YoloBox Pro vs ATEM Mini: Watch this BEFORE you buy!

should you buy an atem mini or a yolo box well i've been testing them both out for months now putting them through hundreds of hours of live streams and after all of that testing i finally found that the best one you should buy is hi i'm aaron pirecki this is not going to be a detailed overview of the a10 mini or the ola box i've actually got plenty of other videos on my channel about both instead i'm going to focus on the differences between the two as well as what kinds of things i think each is most appropriate for i do also need to say that i do have relationships with both yolo box and blackmagic i'm a big fan of both companies and both have sent me things to review however neither of them get any input into this video and they don't get to watch this video before i post it i will also be talking about all of the current models of both the yolo box and the a10 mini throughout this discussion so as of right now there is the original yolo box the yellow box pro and there are five a10 mini models the original a10 mini the a10 mini pro the pro iso the a10 mini xtreme and the eggton mini xtreme iso each of these comes in at a different price point and they are not necessarily directly comparable to each other which is why i think this is actually going to be really interesting let me start out by saying if anybody tells you that one of these is a clear winner they're wrong there is no clear winner what they're really saying is that one is the clear winner for certain uses it's not a cut and dry thing there are a lot of opinions involved in a comparison like this so keep that in mind as you're watching anybody's comparison videos including mine you're always hearing the comparison filtered through the past experiences of the reviewer so i would also encourage you to look for other people's videos comparing the two as well but of course after you finish watching this one so where do we start let's start with who i think these two families of devices are for they both approach the problem space completely differently they have very different philosophies about how live video production should work the yolobox devices are for you if you like a simple all-in-one kit that's beginner friendly and doesn't require a lot of time to figure out how to use it and get started the a10 mini devices are for you if you like building up a full kit piece by piece if you prefer having special purpose devices connected to each other that you can swap out separately later and if you don't mind a steeper learning curve to get going now again no judgment here in fact i fall into both of these categories depending on the situation which is why i keep using both devices when i'm at this studio and i have the time and space to put together all the pieces that make up the studio i like the benefits that the a10 mini line provides which is why most of the gear here is designed around the atem but when i'm traveling or doing small jobs out in the field i'm not a big fan of carrying around a ton of gear and taking a long time to set up so i'm more likely to use the yellow box for those situations so that's my sort of 10 000 foot view of the differences but let's now get into the specifics and dig a little bit deeper let's start with the original atem mini the 300 4 input video switcher now this has been out for about two years now but when it launched it really shook things up in the world of video switchers the original a10 mini is a 4 input hdmi switcher that is also a usb capture device and it only costs 295 before that launched the options available were at least twice the cost and often were missing many of the features of the a10 mini it's been two years now and several other companies have come out with similar switchers at a similar price point and similar size but i still think the a10 mini is the best of its kind because of just how much it can do now how does this relate to the yolo box well the original a10 mini and the yolo box actually don't have much in common the big thing the a10 mini is missing compared to the yolo box is the ability for it to stream to youtube and other platforms directly you will always need to connect it to a computer and stream using software like obs or ecamm or other streaming apps there's also no built-in graphics features other than overlaying images that you upload ahead of time but the main reason i still like the original a10 mini even with all its limitations is it's still the cheapest way to add four cameras to your live streams using software like obs or ecam plus you get four cameras without putting extra load on the computer since the computer sees only the one webcam input and at only 300 it's almost a no-brainer to have one of these around because you never know when it might come in handy the original yellow box on the other hand is 899 dollars so three times the cost and it has only two hdmi inputs but on the other hand it is an all-in-one device it can stream to youtube and you can add text and graphics from the yolo box itself but that also means it isn't something you're going to use with obs or ecamm so if you're planning on streaming using your computer with obs ecam or any of those kinds of software i would definitely get the a10 mini instead of the yolo box because the yellow box isn't really going to help you on the other hand if you're mainly going to be doing live streams out and about and you don't want to drag your computer with you then the yolo box is the clear winner here and what's really interesting is that you can actually use both of these together you can stream from the yolo box but have the atem plugged into one of the yellow box inputs that way you get a total of four cameras on the yolo box instead of just two these two actually do work really well together especially if you stack them on top of each other using the a10 mini stand i created this