Building the Ultimate ATEM Podcast Studio with 5x NEW 4K Blackmagic Micro Studio Cameras

welcome to the set of radio Rufus a brand new podcast but with the look and feel of a 1960s radio station and it's the perfect opportunity for me to put black Magic's new micro Studio camera 4K G2 to the test because this set is a 360° immersive set every single part of it is designed to be seen on camera which I must admit presented a bit of a challenge for me when I was the one tasked with creating a highly functional Five camera live Vision mix podcast setup without any of the tech being seen on camera but I cannot express enough how good the end result is and how well everything turned out and I can't wait to share that with you and that is what I'll be doing in the second half of this video I'm going to give a full breakdown of the studio setup that we've got here but in the first half I want to give a bit of an overview of what the micro Studio camera 4K G2 is and everything that you need to know about it so let's head back to my studio now for that let's talk about the obvious thing first which of course is its size it's absolutely tiny but it's crazy to think that we've got a essentially a studio camera you could call it a cinema camera though because it's got all of the same things that you would find in a cinema camera sitting in the palm of my hand weighing at just 300 G and it is a 4K powerhouse it's got the same sensor the same color science the same dynamic range and the same quality in the camera that I'm using to film this video right now which is a Blackmagic Studio camera 4K Pro and that actually comes as a benefit because it means if you've got an existing Blackmagic camera whether it be the Blackmagic pocket Cinema Camera 4K or the black magic Studio camera 4K line you can mix it with a micro Studio camera 4K G2 and you're not having to worry about will the shots match up will the colors look different looking at ports and connections on the camera first you get two 12g micro BNC connections one for SDI in the other for SDI out and they support 3840 by 2160 so Ultra HD 4K up to 60 frames per second and I think a lot of people will use these cameras in SDI workflows but what Blackmagic didn't talk about I personally feel too much was the fact that on the other side there is an HDMI port now it doesn't support 4K output it is limited to only 1080p up to 60 frames per second but it does mean you can use this camera with HDMI based workflows so this will work great with A10 minis A10 mini extremes A10 mini pros this will work and the other thing I don't think they shouted about enough is the fact that yes you get black Magic's camera control protocol over the SDI that is what the SDI in or the return SDI is for but you also get it with the HDMI as well so if you do connect this up to your A10 mini pro your A10 mini extreme using a single HDMI cable it will create that bir directional connection so that not only is it sending the video and the audio to the switcher but it's sending all the ancillary data back from the switcher to the camera and that's how you get things like the tally light time code the ability to control the lens the camera control and the color calibration of the camera so it does work with HDMI based workflows and not just SDI workflows you also get a 3.5 mm microphone input if you want to use external microphones or sources and on the other side you have a USB type-c connector uh 3.1 up to 5 GBS per second and we'll talk more about that in a second about how that can be used because I think this opens up a lot of functionality for the camera now I do just want to give a quick mention to the great Mounting Solutions on this camera cuz we use that a lot in the build you're going to see later on in this video there is a qu in tripod thread at the top and on the bottom three4 in tripod threads and I like the ability to mount this camera from both the top and the bottom on the side there is a onoff button at the bottom four buttons for navigating through the menus and a record button and on the top because you can record with this camera and we'll come on to that in just a second and the final really only thing to mention here is power there's two ways to power this camera you can use the 12vt DC locking connector to continuously power the cable from a wall or you've got a battery slot here where you can use a Canon LP E6 style battery and you can actually use those at the same time for a bit of redundancy so if you have a fully charged battery in the back and you're powering this from the wall if the power gets disconnected or you have a power cut it will automatically fail over to the battery and continue running until either the battery dies or you uh add DC power back in before we move on to the studio build itself S I do just want to take one second to talk about the USBC port in this camera because it is a key feature and I think it's going to open up a lot of possibilities in the future for what you can do with it so firstly I imagine that 90% of people that get this camera are going to use the USBC port for one thing and one thing only and that is connecting up an external media drive to enable recording onto that external dis and it is as simple as taking a USB SSD for example connecting it up to the USBC port and it will appear and you can record straight onto it but you can do other things with this USBC Port one example being that black Magic's focus and zoom demands are compatible with this camera so you can connect those up and then control your lens's zoom and focus remotely another example is you can actually attach a USBC to ethernet adapter and connect this camera up to your network and you might ask why would you want to do that and there's two main reasons one which I don't think you and I really need to worry about right now but it is interesting for the future of this camera and that is this is the first camera that black magic has enabled the rest protocol which basically allows developers to control the settings of this camera using simple HTTP requests over the network what that means for you and me in that is