I Ditched My $700 Camera! Elgato FaceCam Mk 2 Review and Setup

take three what's up ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the channel my name is Francisco and today we're going to be talking about the Elgato face cam Mark I that was for you bandrew let me get right to it we not I'm not going to make you wait till the end of the video I'm going tell you right now for $150 this is a damn good webcam for anybody out there looking to get a webcam or possibly upgrade their webcam because you're out there streaming on things like twitch YouTube Tik Tok Ki whatever other services are out there that people stream to these days there's so many of them it's hard to keep track of them right anyways if you're looking to stream or you just want to capture yourself with a webcam CU you don't want to go out there and spend six7 800 on a DSLR or mirrorless camera this is a damn good camera but it comes with a caveat all right and before we even get to that uh this camera was announced like maybe four or five days ago the day that it was announced by Elgato I bought it with my own money I got it the very next day and I've had several days with the face cam Mark I now to get a little bit more of familiar with the camera and kind of work out some of the Kinks to get the image to look the way I want it to look which by the way this entire video is being recorded with the face cam Mark I now I said caveats earlier let's get right into that this camera right out of the box is most likely going to look like this for you and if it does I don't want you to freak out I want you to remain calm cool and collected okay because a long time ago in a galaxy far far away I I purchased the original face cam close to release and I got the same exact result that you're seeing here I'm pointing this way because my OBS previews on this monitor over here the cameras right here all right I got the same exact result with the original face cam and I was severely disappointed by it to the point where I returned it I was like this is terrible why are so many people hyping up this camera why on their website do does every still of every image that they have recorded what the face cam looked like infinitely better than what happened to me and so you got to consider back in the day back then I didn't know about things like color correction Luts and stuff like that I didn't know I could do all that on my own here and so in an ignorant fashion not knowing any better I returned to face cam cuz I thought it was complete and utter trash fast forward now a couple of years and I've learned some things along the way and thankfully with with what I've learned I've been able to take the image that you see here and change it to this and this is like way better than what you get right out of the box but another caveat here I remember I said I want you to remain calm cool and collected and the reason I say that too is because our environments that we all record and Stream in are different from one another right what I have as far as lighting is concerned what the color of my walls are natural light sources and stuff like that can vary vastly from one Creator to another so just because my results at the at at the point of plugging it in straight out of the box look look like this does not mean that it's going to be the same for you so I don't want you to freak out when you see this and because ultimately even if it does look like this for you with just a little bit of work about maybe 20 to 30 minutes worth of work you can go from this to this damn near effortlessly now you got to be asking yourself how did we get from what we got out of the box to what you're seeing right now um I made a lot I made a lot for this camera and I had never ever thought about making a lot I have always heard of Luts I never knew what Luts were I knew that you could buy Luts you can download Luts but I ran across epos Fox's video that he he published I think three years ago where he did a excellent I mean I'm talking about excellent tutorial on how to make a l in Da Vinci resolved he also did it I think for Adobe premere Pro and a couple of other programs in the same video but I Ed D Vin resolve so I followed his tutorial step by step and this is a result that got now he didn't say what settings to do for every little thing he gave some roundabout figures as to where you might want to land with some things like white balance and exposure but as far as the coloring itself is concerned I I got this because this is what I wanted to get and I got to tell you this this looks damn good for a $150 webcam 1080p 60fps okay but just in case you want to dabble in making your lot for yourself I'm going to put the link to his video in my description below because I know myself will enough to know that I'm not going to be able to walk you through on how to do that having only seen that video and having only done that process one time so if you want to make your lot and you have to venture resolve you can go click on that link below and I promise you you're going to get some incredible results there are some other ways that you can do some color correction for the image either via the camera Hub software by Elgato or directly in OBS and I will walk you through those two right now okay so the first that you're going to want to do is once you've taken the face cam Mark II out of the packaging You' connected it to your computer maybe there's a small chance you don't have camera Hub installed on your computer so you just go to your favorite web browser and you're going to type in Elgato camera Hub uh typically the downloads link is the very first one that populates at the top so click that scroll down just a little bit and then you're going to see it right here camera hub 