stand is designed to hold an a10 mini and it has a place to attach the yolo box or even just a regular monitor to the top bar and this is a fantastic way to save a lot of space on your desk to take advantage of all the space on top of the atem you can even attach a wireless mic or wireless hdmi receiver to the stand using the cold shoe mounts so at 300 it's hard to argue with getting an a10 mini because it's just such an affordable usb capture card that also lets you do multi-camera live streams on your computer easily but that is not the end of the story because you will need extra stuff to use the a10 mini at the very least a computer but probably also a standalone streaming encoder or hdmi recorder and that's where the more expensive atom models start to fill in the gaps so let's move on to the higher tiers of the a10 models because that's where the more interesting comparisons start now once you get up to the a10 mini pro the main features the pro models offer over the original are the ability to live stream directly from the device as well as record to a usb drive and also the multiview which lets you see all the cameras on the screen at the same time now this is starting to look a little bit closer to the yolo box which can also do these things so this is where the comparisons start to get more interesting so because there starts to be more overlapping features starting at the pro this is where you need to think about what kind of workflows you prefer whether that's the all-in-one kind of workflow or the more building block style where you're putting together piece by piece so at this point instead of comparing the devices directly to each other i'm going to approach the rest of the comparison by a few categories like how quickly you can get live streaming from no experience what kind of accessories are required and things like that i first want to talk about how quickly you can get started streaming from these devices starting from the moment you take it out of the box how quick can you successfully do a live stream that is visible to the world so let's start with the yolo box so you first have to log in on the device and create an account then you plug in one or more camera sources to connect streaming sources you can log in on the device itself connecting it to facebook or youtube or twitch or you can add a custom rtmp url as well at this point you are ready to go all you do is you choose where to stream to and then you press go live and you are on the air so that wasn't so bad at all now onto the a10 mini pro remember the original a10 mini doesn't have any built-in streaming feature itself so you would always have to use it with your computer and obs or ecam or whatever so we're not focusing on that example we're only concerned with the hmi pro and up which all do have the built-in streaming feature so once you plug in a couple of cameras you'll also need to download the atem software control onto your computer so you can configure the stream key once that's connected you can go choose the streaming platform and then enter your stream key here now there is no way to just log in like on the yellow box you're gonna always have to enter a stream key for all the platforms once this is set up you don't need the software control anymore and if you go to file and save startup state that is going to bake everything into the device and save the stream key so that it'll be there even if you unplug the power and now when you're ready to stream you press the on air button and you are live so which is the winner in this category i think the yolo box is the clear winner in this category since you don't need anything other than the yellow box itself to start streaming with the a10 mini you're going to need to plug in a computer at least once to configure it and every time you want to change the stream key one other difference related to this is that the yolo box can stream to multiple platforms by itself you can connect multiple youtube channels or youtube and a facebook or youtube by the custom rtmp and you can enable multiple destinations on the yolobox the a time on the other hand can only stream to one platform at a time so you'll always need to use a separate service like restream.io if you want to broadcast to multiple platforms okay now let's talk about what kinds of extra things you'll either need to or probably want to buy in order to use both of these devices effectively for the yolo box you'll probably want some sort of tripod or stand to put this on a desk if you aren't attaching it to a camera and that's actually why i made this stand for it as well otherwise it just gets a bit messy having everything out on the desk so this helps you be just a little bit more organized plus then you can attach things like the wireless mic receiver or wireless hdmi receivers onto the back but other than that that's really it you can switch cameras by touching the screen and you can even add simple graphics with the built-in tools now for the a10 mini you're gonna need a few things you will need a computer or an ipad to set things up you technically don't need a monitor but you almost certainly will want one both for the multiview to see all of your cameras as well as to monitor your streaming and recording status and if you want to add any graphics you will have to bring them in through the hdmi port using some sort of graphics generation program on a computer if you want to control anything besides the basics of camera switching you're going to need either your computer running the software control app or something else like an ipad running mix effect there's a lot of buttons on the a10 mini but they actually can't control the entire set of functionality of the device so there's definitely more involved in getting the a10 mini up and running next moving on to automation and external control options so it's great that the yellow box is a totally