Connecting Four Microphones (or more) to the ATEM Mini without an External Mixer!

[Music] hey guys it's ryan and today we're going to see exactly how you can stream your podcast with just the items we have on the table here a few microphones some cables an ipad and the a10 mini pro but before we get into that if this is your first time here consider subscribing and also hitting that like button because that helps us out a lot okay let's take a look all right so let's first go through what we actually have on the table here and uh kind of how simplistic it really is on a few of my other videos i've given you a couple different ways to get audio into the atem surprisingly you don't really have to have an external mixer but it is actually kind of a good idea after my initial testing here it's probably a good idea to get an external mixer for a couple reasons but we'll go into that a little bit later but first let's take a look at our setup and see what we're working with okay on the back of the atem as we know they gave us a pretty minimal selection of audio inputs two eighth inch inputs and i might have said this in a previous video that they were a balanced input and i was actually mistaken on that they are unbalanced inputs according to blackmagic but what these inputs actually are are stereo inputs unbalanced stereo inputs now i'm not exactly sure there's got to be a mic pre in there somewhere that uh allows you to boost my gain there it just there has to be to boost that up to the proper levels but you can't have technically can't have a balanced microphone preamp so i'm not exactly sure how they're doing it i'll have to look into that and get back to you guys so let's look at what we're we're going to be using today we have four of our tried and true sm58s from shure just basic vocal mic right i've got four cables over here to go from xlr to eighth inch and then i've got these guys which are going to allow us to patch into both sides of that input we've got our ipad and of course our a10 mini pro so let's take a look at all of these components that we have and go through the process of how we're going to plug each of them into the atem okay so let's talk about these cables really quick first one we have here this is a female xlr to eighth inch connector okay so what this is gonna give us it's gonna take our microphone signal which is you know off of a mic it's balanced it takes just one pin so it unbalances it and it sends it to this guy so let's open up this this one here i just got this at my local audio shop this was made they they custom make these there's mogami 2314 okay and a really good cable mogami makes great cable and then what they've done is they've taken the output and this is just a single conductor cable with the ground and they're taking pin two so pin two hot is what they're taking right here and then they're jumping pin three and ground right here so this is ground this is pin two this is pin three right here okay so they're just taking that and they're they're jumping the ground in pin three all right so it unbalances the signal so this company makes these kind of cables specifically for um camcorder recording so it's over like a shotgun mic or something like that so if you're running a like a dslr and you have a shotgun mic or something like that like a battery-powered shotgun mic then this kind of cable will work so we're using it let's jump over to this eighth inch side so here is the inside of this guy now this is a trs tip ring sleeve but what they've done is they've taken this cable here you can see it right there you can take it and they've they've combined the tip and the ring together so it's sending the same signal to both sides and then obviously the ground is going to this guy so you've got your ground here and your tip and your ring are soldered together accepting that signal this is the other cable that we're going to be using and this is from hosa which makes okay cables they're not the greatest but they work and this is a trs to dual ts female and it's what we call in the bigger version of this where it's all quarter inch and these are like quarter inch male as we call this an insert cable basically what it's doing is it's taking the tip and see the tip comes out right there in this one and that's to send to something and then the ring this guy right here returns it if we had this into analog gear the tip would send the signal out to an analog piece of equipment and then uh like a compressor and then return it on the ring kind of interesting but in this case what we are initially doing and what we've kind of confirmed the a10 back here does is when you split that input it's taking the tip side and the ring side so when you plug in a microphone that's let's say we just plugged in one microphone to the atem using our normal female xlr to this eighth inch it's sending the signal to both sides of that input even though it's an unbalanced input it still has the left and the right side so sending that same signal to both then the magic happens i don't know what but so we're using this guy to get two inputs in one coming in on the left side and one coming in on the right side which the left would be the tip and the right would be the ring so that's what we did we had one and two and on here and then three and four on the other one so now we're going to take a look on how we're going to hook everything up all right so first we've got to plug in our microphones so we're going to take all of our cables here and we're just going to plug them in one at a time okay now let's go over to the atem and get them plugged in on the other side okay so here we have the back of the atem and we are literally just going to take these guys and plug them in to mic one and mic two and that's what's going to split that out for us you are going to hear when you move this if you're monitoring you will hear some crack crackling a little bit of crackling not much but a little bit so just be aware of that it's okay just you don't want to be like moving these cables around a bunch during the broadcast so now we're going to take these guys and we're just going to plug them in now remember we've got our mic 1 coming out here and mic 2 coming out here and tip or the black one here is going to be one two and then mic two will be input three and four so make sure you're plugging in the correct cables here so we're gonna go one two three and four and now we are all hooked up all right so here we have it we have all four of these mics plugged into the atem we've got mic one through four so one two three and four and now that we have these set up we need to go into the software and tweak a couple things to make sure they work properly all right so here we are in the software and