that in the future we're probably going to see a lot more apps being developed and enable us uh enable us to download and use that give the ability to control this camera over the network without needing to use something like the ATM software control but the second more interesting thing I think for us as users right now is Blackmagic have enabled the ability to actually access the hard drive that you connect to the USBC Port over the network as well and what that ma means is you can basically now connect a hard drive up to this camera and leave in at all times and access and offload the footage via the network rather than you having to unplug the the SSD hard drive every time you want to offload your footage and so you could offload your footage on over the network onto your computer onto a Nas onto a Blackmagic Cloud store the possibilities are kind of endless and they've enabled you to do this in three ways they've created a web dashboard a web media server so you just type in the web address into Google Chrome for example and access the footage that way they've enabled FTP so that you can similar to how it works on the hyperdex you can access the hard drive via an FTP server and the one that I'm excited about is they've enabled SMB sharing as well on the camera similar to how it works with the Blackmagic Cloud store and I can already see that in the near future people will write scripts or there'll be automation um kind of created to enable you to say for example do a shoot with an A10 mini and these cameras and when you finish or stop recording or at a certain point during the day over the network you can offload automatically it will connect to all of these cameras and it will pull the 4K raw footage over the network off of these cameras and put it on your Nas automatically let's say and it does that three times a day at a scheduled time there's loads of possibilities with here and you can see kind of I'm getting excited and throwing up all of these ideas I think Blackmagic have opened the door with this camera and hopefully they bring it into future cameras to be to do even more things and to be even more experimental with the workflows and the way we use these things so that USBC Port it might be a tiny little thing but it does excite me with the possibilities that it brings two quick things to note if you're going to want to try this yourself and connect the camera up to a network the first one being that you are going to need to download black Magic's camera utility software to enable the network features in this camera by default the cameras come shipped with them disabled for for additional security the other thing I would recommend if you're going to put multiple of these cameras on the network is go into that utility software and give each camera a unique name and that way they will get a unique address on the network that you can use to access them the second thing is you might say well Alex there's only one USBC port on the side of the camera so how are you connecting a ethernet dongle and an ssdd drive at the same time and I can confirm you can use USBC hubs like this one this is a ug green 7 in1 Hub you can connect that up to the camera and then plug in your ethernet connection and your hard drive and it works absolutely fine I've been doing that no problem at all so now you know what this little thing is capable of let's go back to the 1960s radio roofer studio and show you how I've installed five of these along with an A10 mini extreme ISO to create a fully immersive 360° podcast studio with cinematic quality and a few of the little tips and tricks that I picked up already with using these things but before that let's talk live streaming with the sponsor of today's video live view live view allows you to deliver exceptional live video coverage anytime and anywhere thanks to their Innovative hardware encoders and cuttingedge cellular bonding technology this is their latest portable bonding encoder the liveu solo Pro now it might look small but this thing is packed full of power in fact it's exactly the same technology used by the biggest news and sports broadcasters but adapted to work perfectly for digital content creators the version I have here has both HDMI and SDI inputs allow you to stream in full 4K at up to 60 frames per second with network bonding for top quality and Ultra reliable streaming from anywhere in the world the solo Pro even has hvc encoding meaning you can stream at higher quality without needing as much bandwidth which is key if you're somewhere with limited internet it has a 3-hour internal battery and USBC charging making it the perfect tool for if you're needing to stream while on the Move speaking of Internet you can connect the solo Pro using ethernet and Wi-Fi but where it really comes alive is the fact that you can also plug in up to four 4G or 5G USB modems this ensures a high quality reliable stream from anywhere every time especially with their solo Pro connect kit that comes with two modems with SIM cards unlimited data and LRT included you can then use live VI reliable transport or LRT for short to send your stream out over a bonded internet connection the benefit of doing this is that the liveu solo Pro will constantly monitor each connection and distribute the network traffic effectively across all connections to make sure your live stream stays Rock Solid even in the toughest of network conditions it also adds a layer of redundancy for those critical live streams that can't go off air with network bonding if someone was to accidentally pull out your ethernet cable the live you solo Pro will continue to stream out over the remaining connections and your live viewers will be none the wiser so so if you're looking for a reliable portable encoder with full 4K low latency streaming then check out the new liveu solo Pro and the rest of liveu groundbreaking streaming devices using the link in my description below we're back in the 1960s radio rofus studio so let's talk about the setup that I've implemented here and I want to start by talking about the challenges that this particular project has the first one