Live Streaming Camera Comparison for Churches | Camcorder vs. Mirrorless vs. PTZ vs. Cinema

hey it's jake in this video i wanted to compare some different video camera options your church may want to consider as you continue to build out the live streaming infrastructure for your worship gatherings so in front of me on this table i have cameras that vary in budget from a 200 camcorder to a 6 000 cinema camera all of which can be used in a live streaming context but i know how difficult it can be trying to decide which one is going to be the right fit for your church's live stream whether you're using a single camera or whether you're building a multi-camera setup so what i've done is i've captured some test footage on every single one of these cameras capturing the same subject and the same lighting conditions so that you can compare these video cameras before you start purchasing them for your church if you're just getting started with live streaming at your church be sure to check out our beginner's guide to live streaming link down below this video if you're farther along in your journey you've already been using a simple live streaming setup with maybe one or two cameras and you want to sort of up your game with your live stream by introducing more cameras dedicated hardware video switching encoding automation etc then check out our advanced multi-camera live streaming for churches course also linked below in the description and as always i'm going to link all this gear in our worship ministry toolkit so if you don't catch the name of a camera body or lens just download the toolkit it's all there so let's go ahead and dive into our comparison i'm going to start with the lowest budget camera that is this canon vixia hfr 800 this is a very budget-friendly camcorder coming in around just a couple hundred dollars it's very compact it's got dedicated hdmi out it's got a battery as well as a dedicated uh port for your power adapter for the camera as well that's important for your live stream setup of course you can put an sd card in here if you want to record locally it also has a dedicated hdmi output which you can send to your video capture device or your video switcher so this does check a lot of the boxes required for a decent live streaming camera but let's take a look at the image quality when i look at this image i think the biggest thing that jumps out to me is how soft it is there's not a whole lot of sharpness to the image a lot of that probably has to do the fact that you have kind of a cheap lens mechanism within this camcorder body the image also seems to be pretty grainy even though there's plenty of light within this demonstration here and often that's due to the fact that the sensor on this camera is so small keep in mind as we work through these cameras the image sensors tend to get a lot bigger as the price increases but a bigger sensor captures more light you're going to have a higher image quality so that's the footage coming from this canon vixia camcorder we'll talk about this a little bit later on as we compare it to footage from other cameras in our list next up we have a ptz optics camera this whole setup comes in around seventeen hundred dollars to about two thousand dollars this is the usb version so i was able to record uh video straight out of the usb and it showed up as a webcam within ecamm live so i just recorded it to my computer locally the sensor on this ptz camera isn't a whole lot bigger than what you have on a camcorder hence the reason why there's still quite a bit of noise especially when you see in the shadows of a shirt right here that's really popping out the lens as well when you start comparing it to like these lenses we have on these cinema cameras not nearly as sharp but the advantage of a ptz camera like this is that it is a camera body and a lens and a moving mechanism all in one this is the only one of these cameras that can be remote controlled you can zoom in pan tilt do whatever you want you can't do that with any of these other cameras they have to be manually operated by someone on your church's tech team so when it comes to image quality i think these two cameras have a lot in common they do have the convenience of being small and compact um and they have you know the built-in lenses and zoom functionality panning or till functionality but they sacrifice when it comes to the sensor size and the better image quality that you would get with a larger sensor keep that in mind when you go with one of these cameras the image quality will suffer because of the small sensor sizes next up we have the panasonic gh4 and i wanted to add this to the lineup because you could probably find some decent used panasonic gh4s out there on the market and pick them up for a great price i think i bought a gh4 back in 2014 and i've still held on to this camera because as you can see it gets some pretty fantastic results it can shoot 4k all the video i'm showing you in this demonstration though we're doing 1080p 30 frames a second so that's the image that you're seeing from this camera significantly better than the image from this camcorder or the ptz optics camera a lot of this is due to the fact that it has a micro four thirds sensor so it just can capture more light you're going to have less noise going on and now we're starting to use actual you know separate lenses that we can attach to the camera body these lenses are higher quality than the lenses built into these devices so that's also going to render a much sharper image and as we start to work with these types of lenses you're going to have better depth of field so you're going to have more blurry background it's going to look more cinematic overall it's just going to be a lot more artsy when it comes to the final look of your video next i have the panasonic gh5 and this camera even though it's not brand new it's been out since 2017 this may still be my favorite recommendation for churches when it comes to their live streaming setup and i would say it probably would come down to this camera as well as a black magic pocket cinema camera 4k i have the 6k version here it's kind of the bigger the brother to the 4k