as you can see on mic 1 and mic 2 we have actually split that signal so there's one there's two on the meter there's three on the meter and there's four on the meter what we need to do though is if we go and we try to adjust the input gain on the microphone preamp it's going to adjust both we don't want it to do that we want to have individual control however the magic inside of this thing does it you have two gain controls so we are going to go into our settings and go to audio and then we're going to go to split audio and we're going to split mic one and two and that is that so now we have each mic on its own individual channels if i do a tap test we've got mic one that's coming on its own channel two three and four they're all coming in on their own channels which means we have our own input gain however it's doing it we have our own delay functionality we have our own eq dynamics you know compressor gate limiter we've got our own fader we've got our own pan control and we have our own on button something interesting about the on button is if we actually go to the physical hardware itself and we hit on you'll see in the software that it turns both our mics one and two on we don't really want that necessarily i mean that's a good thing at the beginning to turn all the mics on you just hit two buttons and four mics turn on so if we hit input number two now it turns on our mic three and four so that's good when you wanna turn things on now but what if this guy over here a mic 3 is way too loud and you go to hit the volume button we have that control here on the atm so why not use it well if you try to use it it's going to turn down both 1 and 2 or both three and four so it still acts as a pair as far as the hardware is concerned let's zero these out and then let's look at what we can do to make sure that our gain structure is good now inside the software we can do a lot more things we have individual control over everything so our on on and off function we can do that on an on a channel by channel basis and if you see if i turn our mic 2 or 4 on it doesn't show up on the atem i don't know why just note that that two mics might be on without you knowing it so what we're going to do first is we'll get some we'll get some gain out of these i'm gonna turn on mic one i'm gonna talk into mic one and turn up the gain or adjust the gain to make sure that i have a good level so i'm pretty close on the mic you know i'm what a couple inches away but hey that's pretty good so let's do check check hey one two one two i'm gonna bring it down just a teeny bit so it's just tweaking into those yellows you know yellow sustained yellow probably not too smart but hey we want it to get close there so check check hey hey one two we can also look at our meters on the side there and we're getting about minus 19 which is okay between minus 19 minus 15 i think we'll be good and so i'll go through and do that for each of these mics so let's look at our processing to see how we can make this sound a little bit better all right so i got my microphone on here i'm going to throw a roll off on there immediately oh that's band two i don't want band two on like band to a peak there we go so band one i'm going to bring this up to about kind of like what we did in the in the all things audio video is where i'm going to kind of set this so i'll start around like 150 and then i usually try to cut let's use band 2 please so band 2 let's get that a little narrower and we'll kind of get that boominess out so if you can hear around right there we'll cut that out that cleans it up a little bit and then i don't really hear much in the mids but let's see what we got so i'm going to narrow that down again actually has a pretty narrow bandwidth which is nice so let's see uh check check check one two right here maybe a little bit right there i'm not going to cut it much just a little bit and then i'm going to give myself a little bit of presence so i'm going to do on band 4 we're going to get a really wide band here and then i'm just going to bump it just a teeny bit of 5k not much yeah somewhere around there hey one two okay so that gives us a little bit of presence now we're going to run over to the compressor and we're going to put a little bit of compression on and as you can probably tell there's explosives but they're not as bad because we put that roll off in so that's that's a plus right so let's go to our compressor here and we're going to just put that in and as we can already see we're getting some gain reduction there which is nice and for this i usually do pretty quick attack not not all the way but a fairly quick attack you know and then a very short hold and release time and the reason why is because i want that to just grab those peaks and pull them down and then immediately let them back up not super sharp but you know so when i go like this and then i go like this it's all kind of the same level and it's you can see the gain reduction happening but then you come back down here you're still the same but when you go louder it still keeps it you know where it needs to be no expander gate there's no real reason to do that here uh so i got that compressor dialed in pretty good yeah two to one maybe a 2.5 to one we're not going harsh on this we don't want to be a very harsh compression so we want to keep that relatively smooth uh threshold i didn't adjust it because it's pretty good like we're hitting you know mine between minus five and minus ten is what i'm seeing there so we're gonna keep that there and then we'll go down the line and what we'll do is we'll just copy these these settings over now i haven't found a way to actually copy these settings you have to just go in and do them individually and then don't turn off your atm because you'll lose them all so yeah that sucks come on blackmagic let's get on that please oh the last thing we need to do on our compression before we go to the other channels is if you see here on the input i'm hitting you know minus 15 to minus 10 on the peaks maybe -15 rms i need to because we're reducing the gain here i need to adjust this so that's called our makeup gain so i'm going to take our makeup gain and just bump it a little bit so it's hitting the exact same levels as our input gains so that's about right maybe i'll bring it back just a teeny bit to be on the safe side hey check check one two now let's bump it up check check one two one two one two hey hey hey hey check check okay that's good now i'm gonna go put this across all these mics so obviously with these microphones you're going to have to set your delay right here on each of them and delay them to whatever your main camera is so if you have like a close-up on the main presenter main host you probably want to