actually being size the space that we've got to work with it's remarkably tiny even though it does look big on camera it's just 3 m by 3 m squared and then when the set designers put all of their stuff in that greatly gets reduced so that basically meant for me there was no way we were going to be able to have large studio cameras on tripods I was going to have to get creative about the cameras that I chose the lenses and the way we mounted things as well that's the first thing the second was and I mentioned it at the beginning of the video the client was very specific that this set needed to be a fully immersive 360° set so they could shoot from any angle and it had that sort of fly on the wall feel and um and basically that would be fine but you don't want to ruin the 1960s illusion either so they were very specific that they didn't really want to see any of the modern-day technology any of the cameras the the vision mixer Etc in any of the shots either so we'll come on to how I hid some some of that away in just a second the third thing is to add on to that the actual producer of the show the person who's Live Vision mixing uh the show in real time also is part of the show itself so they needed to be on camera and using the modern-day technology without it being seen on camera so I'll talk about how I got around some of that as well the final two things are the client who is the fellow Studios they're the UK's fastest growing podcast Network I've done a video about them about how I built their F1 the last lap setup they are very used to high quality content high quality cameras high quality sound and they didn't want to sacrifice on any of that why would they for this build so I so the products that I chose had to still deliver the very very top quality for them and finally and arguably the most important as well everything needed to be easy to use so that a producer could just come in sit down press on and start recording straight away without having to do a whole lot of setup or settings changes so what did I go with to make all this happen well you already know the camera the micro Studio camera 4K G2 was really the perfect choice because it's small and can be easily hidden away we've actually got five of these hidden around the set one single shot on Rufus the main presenter to radio Rufus this is the latest and greatest in a frankly one single one Aiden the producer mle Ed suited up white man have one guest single and two super wide angles mounted in each corner to really help her show off the whole studio and to allow us to capture if the talent were to stand up or start walking around the set it's a 360° set as I keep saying so we want the talent to know that they can go anywhere within the set or do anything without the worry about whether it will be picked up on camera or not each camera is mounted into the set using these fantastic Elgato War mounts I'll leave a link in the description below to all of the kid that's been used for this set build this is where having the multiple tripod mounts on the camera becomes really useful because it gives you a bunch of possibilities and flexibilities for mounting these cameras then all I have plugged into the camera is it 12volt DC power and I found these right angled thin HDMI cables to keep everything as low profile as possible with as minimal wires on show and for each camera I just drilled a small hole into the set to run all the cables through to the back of the set and you end up with this super clean setup now in the future I might add in a USBC extension cable for each of the cameras that can run to the back of the set where I can then plug in a hard drive and an Ethernet dongle to connect this up to the network and do what we were talking about earlier with offloading footage over the network but that isn't needed right now for these guys I want to pass on a few quick tips in terms of things I did in the menu of the camera to get this working for an A10 workflow so the first thing is if you're going to be using this with an HDMI based A10 workflow go into the menu of the camera go to the monitor menu and turn on clean feed this will then get rid of all the onscreen displays so that you're sending just a clean HDMI feed to your ATM switcher equally if you're going to be using the micro Studio camera 4K G2 with an SDI based workflow don't forget to go into the setup menu of the camera and make sure you assign the correct ATM camera ID to the camera so whatever SDI Port you're plugging into if you're plugging into SDI in number five make sure you go into the setup menu on the camera and change that to number five so that all of the tally light and the data is all that's sent back to the camera is all correct now one thing I actually did for this particular build as well because it is designed to be more of a fly on the wall type thing is I went into the setup menu and disabled the tally light so that the talent isn't sitting here seeing red on airl lights D around the room and getting distracted but that might be something that you don't want to do and you want to have a tally light for your particular setup underneath this producer desk I built a mini rack setup to house all of the broadcast equipment and we designed the set in a way so that this corner right here is the only Corner that will never be caught on camera so the rack lives underneath there and we've also added a little access hatch so that we can easily run cables from the outside of the set into the back of the rack now I tried to keep the rack as small and simple as possible but still be one self-contained unit that gives us all of the functionality that we need to run a show at the bottom of the rack we have the Beringer X32 audio mixer feeding into that is three of these sha super 55 Deluxe microphones connected via XLR to give the very vintage look but with the top high quality sound that these microphones give they are absolutely fantastic then I've also run three individual XLR outputs from the mixer to these Behringer pm1 units which I've mounted underneath the table at each of the seating positions so that each Talent can