but this camera or the black magic pocket cinema 4k very very comparable i actually think this has an edge to it because not only will it work great for your live stream it has a dedicated hdmi output it also has built-in image stabilization so if you want to take it off a tripod someone can easily hand hold it give it some motion but it won't be like super jittery and shaky whereas the blackmagic 4k or 6k doesn't have that in the gh5 has fantastic dynamic range as well so it's going to preserve the highlights the bright parts of your image and it's also going to have more data in the shadows or the darker parts of the image and that's what you'll see in these cheaper cameras don't do that so well all said and done you could probably find a gh5 body and a good zoom lens this is a 12 to 60 leica lens you could probably find a setup like this for around two thousand dollars even less possibly when you're looking on the used market so if you're undecided between the gh4 and the gh5 i really want to push you to spend a few extra dollars towards the gh5 you get a full dedicated hdmi output the gh4 has the little micro hdmi port and then image quality wise you do see a significant difference when i look at the gh4 footage it looks a little bit more artificially sharper it also has a bit more noise in the image whereas the gh5 just looks cleaner all around it looks sharp without having that artificial sharpening effect that looks like is happening inside the camera body so i'm a very big fan of the gh5 and in fact at our church we use two of these gh5s alongside of our next camera which is the black magic pocket cinema camera 6k it's important to keep in mind with the black magic footage you have to apply a lut to it so coming out of the camera it has this log profile so i could color grade this to look better right now i'm just going to throw on the black magic design film 4k look there's also the other one has more contrast to it not a huge fan of the color science there on that lut but it'll do for our demonstration purposes but as you can see on this camera it does retain a lot of the information and the highlights just look at how much of the light bulb you can still see it's not like completely bright and blown out and of course it retains a lot of the information here in the shadows on his face it's a very clean image and of course when you have a canon lens on there it's going to look super sharp really high quality the pocket 6k has an ef mount for canon lenses this is my favorite lens for having a follow cam like this is the tight shot on our passer or worship leaders this is a 70 to 200 f 4 lens so even though it's not the f 2.8 it's not that bright of a lens for what we're using it for and having on an f4 uh works perfectly fine we have plenty of stage light and having an f4 actually gives us a little bit more uh depth to play with when it comes to pulling focus so less of a chance that the pastor or worship leader will be out of focus there and this lens also has image stabilization as well so it's great to have that on to ensure that we have really smooth movements and no jittery movements with this camera we've also got a larger sensor so that's why a camera like this one as well as the c200 is gonna perform better in low light it can capture more light and more information it's camera also has dedicated hdmi out so that's great we just go hdmi out directly to our video switcher and there is a lot you can apply to the image out of the hdmi output here so that the image you send to your video switcher does have contrast and saturation you're not just sending a log image to your live stream price wise though we're starting to move up there this camera body starts at two thousand dollars and then this lens i found it used for seven hundred dollars i think brand new it's eleven hundred dollars so i wanna encourage you guys to check out the used market it can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars when you're building out this type of system and when you're getting multiple camera bodies and lenses like this it's going to add up real quickly so like i said at my church we're using a combination right now of the gh5 as well as the black magic pocket cinema camera 6k and i just really love this combination we're using the lut in this camera to kind of be our starting point for the overall look of the image that we're going for and then on these gh5s we can dial in the contrast and saturation and other settings to match the image that we have coming out of this pocket cinema 6k of course in an ideal world you would have all the same camera bodies with your setup so that you can just not worry about the coloring differences but fortunately you can still dial these cameras in to match each other even if they're from different manufacturers and then finally we have one of my favorite beasts of a camera this is the canon c200 this is a cinema camera one of the higher end cameras that canon makes this is on the lower end of their cinema line this guy i think the camera body is around fifty five hundred dollars and then of course your lens cost whatever your lens cost on it but when you start comparing price points you can get one of these camera bodies or you could get like three gh5s so you gotta start doing the math and seeing what is more realistic for your setting let's talk about some of the benefits of full cinema cameras like this that makes it kind of stand out from the rest of the pack um you of course have a lot more you know i o inputs and outputs you can work with here when it comes to you know audio coming into the camera as well as video coming out of the camera i have hdmi out i have sdil i've got this cool pistol grip i've also got nd filters so that if it's too bright and i don't want to stop down on my lens i can just add a nd filter to the camera it's kind of like adding sunglasses to the camera it's built inside here and uh it'll reduce the amount of light coming through so i don't have to stop down and lose that depth of field and then of course with canon you have amazing color science straight out of camera body color science doesn't matter a lot these days if you're