1.9.1 download that install that and when you do this is what you're going to get this is the camer Hub software you got a live feed live preview going on of your face cam Mark I and all the little bells and whistles off to the side here that we can kind of mess around with okay so um starting at the top you're going to be able to see that you've got the correct camera selected now this is not like critical but you know for example I have a caming 4K also connected to my computer so there's a chance that it's going to by default select a caming 4K if that does happen you just click the drop down and you just select your mark 2 camera call it a day it will will tell you the format right below 1080p 60 FPS nv12 uncompressed now if you recall at the very beginning of the video I said take three that's because I didn't realize that I was recording this entire time at 560 which was crazy but uh we figured that out so hey it's me again sorry I almost forgot to include this in the video if by any chance you start capturing with the face cam Mark I and you notice that it's not capturing at 1080p60 like you wanted to and you try going into the camera Hub software to adjust the resolution that it's capturing at good luck finding out how to do that because I tried I couldn't figure it out but you can change the resolution that it captures at by going into OBS you click on your Source right click go to properties wait first of all hold on too fast all right and we're going to bring this over here I'm going to resize it just to make sure y'all can get a good view here and right here under resolution FPS type it's going to be set to default or to devices default just go to custom and go to the resolution here and select 1920 x 1080 and you'll be capturing at 1080p 60 FPS and if you want confirmation you can open up camera Hub software and where you can select a device that you're working on right underneath it it's going to verify for you that it is capturing at the resolution you've set here in OBS now do me a favor and finish the rest of the video thanks in camera Hub software you're able to do a lot with the camera right and I'll show you what automatic settings look like here in just a little bit but you're able to you know zoom in and out so we can you know whoop do that or whoop do that right and then not only that but we can also assign presets so you know preset number one right now I have it set to 100% uh field of view I go to B we're up to 130% and C we're over here at 200% and then if I want to go over to D I want to create a new preset let's just say that's like a little too low for me and I want to for some reason really catch my forehead right you move the slider over you can move it around around like so I'm going to center it and then if you want to save the preset to a given letter you hold it you click and hold and when you see that download sign you're done so to test that we're going to go to a b c and d there we go all right perfect wonderful you can do pen and tilt of course if you want to fine-tune everything and also by the way if you happen to have something like a stream deck plus you can add a camera Hub plugin to your stream deck software and you can use the dial to do your panning and tilting and also your color correction this second part right here is where things get a little bit more important okay uh you got your picture you can do you can adjust your contrast your saturation your sharpness you can adjust the exposure you can adjust your white balance and also adjust some processing I don't mess with processing Whatever It Is by default I leave it alone and the very first thing that I would do is I would start with white balance but let's just see what this looks like automatically first of all this is automatic exposure and this is automatic White white balance I've seen other webcams do way worse when it comes to automatic settings this looks like you can work with this all right you can 100% work with this but you see I'm from my family from Central America all right so I got a little bit of brown in my skin and I want to show that off because the brown the brown on my skin looks looks good so we're going to take that off and the setting right now is a little too cool for my liking that's a little too red but you know what we're we're going to leave it right that like that like that's a little bit more accurate to what my skin tone is right um next up is exposure now I would highly advise that if this is your first time dealing with something like setting your own exposure in a camera you want to get incredibly comfortable with doing so manually as opposed to letting the software do it automatically again camera Hub software and the face cam Mark II from what I've just seen right now does an excellent job considering that most other webcams atrociously fail when it comes to automatic settings we're going to turn it off all right and then this is what I already had it set to 150 over uh 1 over 50 for my shutter speed and 153 for my ISO ISO is kind of a big one and if you don't know what you're doing with ISO you're going to really screw up your image okay because the higher you go the brighter it gets right and so like you're trying to be like why is my camera so dark bro oh and so you're going to turn it up all the way over here and and I mean obviously all this looks terrible right so we're not going to do that so we're going to bring it down the manual suggests you stay under 400 ISO right because if you look closely let's let's let's go ah and pan in right here if you look closely um like you can't see it over here but if you look closely like around here you might see a little bit of noise but let's go ahead and turn ISO up just a little bit more okay there we