- When you're doing a live stream, there are a lot of
things that can go wrong. And we had pizza for dinner. - Yeah. - And then we had I'll be right back (crashing sound as Tom smashes his head into a hanging metal lamp and falls to the ground in pain) Ow! [Expletive] - Are you okay? (upbeat music) - Over the past four
years, I've gotten injured, gotten sick and had power
outages during live streams. Basically everything that
could go wrong has gone wrong. And when it comes to live streaming, there are things like that that are totally out of your control. But fortunately, most things
when it comes to livestreaming are within your control. So today I wanted to help you
learn from my mistakes and trust me, I've made a lot of them to help you level up your livestreams. So by far the most common
mistake that I see in people's livestreams is them ignoring the audio. Audio should be your number one
technical priority of a live stream. Forget cameras,
forget everything else. Focus on your audio. When it comes to video, I've often said that audio is
half a video, but honestly, I think it might even be more
than half and people will watch a bad looking
video. That sounds good. A lot longer than they'll
watch. A good looking video that sounds bad. Fortunately, you don't need
a ton of expensive gear to get good audio. You don't need the RODECaster Pro you don't need a $400 microphone. You don't need any of that.
If you can just invest like 50, especially, even upwards of a hundred
dollars in a decent microphone, you're going to be set. And if you just buy a USB microphone, that gets good reviews it's probably going to do
pretty well for your streams. This is the Samson Q2U, a
super popular USB microphone. It's got USB and it also has an XLR input so you could use it if you got an interface
or mixer down the line. It costs about $60, $70
prices change all the time. It comes with a little stand. It comes with the holder and the sound quality of
the Q2U is not bad at all. So that's my cue-to-you to
consider investing in something like this. If you haven't done so already. Now, of course, once
you get your microphone, no matter what kind of microphone it is, it's not going to do you
much good if you don't know how to use it. So be sure to spend some time
and figure out what kind of pickup pattern, what kind of features, what kind of switches, knobs, and dials your specific microphone might have. So that means they're going
to need to spend some time sitting down, doing some test recordings, listening back to things, trying them out. For example, if you're somebody who's going to be standing and walking around and moving a lot
during your livestream, maybe a fixed position
microphone is a terrible choice. Maybe you're going to want
a lavalier microphone, that you can pin to you. And then when you go all the way on the other side of the room,
it's not going to matter. It's still going to sound pretty good. Maybe you're somebody who types a lot hits the table a lot when you talk. And that means having a little
stand like this might be a bad idea because it's going
to pick up all the sounds. So maybe you're going to need
to find a way to position your mic on a boom arm or rig it
up where it's not going to be affected by those sounds. And I talked about audio first on purpose, because it is the number
one mistake people make. But speaking of purpose, now that we've said adios to bad audio, let's talk about mistake number two, and that is not having a
purpose for your live stream. The number one fear that people
have when they start out is, oh my gosh, what if nobody shows up to
my stream and that's probably going to happen. I've streamed to nobody before, other than like myself on another device, you're still going to get a
lot of practice and a lot of experience from doing the stream. And that's going to carry
on into future streams and future videos. Plus there's always replay value. So someone could find the stream later on and watch the replay. But that's only going to
have value if your stream has purpose in the first place and purpose doesn't mean you need a full on keynote lecture that
you're giving and it's like a university class. It just means make sure there's
a reason that you're doing the stream and a reason
for people to join. And I would definitely
advise against doing just a general Q and A stream, especially when you're just starting out. As you've grown your
community and your audience gets a little bigger Q and A
streams become a little easier because there's more people there. But until you get to that point, it's a good idea to have some
kind of outline for what you want to cover in your stream. And even if you do get to the
point where you can just turn on a live stream and people
are going to join and you can chat with them, it's still a good idea to kind
of focus on a specific theme or direct the conversation a little bit so it's not totally all over the place. And I've even watched streams
from people while they're just doing what they do. They're just working on
stuff like recording music or programming code or editing a video, like whatever they're doing they're just sort of streaming that. Even something like that, that feels relatively
unstructured still has a purpose. You're still watching
somebody do what they do. You're seeing their
workflow. That's exciting. And then you can ask them
questions and they can jump in and have fun chatting along the way. So when it comes to streaming much like sea life in the ocean, you got to have a porpoise. Now was that joke not delightful? well, speaking of things
