablet, and you can aim it at your subject and they've got a microphone and a camera. And you can go that way. One benefit of using a webcam is that it's got a USB connector on it and you can plug it directly into your computer. But better yet, if you go with a camera like this, like this camcorder, this camera has a lot of advantages that the simpler setups don't have. First of all, it's got optical zoom. Now the optical zoom, is you're, I'm sure you're familiar with with zoom on a camcorder, the optical zoom uses lenses in order to get a tighter shot from farther away. So you can position these farther away, than than the other cameras. You want optical zoom rather than digital zoom, because what happens to the digital zoom, the picture starts to get soft and pixelated, where the optical zoom, you just, you're just zooming in using the lenses. The other thing is that the audio can be a little bit better because you can put an external audio and we'll talk more about that later. Another option is you can go to this which is called a PTZ camera, a pan-tilt zoom camera, and as you can see it it spins around and it goes up and down and it'll zoom in and zoom out. And again, you can plug that in directly into your computer. It has a little remote control which allows you to control that, you can even program in the various shots. And you know so that you can kind of hit your pre programmed shot for the lectern or a wider shot or whatever. In any case, you can plug that in directly to your computer. Now, any of these cameras that you're considering using plugging them into a laptop or a tablet, they're going to going to need an HDMI output. And you're gonna want to make sure that the cables that you get will plug into the HDMI output on the camera, and there are different HDMI plugs. So you want to make sure you get the right one for your specific camera. Now, on the other end of this, you'll see, you only have another HDMI connector. And you can't just plug that into the HDMI port on your computer because that's an output only port you need to go in, not out. So what you need to do that, is one of these and this is called a capture card or an interface. And what it does, it converts that HDMI video and audio into USB, which your computer can then use. So you plug the other end of your HDMI cable into this. And then you can plug this into the computer and you will be able to access the video from whatever camera that you plug into this in your, in your streaming on your laptop, or your tablet. You can go directly into the streaming platforms Facebook, Youtube, Zoom or whatever. Or you can use a software to do that. We'll talk a little bit more about that later too. But that, but that pretty much covers the basic equipment. Now let's get into some more detail.

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