go so now we a little higher you can see a bit more of that grainy look going on around the edges here that's because your ISO is way too high and so if you want to keep your image as clean as possible you want to bring that down as much as you possibly can and in order to to combat that you got to have some pretty decent lighting I remember mine was at 153 and so in order to do that again you got to have some pretty decent lighting I've got key light Air Key light air and Elgato ring light over here plus my two little lamps in the back to kind of highlight the back back a little bit and I think we're doing okay so far uh shutter speed basically determines your for lack of a better term your frame rate right uh but also it will affect how much light comes in and out of your camera how much how much light it allows to come in and out right so high the lower your speed is the more light comes in the higher your speed is the less light comes in but look at this let's pretend you want to you want this as an image well your shutter speed is so low that your starting to introduce motion blur now I don't know about y'all but anytime a video game has motion blur is an option I turn that off immediately it's terrible right and so if we go now to like 130 you know we still have a little bit of blur but it ain't that bad let's go up to 160 right now it's looking better right right right okay and you know maybe maybe you're crazy maybe you want to record at 120 you can do that too right but again when you have it at 1 over 20 like this one over 120 like this then you have to raise your ISO up a bit right or you have to make sure your lights are cranked up to the max basically just so you can be well lit enough for the camera to capture everything correctly um but let's go ahead and reset everything back down to what it was this was 1 over 153 and I believe that was one over 16 1 over 60 okay so we got our exposure set up and that's great right but our our image still looks a little washed out okay and that's where picture comes into play um the first thing I usually mess with when I do this is I I mess with SH uh saturation right because I can tell you right now that I just don't feel like my skin tone is exactly where it needs to be so if I go to like 66% I think that's pretty darn close and as for contrast um basically I just kind of move it around until I feel like my background is accurately represented right so like I can see my couch over here is a a little bit washed out still I'm going to go ahead and crank it up just a little bit more that's a little too much it ain't it ain't that dark let's bring it down a bit let's go let's go this way here i' I'd leave it at 70 right now okay sharpness I don't mess with again this is one of those things that however it comes out of the box by default I'll leave it be and there you go voila this is what the B cam Mark II can look like with a little bit of work in the camera Hub software and I don't think it's too bad I think honestly that that's that's okay it's okay it's passible right you have to also consider that you know outside of maybe the one scene that you have in your stream where it's the full camera when you're playing your game you're you're taking a a large image and you're you're crunching it down to a tiny little square a lot of these details are going to be very difficult for people to see right any issues any things that you might perceive as not being good in your image uh is going to be hard for others to see because of the fact that you're taking a larger picture and you're pressing it you're literally shrinking and crunching it down to like a tiny little square so if you see something you don't like after you've gotten the image to be as close to as what you want it to be don't trip over it like Let It Go and move on it it's probably not going to be noticed by somebody unless you point it out to them if you wanted to get fancy with it you can do effects right so you download the AI background stuff from Nvidia and we can do Camera blur I don't think it's going to do it because I have the mark 2 camera set up here as the actual camera and not the virtual agato camera but if you set your Source in OBS as a virtual camera you can add things like blur blue screen or green screen and a whole bunch of other um you know backgrounds that they've already got included there I've been a very forgetful individual today so before we even move on uh I also want to mention that one of the bigger newer features about the face cam Mark II compared to its predecessor is the fact that the FaceCam Mark II not only captures in standard dynamic range but it can also capture in high dynamic range or HDR what you're looking at right now is the face cam Mark I all right an SDR with little to no work done at all in camera Hub software this is basically what it's going to look like plug and play but if we scroll down here to the exposure section and we switch it over to high dynamic range this is what happens and I do not like this whatsoever like at all I think this looks bad very bad and the way that it does HDR from what I understand if I understand this correctly is that it basically takes multiple exposures of the image and averages them all out which is interesting to say the least and one of thing that I noticed when I first plugged this in and turned hdr on is the lamp right here on my back left uh the light itself wasn't flickering like if I were to look back over here the light was not flickering but the way that the image was being processed with HDR turned on it was flickering like it was very very very noticeable and it did not look good whatsoever but maybe maybe I need to do some adjustments here so again HDR Plug and Play right out of the box