standalone device everything that the yellow box can do is controlled from the touchscreen itself the atem mini has a lot of buttons but honestly it has too many buttons and none of the right ones most of the buttons on the a10 mini both the original and the extreme i just don't use because they don't control things i need to control so what that means is you actually have to use a computer or an ipad in order to control all the features of the a10 mini so as of right now when i'm recording this video there are no options for external control of the yolo box you have to do everything on the screen the a10 mini on the other hand has a whole bunch of different options for external control now why might you want to do that well one really cool thing to do is connect both an ipad running mix effect as well as a computer and a stream deck that way you can control it from multiple different locations around your studio or if you're working with a team you can have one person dedicated to controlling the audio and other handling graphics and other switching camera angles and that is super powerful and that's something you only get with the atem right now with the yolo box while you can do everything on the device itself you also have to and i'm hoping they're going to update it in the future to allow some more integrations with other hardware like the stream deck and i'll be sure to post a video on this channel if they do so this is a good time to make sure you're subscribed and while you're here give this video a thumbs up because if you've made it this far you are clearly enjoying it and gosh should this video take a long time to make okay now i want to get into picture quality first i need to explain what i'm going to do i have created a collection of animations that are specifically designed to push video encoders to the limit very detailed motion very precise lines things that are designed to trick the encoder and make it struggle so we can see where it breaks down this will also let us make sure that we're getting for example the full color range we don't have like a higher contrast picture things like that these video clips are encoded in prores so very high quality and there are basically no compression artifacts visible in the original clip those are loaded into my hyper deck playing it out over an hdmi cord so i've plugged that hdmi cord into the yellow box the yellow box pro and the a10 mini xtreme and we're going to stream from those devices to youtube and we're going to look at what it looks like at the other end so first i want to show you what it looks like from the original yolo box on youtube i'm going to play this for a couple of seconds and we'll take a look so you can see these are supposed to be perfect circles with a darker circle inside and it's actually doing a decent job except for maybe the blue one and the pink one look a little bit off now this is supposed to be smooth so you can see some compression squares going on there up here we've got blurry lines on the harsh edges because we're pushing too much through this clip and this ticker at the bottom is supposed to show us frame drops and if you notice you will see it's skipping over some of the frames occasionally now again keep in mind that what you're seeing on youtube is a little bit different than what i'm seeing because you're seeing it through another layer of encoding and compression and possible frame drops of that but i can tell you when i'm looking at it here i do also see a couple of frame drops every now and then now in a recent update of the yolobox software they added multiple different encoding modes so now you can actually go into the settings and you can choose the encoding setting either variable bitrate constant bit rate or constant quality and you get to choose your target bitrate what i did here was i set everything to six megabits in both the yellow box and the a10 because that's a reasonable default for 30 frames per second streaming i did stream the test clips using all three different settings so if we compare first of all the constant bit rate video compared to the variable bitrate we might notice a couple of differences it looks like the variable bitrate is doing a better job of things like the crisp lines but let's now take a look at that compared to constant quality which is the third setting to me this one actually looks like it's doing the best job out of all three i see more detail in these circles i see more detail over here i see nice crisp lines up here and these gradients look sharper too we are still getting some frame skips in that ticker though so that's the original now let's take a look at the pro so again i have the clips recorded in all three different modes constant quality constant bit rate and variable bit rate first right off the bat i can tell you this looks a ton better if we just take a still frame and go between the original yellow box and the pro there's some pretty drastic differences let's talk about some of these differences it's actually probably easier to see differences when i'm flipping back and forth compared to side by side even take a look for example at the color range in these gradients it's much more accurate in the pro in the original it looks a little bit desaturated and if you look over here this is quite different as well now these are just totally different colors because those animate but if we compare the ones that don't change like the grays as well as these colors the yellow box pro is a lot lot better so this is constant quality on the yellow box pro let's skip ahead to the constant bit rate and here i'm noticing that there is more compression visible you can see more little squares here and these lines are less sharp and then at the end we've got variable bit rate which these look nice but i'm pretty sure the best one on this one was constant quality now of course just because this is giving us the