Building a Studio for Twitch Broadcasting
After two years of success as a Twitch Streamer I moved into a new place with an empty 12x12 foot room, a significant budget, and plenty of time to work out what I wanted my ideal studio to look like. Here’s what I needed and what I came up with!
The Computer
Computer Hardware for streaming comes down to a decision between a one-system or two-system setup. A two-system setup uses a secondary computer to encode and upload your stream to Twitch, but the increased number of potential failure points have always put me off the idea. Maybe next time! For now I’m on a strong single system that I put together for about $1,200 which has no trouble pushing 1080p60fps content out at 6k bitrate.
To sensibly put your own system together I highly recommend http://www.logicalincrements.com/. I prioritized an SSD to reduce lagtime when opening up games on stream. These days most systems you can build will have no problem streaming.
The Internet!
A solid Internet connection is incredibly important. When moving my partner and I were completely ruling entire neighborhoods out based on which ISPs were available.
A problem for streaming is that ISPs don’t accurately measure and report their downtimes when selling their Internet, and on top of that most people you can ask don’t care enough about something like a 5 second outage to remember it and report it to you. When streaming a 5 second outage completely drops your stream! Many viewers are just going to pack up and leave if something like that happens, rather than sticking around and messing with refreshing the page and waiting for you to get back online.
Anecdotally, I’ve had very poor experiences with uptime consistency out of Comcast, and quite good experiences with lower-traffic fiber networks. In my current place I have a fiber connection as my primary option with Comcast as my backup in case of a lengthy outage on my primary connection.
It is VERY worth having two Internet connections if you want to stream professionally. It will rapidly pay for itself and also save you a huge amount of stress dealing with the occasional outages that happen on one of your connections.
Audio
Working out the ideal way to get your voice, but not any background noise, from the room you’re in, through a wire, and out to all of your viewers is an immense task. After spending 10+ hours fine-tuning my audio setup here are my most important takeaways:
- Buy a Good Microphone and the hardware it needs to SHINE.
The standard budget Microphone is a Blue Yeti, which wins extra points for plugging straight into a USB port. Once you’re ready to move up from there things get a little more complicated. I use a Shure SM7b on a Rode Mic arm. The SM7b outputs a quiet signal, so I plug it through a dbx 286s, which handles some of the amplification of that signal as well as smoothing out my volume levels so I can yell and whisper into the same microphone. From there the signal moseys through a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 USB Interface, which is finally able to plug into one of my computer’s USB ports. - PUT IT CLOSE TO YOUR MOUTH.
It’s hard to stress enough how important this is. The simple way to remove background noises from the sound of your voice is just to have your voice be closer to the microphone and turn the microphone’s gain down. My lips touch my microphone regularly enough that I stress out a little about making sure it’s clean. - There are experts who understand this way better than us and you can hire them.
Give your local theater, college, nightclub, etc., a call and ask if they know a good sound engineer who could do a house call. They’ll get better sound out of the equipment you’ve got in an hour than YouTube tutorials are ever going to give you on your own.
Final note: If you’re playing audio through speakers while streaming you’re going to occasionally run into problems with echo from your microphone picking up your computer audio. The simple solution is to wear headphones, but it’s also possible to try to stream with your audio coming through speakers if you’re feeling ambitious.
Video
Your PC will handle streaming your game, notifications, etc., but you may want to also stream video of yourself. Having a visual presence on your stream is NOT NECESSARY. You can be a hugely successful streamer without anyone ever knowing what you look like. If you do choose to add video to your stream make sure it adds to a viewer’s experience instead of detracting from it.
At this point I don’t bother adding a camera to a stream unless I have at least a Logitech C920 with a deliberate background; either a green screen or a nice staged background. I think this is a sensible baseline to start with as a beginning streamer if your stream is focused on gameplay.
Of course the sky is the limit here. Here’s how my setup looks right now:
VIDEO 1) Camera
I still use my C920 on occasion to point an extra camera around my office, get my sleeping cat on stream or something like that. But in setting up this room I mapped out two camera angles for static dSLRs, one with a green background and one with a staged background.
To run a dSLR’s output through to your stream you’ll need a capture card. I use Lumix GH4s and capture them with two Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4K capture cards. I haven’t had technical issues with capturing two of the same camera with two of the same capture card using one computer, but would suggest caution if anyone else wants to try it with different card types.
My lenses are having to do a decent amount of work; I’m quite close to them and want to be able to move around a little without them losing focus (don’t stream with autofocus on, it looks awful whenever the camera refocuses). I’ve tried a few different options and eventually settled on Olympus M.Zuiko 12mm f/2 Lenses.
Setting the camera up is a bit of work, especially if you’re learning as you go. Most dSLR’s will have a clean HDMI output option which is very important to toggle on — otherwise anything that shows up on the dSLR display will also be added to the video of you on stream. Make sure you buy batteries which can plug into a power source while they’re in the camera so that you don’t have to worry about them running out of power while you’re using them.
VIDEO 2) Background
There are two types of camera backgrounds to discuss.
- Green Screen
Streaming software is good enough that it can use a chroma key to strip groups of pixels close to each other in color out of your video output while you’re streaming. The go-to color is green for a variety of technical and practical reasons.
In order of importance from most to least, when setting up a green screen:
Get steady, even, light onto the Screen.
Remove any wrinkles from the Screen if using fabric.
Light yourself with different lights from the Screen (to reduce green color bleeding onto your face etc.). - Staged
A staged background can be just about anything. I have some sweet posters from Displate, a curtain over my doorway to make the doorway less weird, and some fun lighting using Lumia Stream to let streamlabs notifications control a couple of Phillips Hue RGB lights.
VIDEO 3) Lighting
Lighting sounded boring to me at first, but I feel like the more I stream the more I care about it. A problem for streaming is that photography/video usually requires shining a huge amount of light on the subject, but as a streamer you probably don’t want a huge amount of light shone at your eyes 40+ hours a week for the next 10 years.
To solve lighting in this room I started by using blackout film on the windows in the room to give myself complete control over lighting. With that done I added 4400k LED Strips all the way around the ceiling of the room, spaced about 4-inches away from the walls. This gives me a steady, somewhat pleasant yellow light in the room which won’t cast odd shadows as I move around.
The next step was to add deliberate steady lighting to my green screen and to myself. For the green screen I used two ceiling-mounted LED panels, and for my face I used two more of these, one shining down from the right of my face and one from behind my left shoulder as a halo light to highlight the top of my head.
All of these LED panels are very adjustable, I put them all at 4400k to match the light temperature already present in the room and adjusted the dSLR’s white balance accordingly.
The end result with this video and lighting setup is that I can run my stream with a nice chroma key, and then quickly turn off most of the lights in the room, change cameras in my broadcasting software, and suddenly have relaxed after-dark vibes from my side-angle camera.
I also went a little crazy and added a green floor to my green screen setup, which means I can stream some augmented reality VR if I’m in the mood! Haven’t perfectly calibrated the lighting and camera for that yet, so you can see the chroma key struggling a little with my outline.
Cooling
Just a note of warning: if you set up a room with shut windows, a closed door, and a ton of lights, cameras, and a computer in it, that room is going to get very hot.
My solution to that has been to pipe cool air in from an AC unit outside the room. The AC unit works in the next room, then a fan sucks as much of the cool air the AC is outputting as possible into a pipe that runs into this room and pushes cool air in along the ceiling.
Even that isn’t enough on a hot day; a lot of the time I end up leaving a window open to help air circulate and sacrifice a little bit of my control of light in the room by only lowering the blinds over the window instead of fully closing it with the blackout film.