that are de-lightful, mistake, number three has to do with camera angles and lighting. And it absolutely doesn't
matter what camera you're using, what lens you're using. There are a few really
important things to keep in mind about your angles and your
lighting during your stream and your videos too. And the first thing just
has to do with having a nicely framed shot, where
everything makes sense, and you don't have too much
empty dead space up here, or your angle is too high. It can make your subject look
really small and really meek. Now sometimes for streaming
having that fishbowl view can actually be super cool. Like I've got a GoPro in the corner of my office studio right here, and that can be kind of a
cool thing to give the viewer some context of the space that
you're in since they can't physically be there with you, but that's probably not
going to be your main shot. If I keep the camera more
or less at eye level, or maybe sometimes even
a little above eye level, that's going to be the most
neutral shot for your stream. And sometimes people can feel
sort of uncomfortable looking away from the camera to
focus on things over here. So I'm here right now to tell
you that in today's world viewers are very used to seeing
somebody look off screen, to do something or check in
with the chat or whatever, but the camera should really
be your main focus unless the stream is to watch you do something like if I'm using a power
tool or playing a game, it makes sense that I'm going
to be focused over here. I'm not going to be using a
jigsaw and like staring at the camera and cutting off my fingers, even though that would
probably get a lot of views. So the simplest thing that I
recommend doing is if possible, keeping your camera right next
to your computer's display, not above it, which is really
common, but right next to it. So that way all you have to
do is just look slightly over and boom, there's the camera. And then just train
yourself, which you can do. It becomes muscle memory after awhile to just look at the camera as a person and treat it as though it's somebody else that's in the room with you. And you're talking to them
while you're streaming. And camera angles and lighting
are tied together really well because people love to
focus on their camera. But if you notice audio came
first and now we're talking about lighting. We haven't even talked about cameras yet, and we're honestly not going
to because lighting is the other thing that doesn't even matter if
you're using a webcam or a $4,000 camera, good lighting can help any
camera to look pretty darn decent and pretty darn usable. Now not long ago, I did
make an entire video all about my lighting setup, which is pretty extreme. And in general, for your streams, which speaking of, I used
to do a weekly stream, and then I stopped doing it. And it became my ex-stream . . . When you're streaming, you're basically going to want
to follow the same rules for lighting as you would
for a prerecorded video. However, to you know,
put together a full-on lighted studio with high-end lights can be incredibly expensive
and you don't need to feel intimidated about that. You can start on a budget. You can go to a site like
Amazon and just look for inexpensive video lights
that get good reviews. And they're probably going to be fine, especially if you're not
moving them around a lot. Cheaper lights tend to break
down when they're moved and taken and broken down and
set up over and over again, they break pretty quickly. But if you just put it on a
stand off to the side and it's just in the same spot all the time, they can last for a pretty long while. I do recommend whenever
possible using dedicated video lights, that there's no flickering
whatsoever in your video. And to start out by focusing on you because you are the subject. So light yourself first and
then focus on all the ambient environmental stuff, because if your space looks really cool, but you're just this dark
figure that's sort of sitting in there, it's not going to look that great. And if you do want to use
RGB lights to add splashes of color to your space, I think that's a super
cool fun thing to do. Just be careful with very
cheap LED RGB lights, because they do tend to
flicker a lot on video. So just like audio, where it was, get your gear and test
it and figure it out. Same thing with lighting,
get your lights, set them up, test them out, use them with your camera. See if there's any weird
reflections or flickering. And now that you've been
enlightened on lighting, let's chat about mistake
number four, which is the chat. Now, in my opinion, when
it comes to streaming, the chat is where it's at. But how you interact with
your chat and your community totally depends on the topic
of your stream and your personality. You're doing a livestream, which means you are inviting
in opportunities for problems and mistakes, but you're also inviting in
the opportunity to connect with people in real time, in a
really fun and unique way. So while there are so many
different ways to approach how you engage with the chat, here are a few simple ground rules. And the first thing is be
sure not to ignore the chat. Those people are there supporting you. They they're excited to interact with you. Don't totally ignore that. You might want to engage with
every comment depending on your audience. You might want to find a way
to pop comments on screen using something like E cam live or
Erin Prechy's Chrome extension, and be sure when you are talking
to people in the chat that you're using their screen names. That's something I had to