that's what this looks like let me turn my let on over here in OBS and see if that does anything different for me I can I can see where that actually looks pretty pretty solid but I'm not going to really have a good idea until I start editing the video because of the way that the resolutions work here on the screen I have it in portrait blah blah blah that looks a lot smoother and a lot better um and let me turn the L off again so this is HDR with the let off with the out of thebox settings for the face cam R2 and with that being said let's go back over here to standard dynamic range there we go okay so this is standard dynamic range L off and this is standard dynamic range with the L on you tell me right here in the comments below which one did you think looks better now let's continue but yeah so this is the face cam Mark I changing up the image over here in the camera Hub software but for some reason let's just pretend you don't have camera Hub software you don't want to download it and you prefer to use obs yes okay so in OBS getting color correction done is actually pretty simple and straightforward and I would even argue that it's better than doing it in the camera Hub software because we get a couple of more options than what we get with the camera Hub software so in order to do this again very easy very straightforward we're going to go up here we're going to select our source which is our face cam Mark I click on filters we're going to move the window off to the side just a little bit and I'm going to resize it just so you can get a better look at it you can tell that my L is turned off uh under effect filter so you're going to hit the plus sign we're going to go to color correction we're going to hit okay and Bam gamma contrast brightness saturation Hue shift opacity color multiply color add opacity color multiply color add I don't touch them I don't mess with them I don't know I know what opacity does but the other two I don't know what they do so I'm not going to mess with them okay the first thing I want to do is again I want to try and get the image to reflect my skin tone as best as humanly possible so in order to do that I take saturation and I increase it a little little bit while also keeping an eye out on the Reds so like the red cable the red top of my hoodie and the red bottom half of this box back here I think that is pretty accurate when I'm looking at Reds right next thing I do is I take gamma uh I think there's a little bit too much brightness in Shenanigans going on I know there's a brightness setting okay I don't touch brightness setting but I do take gamma and just bring it down a little bit like just a hair as a matter of fact we're going to to find two go to like negative point10 all right uh contrast same thing I bring it down till about that and I'm done and I'm going to leave these settings up here for just a bit in case you want to try and copy those and maybe use that as a foundation to get your picture dialed into how you want it to do because again remember my lighting my room my environment is totally different from yours so my settings if you copy them you know number for number you're not necessarily guaranteed to get the same exact result but of course you can use this as a foundation to work off of now as I've said earlier I am not a fan of the color correction here in OBS nor am I a fan of the color correction in the camera Hub software because thankfully I took some time to learn how to apply a lot and not only how to apply a lot but how to create a lot so this is the Elgato face cam Mark I right out of the box no color correction nothing done to it except for EXP exposure and white balance and now I've applied my L and this is what it looks like and for $150 um this looks pretty darn good for 150 bucks like no joke at all this is a really damn good webcam like I I have a $700 Canon M50 of course of course that looks way clearer and way better than this does and and that's just with the kit lens if I swap out to some of my other lenses it looks even better I also have the obsbot tail a this little guy right here this thing is a $500 webcam all right and it can capture 1080p60 or 4K 30 so of course this is going to look better for $150 for for for such less amount of money I feel like we're getting exceptionally good quality right here like I again I'm like nitpicky when it comes to Quality I want my stuff to look pristine and incredible and I have been comfortable using this for my streams since I got it and not to mention that the setup is so simple you plug it in and it's done I don't have to sit here and focus my Canon M50 every single time I don't have to sit here and deal with the pan tilt Zoom of the obot tiny of the obot tilil air um it's just right there it's right here on top of my monitor anytime OBS turns on the camera turns on we're good to go so I hope yall found this review and this information helpful let me know in the comments below did you buy the camera what do you think are you going to buy it was this information helpful at all and until next time be good to yourselves be good to one another peace out oh by the way there's going to be also an Amazon affiliate Link at the bottom so if you want to support the channel about your boy go ahead and check that out and again if you want to do the lot and how to you want to figure out how to do that for yourself I'll have that link down there below as well uh if you do me a favor go ahead and comment on his video tell him Frank sent you Frank sent you yeah Frank sent me he doesn't know who I am but why the hell not till next time yall I'll take care

Channel: Stream Gear Talk

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Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024