Truth. The Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Pro is a slick looking piece of gear. Wonderful to the touch, and elicits a feeling equal to the happiest of digital ballets whenever your fingers dance across the sizable keys to run your live video production of choice. Unfortunately, I have found the quality of its video output under gaming scenarios to be wanting. Whether livestreaming directly from the device using its Ethernet connection to talk directly to YouTube, using it as a glorified capture card connected to a PC running OBS, or sending the feed directly to local storage, I could not find any single way that ended with good looking video.
Now. I am sure that there are streamers and YouTubers out there who have dug into the XML files or are using the ATEM Mini Pro alongside other Blackmagic gear that enhances the video output. Plenty of influencers are out there approving the use of the ATEM Mini Pro and I am sure there is something to that. For someone like me, who streams from any of seven different gaming configurations, I was not interested in onboarding a piece of gear that would lead to more work.
And so today I boxed the BMAMP up and did the online work to process it for a refund. I gave thought to a few different options to pivot my production on. I have been using one of my builds as a dedicated streaming PC. Its position in the studio allows me to use it to stream from my XBox Series S, Nintendo Switch, one gaming PC, and, until recently, my PlayStation 5.
The other gaming devices are on the other side of the studio, and I just let go of streaming from them when I designated this box as THE streaming PC. While testing the ATEM, thinking I would be ok streaming from it in standalone mode, I moved my PS5 over to the other side of the studio. And I was just not up for moving it back. The console station was too overcrowded and I liked the cleaner and less cluttered area I had moved it to.
I thought about moving this streaming PC around to whatever machine I wanted to stream from. But I also game on this PC, and I didn’t want to lose that capability. And it doesn’t have any SSD’s in it , which would be another risk to it being shaked, rattled, and hummed when moving it around. I had another streaming/gaming PC that failed a few months ago. At the time I was switching jobs and had to cover a lot of territory for the owner who had some outages soon after I joined the new company. I was not up for troubleshooting the strangely behaving box. There was also another hanger queen under the same work bench. I figured it was finally time to troubleshoot it and clean the messy area of the basement up in the process.
Just as it had done a few months ago, that PC, a mid-tower in a Corsair SPEC-01 case, powered up, but had no video output, and would not shut down after holding the power button down forever. The box had one of my spare GTX 1070’s in it, and I decided that was the most important thing to salvage, since low-end nVidia cards are still great for livestreaming. So it was more important to get the GPU out and troubleshoot it in the other box, rather than swapping out a Power Supply or motherboard/CPU/HSF. I also pulled the 2TB nVME SSD out of it to use as the OS drive in the shorter chassis.
The hanger queen was not as bad off as I thought. It needed a good dust blowing. It kind of looked like a barn find in Forza Horizon. But the fans were still wired up and pretty easy to wrangle into place; this case, a ThermalTake v21, has 4 fans at the top of the case and they are powered by a mix of molex-to-2-pin adapters. It would have been annoying to wire them all-up again. The 6TB storage drive was still in the case and already connected for power, the data cable just dangling, waiting to be reconnected to the SATA headers. RAM was missing; there are only two slots in this case. The failed PC had 4-slots and I had populated them with 8GB sticks. Yanking them for the new build would have resulted in a 16GB cfg, and I really wanted 32. Fortunately, I still had a pair of Corsair Vengeance RGBs hanging out in an anti-static baggie of spare silicon, a set of twin 16GB sticks that had been in this case before.
After a bit of part-swapping, I had the new streaming PC reconstituted. It powered up, and gave me a bit of trouble getting the nVME drive installed with Windows 10. But other than that, it took all of the software I use for my production tools with aplomb. I was also able to sort out a few nits in the test livestream I ran with it later that evening. It doesn’t have any SSDs in the case other than the nVME. I had recently dug up my spare nVME drives and got an external nVME SSD enclosure that connects over USB, as I had intended that to be the drive solution for ATEM Mini Pro. Connecting that to one of the USB 3.0 ports works on this new dedicated streaming PC better for local recording than my old solution of recording to an external USB 2.0 drive. But the biggest leap tonight was in cameras.
The whole reason I went down the path of acquiring an ATEM Mini Pro was because nothing I have in the studio was doing a good job of consuming video from the Panasonic LUMIX GX85 I got last summer. I needed to get my ROI out of that camera. At a minimum, I figured the Blackmagic Web Presenter, a piece of kit I’d had and been using for a few years, was always reliable and expected that the ATEM Mini Pro would do the same. It did a great job with the GX85, but fell short of my expectations in everything else. Getting rid of the ATEM Mini Pro meant that I was right back where I started with regards to that camera. I didn’t like using such a great camera and then sending it through the Web Presenter, which maxes out at 720p. The Elgato Cam Link saturates the USB bus and will drop offline or freeze almost every live video I use it for. The Mirabox HSV321 was much more reliable, but has cameras it likes and ones it doesn’t. I finally considered an approach that I’d considered many times before, but figured must not be viable, because I do not hear about other streamers taking the same road. That was to just use a second video capture card; one for the primary gaming machine’s video, and the other for my higher-end cameras. I have tons of capture cards around from when I used to review them. I had always worried about how a streaming PC would react to two capture cards and if it could keep with that much data coming across the USB bus. Turns out it works just fine.
I used the Elgato HD60S+ for game capture and the AverMedia Live Gamer Xtreme GC550 for capturing the camera tonight, the Panasonic HDC-HS80 camcorder. It all worked well. In fact, I’ve struggled to get decent video out of the HDC-HS80; it is extremely sensitive to low-light and the Web Presenter and any other camera capture device had only provided barely passable camera video for my past livestreams. And nothing worked well when I’ve tried using it for podcasting, with the camera picture blown up to sizes greater than the little PIP-like modal I use when livestreaming. The GC550 did the trick. This now sets me up to use any capture card in tandem with the main card and, fingers crossed, that approach should work just fine. I’m not sure why other streamers don’t just use two capture cards when pulling in a high-end camera’s video.
All-in-all, its been a day of technical adventure. One of the rare ones in a world that continues to be a swirling pool of outhouse slurry on most days. I’ll count this as a victory and continue walking forward.
Rounding Off Infinity 