learn early on was I would just start reading comments and you
would have no idea what the heck was happening. So be sure to say like, "oh, skaterboy2002 says that this is the, this chat is fire lit." And that way they're
going to feel like, oh, well they said my name,
it's really important. But now that you're going to
be sure not to ignore your chat, be sure not to let
the chat totally derail you. And by that, I mean, I have
seen so many people who, as soon as a comment pops up, they pull it into the chat
and they acknowledge it right away, which feels really polite. And I definitely did
that in the beginning, but it can be really distracting for other viewers who
aren't necessarily trying to chat with you. If you're in the middle of a thought, and you're saying something
like "after all these years, the biggest piece of advice
I can say is," oh skater boy, 2002 says, did you see that Netflix original series last
night, the ending was fire lit. And then you start
talking about that comment and you forget the main point, or you have to go double back and like, what were we talking about? Yeah, it was something well
it's really frustrating for other viewers when that's their chat experience and it feels
constantly interrupted. And this also kind of ties
in with the idea of having a purpose for your stream. Sometimes you might decide
like, hey everybody, today, we're going to talk about the
stream deck and all these cool ways that you can use the stream deck. But then everyone in
your chat is like, hey, what camera are you using? Can we talk about cameras? If you had this idea, but
it seems like everyone who's actually there wants
to talk about something else, it's totally okay to switch
gears and focus on what the viewers want to see if that's
something you're comfortable with doing. But if you don't want to do that, you're also in charge and
you can say, you know what, next time we'll talk about cameras, but today I really want to
focus on this because there's some super cool stuff
that I want to show you. So after all that chat, chit chat, let's go into mistake number five. And that is the stream
that should have been a prerecorded video. You might have a job or have
had a job where you've gone to a meeting and it turns out that meeting could have been an email. There's a very similar thing
that happens with live streams, where people will do an
hour, hour and a half, two hours or more of live streaming. And it turns out maybe that
should have just been a prerecorded video. Like if I said, hey, going
back to the stream deck in today's stream, I'm
going to show you how to add a custom icon to the stream deck. And then I spend three minutes
dragging an icon there and it's done. And then people are going to
come in after 40 minutes and go like, "hey, how do I do
the thing with the icon?" And I'm going to just keep
repeating myself over and over, and it's going to get kind of
disjointed and kind of weird. So it's a good idea to pick
your streaming topic as something that could potentially
lend itself to an ongoing discussion for, you know, an hour or two or whatever
length of stream you're comfortable with. Cause I don't know if
this has happened to you, but it's definitely happened
to me where I've searched something up, like how to do blank. And then I find a video
that's the perfect answer. But instead of just being a
three to four minute video, it's an hour and 45 minute
long livestream with no chapter markers added in afterwards and you just have to scrub
through to like the three minutes that actually apply to the topic. Now sometimes you might want
to make your stream work in conjunction with your video. That's just like a
super smart thing to do. So if you did a video about like, "hey, here's a couple stream
deck, quick tip, extreme, quick tip decks on deck," and that was a four
minute video or whatever, but then you do a stream
where you talk about like, let's dive into a bunch of stuff
to do with the stream deck. And so constantly throughout the stream, as you're talking to your
audience and you're engaging with your community, you're just diving into more
depth about whatever your video topic was. Now notice that none of these
five mistakes had anything to do with specific cameras
or camera equipment. I know that's one of the number
one things that people want to focus on when they start streaming. I love camera equipment. I'm definitely not someone
who believes that gear doesn't matter. Gear definitely does matter, but when it comes to streaming, these five things are much more
common mistakes that I feel have a much more negative
impact on people's streams rather than using like a low end webcam. It's really just important
to take your time, learn your gear, learn your software that you're using experiment a bit, and then just jump in. And I know it's the
internet, but in general, people are very forgiving when
they see you as a one person production crew and like, oh, your mic gets muted for a
second or you switched to the wrong screen, or the camera
quality is not perfect. This is by no means a complete
list of every streaming mistake, and it is heavily
biased in my own opinion. But in my experience, both as
a streamer and as a viewer, these are the five most common mistakes that I see people make. So as always thank you to
everyone who supports my channel, it means the world to me and I wouldn't be able to do what I do without your support.
So thank you very much. And if you want to avoid
making more streaming mistakes, then don't make the mistake of not checking out my livestreaming
tips and tricks playlist. (outro music)