delay things to their microphone if you do have or to their camera their main camera so let's set up our ipad so i'm going to switch over to the ipad here and you can use this as your your playback so you can playback audio clips you can play like video clips if you want because technically it's an hdmi input so you can do a lot of things and i have this program it's it's a called go button it's from q lab figure 57 i think is the name of the company and they make this for show productions they have a mac based version that works really well but this is all they have on the ipad now you can run things out of like itunes or whatever other program you want to run things out and you can run youtube videos so we're going to do both of those things here now i've got this example show this is the one that comes pre-installed on here so it has all their sounds but first what we have to do is we have to turn on that input and instead of having like auto follows video we let's let's go and just turn it on so now we've got audio coming from the ipad let's just test it really quick oh yeah rim shot nice okay so but what we're gonna do that was a little loud so let's turn that down [Music] hey that's pretty good so if i talk into this mic here hey uh what did you say oh that was too bad [Music] oh there's four of them and then we've got yeah yeah okay and then that fades all the cues so that's a that's a button that uh i don't know if you can see me hitting those [Applause] [Music] nice or we can play some pre-show music ah oh the beautiful morn uh we can we can pause that we can go to two ladies and gentlemen boys and girls children of all ages hey [Music] so anyways that's something we can do on the ipad now let's go let's go grab youtube and play something there all right so let's go back and play a video we'll play off of here we should bring it up and start right into it hey guys it's ryan this is the top five features that are on the atem series of what ugly mug is that hey the a10 mini pro and the itinerary pro iso so oh that's a fun face so anyways you can run video you can run audio clips you can pretty much do whatever you need to do off of an ipad you can do it off of a computer as well and then have these four mics plugged in and with this setup you can run your entire podcast without an external mixer but there's a couple reasons why this it's a good idea to have an external mixer so let's start with these microphones i'm going to turn them all off and if you notice i still have the audio up from our program send so i've turned off you'll see in the software i've turned off all the microphones and i still have the audio up uh from the atem it's not muted on on my edit right now so it's pretty quiet right if i turn on let's just turn on one microphone in the software and you can hear it now this microphone is on but you can hear it one very very faintly there's a 60 cycle hum and two is that hiss that noise floor says so if we add another one it gets a little bit louder with his we had another one it gets even more and then it just builds upon itself and gives us this annoying noise floor and that just means they're really dirty inputs which is annoying now one on if you're running one in a line level configuration from a mixer you'll probably be okay it's you won't be able to hear it as well okay so as you can hear we have that annoying like i'm on this mic all these mics are still on and there's that annoying hiss and you're not going to have that in a more professional mixer you're just not it's going to sound nice and clean maybe a teeny bit if you have some compression in there now is this something you could do in a pinch yes if this is all you have you can do this it's cheaper to buy a few cables than it is to go buy a mixer but for like a hundred bucks you can buy a relatively cheap mixer and a cable to get to get you by so that about wraps it up that is how you can stream your podcast with just the atm and a few cables now obviously these microphones wouldn't be sitting here in front i gotta say it because some trolls gonna come along wouldn't put your microphones like that yeah i understand you put these in front of the people kind of a round table situation that's what that's what you do right so that is it we kind of just did a practical use case if this is all you have it can be done uh i would say probably not your best bet but you know give it a shot see what you think now this is with basic mirroring this is your basic uh decent quality still dynamic microphone so we didn't this doesn't supply any kind of phantom power to microphones so using a condenser mic probably not going to work unless you have some sort of external preamp like this guy this is this is the art or art studio v3 it's a tube tube mp uh microphone preamp so it's got a little tube inside there sounds okay you know this is a this is a regular microphone preamp right so it is going to have a balanced input and a balanced output you might run into some issues with a balanced output so what i would suggest with this is if you have even more cables and this is kind of a secondary thing not only do we have four microphones going into here i've got three different cameras going all with microphone inputs so you could technically run up to let's in this configuration if i've got three cameras i can run up to seven inputs and if i have another camera instead of a computer or an ipad input that gives me eight microphone ends that i could do with up and down volume control on the surface itself not too bad now that's going to wrap it up there i hope you guys liked it if you did please subscribe thumb up us if you can and then we'll keep kind of going down this road in a few videos coming up and seeing exactly what we could do i'm gonna bust out another mixer and hopefully we can integrate that with our atem to do kind of more of a professional uh shoot let's say the biggest thing though is comment below if you have any questions about our setup here and what i've done what your what your thoughts are on it um put it in the comments and i will do my best answer so thanks for tuning in guys and we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Ryan Knows Nothing

Views: 21,597

Keywords: ATEM Mini Pro ISO, blackmagic atem mini, blackmagic atem mini pro, blackmagic atem mini pro iso, blackmagic design, atem mini switcher, atem mini pro audio, atem mini audio, atem mini microphone inputs, atem mini mic inputs, atem mini pro, atem mini, atem mini pro unboxing, atem mini pro review, video switcher, video streaming, video streaming setup, streaming setup, youtube streaming, tech unboxing, tech unboxing videos, Audio, broadcast audio

Id: S2NVEky6deU

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020