have an individual headphone mix now it is worth saying that the X32 mixer probably is a bit overkill for this particular setup but the reason that I've used it is because it's the one that the client knows and uses across all of their podcasts and all of their producers are trained on that mixer so it made sense to also apply it into this setup as well also one of the great things about the X32 is it is controllable over the network and we use that quite heavily as you'll come to see later when we talk about stream deck and big Focus companion of course don't forget what I mentioned earlier as well all of the broadcasting Tech needs to be hidden away we can't have a big audio mixing desk here on the producer desk so the X32 works well for that as well cuz it can be hidden away in the rack and we can use the stream deck to control it over the network above the X32 is an A10 mini extreme ISO the five cameras are connected to that via fiber HDMI for the two HDMI outputs one feeds the screen at the producer desk for the multiv view the other feeds the onset monitor both of which are fitted into these custombuilt units to help hide the modern technology to bring audio from the mixer into the ATM it's as simple as taking two XLR outputs from the X32 with a cable that converts to a 3.5 mm stereo Jack on the end and plugging that into in my case mic 2 input on the A10 mini now I do put a slight delay on the outputs in the X32 to help uh sync all the audio up so everything is in sync with the camera picture the other thing to mention with the a many that I do which is more of an ease of use thing but it's a really nice thing to do with your builds is I just run a 2 m USBC cable from the back of the A10 mini which is obviously on the floor in the rack and I just have it poking and coming out of the producer desk and that is there so that when a producer sits down they can just easily plug in a hard drive for recording without having to scramble to the back of the rack and try and plug uh one into the back of the A10 mini that cable is there already for them to use then on the top shelf there's a Mac Mini which runs all of the crucial software like ATM software control X32 edit and most crucially bit Focus companion but as I mentioned a second display from that Mac is also connected to ATM input number six and that allows the producer to use that second display to show videos photos or even bring in remote guests and that input can be rooted directly to the onset monitor for the talent to see the Mac is also connected via USB to the X32 rack which is how it sends its audio to the audio mixer but it also opens up the functionality for us to be able to do multi-chat recording on the Mac if we want to next for the Mac in the rack is an eight Port network switch and a ginet Wi-Fi 6 router this allows us to create and manage the set's OWN network and for everything to be on its own static IP address so that we're not conflicting with anything else that might be going on in The Wider building the Wi-Fi router also puts out its own radio Roofus Wi-Fi network which is actually key in this set because we heavily utilize smart plugs for it to turn on and off things like practical lighting all of the cameras the screens and even the rack itself and that's where the final key piece of tech comes in the Elgato stream deck everything is run from this thing and it's what allows us to house and hide all of the broadcast kit away and just have one piece of technology sitting in the corner of the desk that will never be caught on camera so when a producer comes in to film an episode all they do is sit down in this chair press these buttons to turn everything on and then they've got their main control page for controlling the ATM and audio mixer and they can do things like cutting between cameras unmuting microphones selecting what they want to appear on the talent monitor even starting and stopping a recording everything they need to control a show is on one simple unit and that's all thanks to bit Focus companion running on the Mac now if you don't know what bit Focus companion is it is a fantastic piece of software that allows you to connect up all of your broadcast hardware and software devices and control them using an Elgato stream deck or other control surfaces I'm actually going to do a video in the near future about how I use bit Focus companion so if you want to see that hit the Subscribe button so now you know how it's made what does the end result look like Well Radio Rufus is Live Now on YouTube so you can click the link down in my description below or click on the I button in the top right hand corner and check out the latest episode over on their YouTube channel now I want to say a final big thank you to the team at the fellow Studios for getting me involved but also allowing me to share the behind the scenes of this build with you so big thanks to them if you enjoyed the video please do give it a thumbs up that really does help algorithm stuff as well also if you're new here make sure you hit the Subscribe button for more videos just like this if you got a question about the build or the micro Studio camera for kg2 get them down in the comments below I read through all of them and we'll reply to as many as possible and if you need specific help with your setups my email address is on screen now you can ping me an email and we'll set up a onetoone Consulting session to get those answered and once You' done all that guys I will see you on the next video

Channel: Alex Pettitt

Views: 19,469

Keywords: blackmagic micro studio camera 4k g2, micro studio camera, micro 4k g2, blackmagic micro g2, micro studio camera 4k g2 podcast, micro g2 podcast setup, blackmagic podcast setup, blackmagic podcast studio, micro 4k g2 studio build, 2024 podcast setup, best podcast setup 2024, podcast studio build, bmpcc4k, bmpcc6k, Davinci Resolve, davinci resolve podcast, micro studio camera 4k g2 atem mini, micro 4k g2 atem setup, best podcast camera 2024, radio rufus, Podcasting, Production

Id: yYlb4DSICGk

Length: 23min 38sec (1418 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2024