doing a lot of post production and you can just do some grading in editing but we can't do that when we are doing live streams unless if you actually have like a shader and all that extra gear that you normally only find in larger broadcast setups so for those of us in smaller situations where we have a couple cameras but we want a high quality image i think it's so much more convenient to be able to just pull the image straight out of this camera and not have to mess at all pretty much with the coloring of it of course you gotta dial in your white balance and exposure but when it comes to adding additional color grading or shading after the fact it's just not necessary when you can throw on the bt 709 lut with inside the camera body and send that out of the hdmi port to your video switcher canon cameras also have amazing dual pixel autofocus i would discourage you though from using autofocus much in a live stream setting you should be able to just pull focus easily onto your subject because you don't want autofocus to do something wonky to your image you know in the middle of your live stream because sometimes it loses someone's face and then it will get all blurry and then they'll try to find a face again so we don't want that keep it in manual focus use focus peaking on your camera monitor here so you can see in the red highlights or green highlights whatever color you have in focus peaking you'll be able to be sure what actually is in focus in my dream scenario at our church we would have three to four of these cameras but of course the price tag there that's more than twenty thousand dollars just for your camera body and that doesn't even really cover all the lenses you would need for these camera bodies and i realized i was talking about this camera so much let's look at the image and it looks so clean there's no noise going on the highlights look great the shadows look great the dynamic range is phenomenal because you can actually like see the filaments of the light bulb so i talked enough about these cameras i showed you footage from each one and you probably saw how it got progressively better from this side of the table over to this side of the table so now i want to actually put these video files side by side so you can really see the difference first let's compare the canon vixia camcorder with a canon c200 we actually joked around here we realized that the camcorder cost less than just one of the batteries for the c200 i think it's like a 400 battery this is a less than 300 camcorder but i want you guys to actually see the difference in image quality so let's go ahead and roll that footage [Music] next let's play some footage side by side from the vixia camcorder with the ptz optics point tilt zoom camera [Music] next let's go ahead and compare the ptz optics camera footage with the gh5 i'm going to skip the gh4 here because i just want to encourage you to get the gh5 if you're going to go with one of these panasonic cameras maybe the gh4 could be an extra you know third angle that you don't cut to very often if you want to go that route but i wanted to compare the ptz optics camera with the gh5 because i always get this question should i go the btz optics route or the gh5 route well here we go just take a look at the image [Music] now i want to compare the gh5 with blackmagic pocket cinema camera 6k so let's roll that footage finally let's compare the black magic pocket cinema camera 6k with the canon c200 [Music] i really hope you found this video helpful and these comparisons helpful as you decide where to invest your church's dollars into a live streaming setup i love recommending the panasonic gh5 or the black magic pocket cinema 4k or 6k camera bodies i think the image quality you're gonna get for the price is really unbeatable but if you happen to have the funds you're not gonna go wrong if you go the c200 route i would only go with these cameras if budget makes it absolutely necessary especially with something like this camcorder or you really need the convenience of something that can pan tilt and zoom but understand that there's gonna be some sacrifice in image quality when you go this route i personally think a lot of live streams are headed more towards the cinematic style where you're gonna have more creativity with lenses you're gonna have bigger sensors that gonna perform better in low light and have better dynamic range so if you're investing in your church's video infrastructure for far into the future that's why i would consider either the gh5 in up to one of these higher end cinema cameras we're gonna link all of these cameras in our worship ministry toolkit down below this video if you would like my team's help to come alongside you and build the right live streaming system for your church then check out worshipministryschool.com we cover it all in worship ministry school we have online courses that cover beginner live streaming advanced live streaming we dive into creating your broadcast mix using ableton live and mixing audio separately with all the best plugins so that you can send your your congregation the best sounding and looking live stream possible so we have all those courses in worship ministry school but the best part is we have our coaching portal where you can get real-time help from my team we can help you troubleshoot any issues with your live streaming system we can also help you navigate which one of these camera setups are going to be best for your specific situation so if you want to join worship ministry school you can get started with a free strategy session just see the link below this video to sign up for that free session with one of our coaches thanks so much for watching this video if you found it helpful smash the like button share it with your friends in worship ministry and don't forget to subscribe to our channel so you don't miss out on any of our latest videos to help you grow yourself and grow your church [Music] you

Channel: Churchfront

Views: 77,102

Keywords: churchfront, worship leader training, worship ministry school, jake gosselin, worship tech training

Id: 2ddUKXx94ck

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020