best picture doesn't mean you should always use this one because this is going to fail differently if your network is slow and things like that also the frame drops are much much much less on the pro and that makes sense there's a much better processor in the yellow box pro that was one of the big upgrades they did in that version and apparently it is paying off and it's doing a much better job at this very stressful clip to encode okay let's now compare it to the a10 mini extreme one thing to note about the atm minix stream is that you do not get settings for how it encodes it is always variable bitrate and this has caused some people some issues when the platform they're streaming to does not expect a variable bitrate signal so for example if you're encoding a still graphic just like a title card with a little countdown that's gonna be a very low bitrate and the streaming platform may not actually let you start streaming because it thinks it's not a real video but let's take a look at how it actually looks the first big difference i noticed here is that it is not skipping any frames now if you are seeing frame skips it's likely because the computer that i'm playing it on and going through the encoder is doing some weird frame interpolation stuff because it's not totally lined up but it is not skipping any frames it is 100 it is very solid also the color range here looks fantastic these lines are decently sharp and i'm seeing every inner circle on these the blue one's the hardest one to see but it is there and the rest of them are great let's do a side by side of a snapshot of this compared to the yellow box pro so they are pretty close but biggest difference i noticed is that the green on the yellow box pro is more muted the green on the atomic stream is much much brighter and if we go back to the original it's even duller so we can see that the a10 mini has the best accuracy in the greens and if you were to take a snapshot of this and bring it into photoshop you can measure the color that comes out of it if you want to compare that yourself so as far as color accuracy goes i do think the a10 extreme does the best job so looking back to the original yolo box compared to the yellow box pro compared to the a10 mini the a10 mini is definitely the best quality out of the three in terms of how it's dealing with my extremely complicated stress test clip by the way if you want to try this out yourself you can download these clips from my website i'll leave a link below they're for sale on there in different configurations different frame rates i go all the way from 24 to 60 and i have both 1080 and 4k versions of them okay so all of that said after looking at these and after looking at some of my own recordings i've done on these the yolobox pro is a very clear upgrade in picture quality compared to the original yolo box and the a10 mini extreme does look better than the yolobox pro the next category i want to talk about is chroma keying so what i've done here is i've previously set up a green screen with proper lighting and streamed from the yolobox pro as well as the atomic extreme the original yellow box does not have the chroma key feature and i've streamed these to a youtube video so we can play back here and talk about what's going on first of all before we even look at this i want to just say that the yellow box was so simple to set up the green screen it basically worked first try with no fiddling i'm not going to get into how to green screen on this video i'll save that for a different one instead we're just going to look at the end result so first i've got a video clip here of the green screen on the yolobox pro if you notice it's doing a very good job i see barely any green spill just a tiny bit on my shoulder here and it's doing a very good job with the sort of fuzzy edges of these things i'm holding up got a little microphone cord with fine detail and it did a great job of that and it's even dealing with the motion blur reasonably well as well now this is what the a10 mini chroma key looks like it is also actually very good and it's getting the same spill here so i think that might just be my fault of the lighting and it's also dealing with the motion blur and the fine details pretty well the biggest effect you're going to have on whether you get a good green screen on any device is lighting it properly so you want to make sure your background green is lit evenly and you want to make sure your subject is also lit evenly so as far as the yolo box compared to the atem honestly they look about the same to me i don't see a ton of differences and they're doing a very good job but the yolo box green screen was way easier to set up the atem1 took a lot more fiddling of all the different settings you get in its keyer all right next category stability and reliability now this category is pretty subjective there unfortunately isn't any hard data i can give you here but i can talk about my experience and some tests i've done first of all i can't say that either of these has been completely flawless so let me describe some of the problems i've had with each of them for the most part both of them have been very solid and up until recently i actually hadn't had really any issues streaming from the atem but weirdly just a couple weeks ago i actually had it just straight up stop streaming in the middle of a show no error message no cash flowing up nothing it just stopped the streaming buttons were not responsive and i had to just unplug it and plug it back in again now luckily it was only down for about 30 seconds because it was very quick to reboot and all the settings had been saved so it just came back online instantly so i haven't had that particular problem with the yolobox but i will also admit i have put far fewer hours on the yolobox compared to the atem but i have had some other issues which are definitely bugs that i hope they can fix on a recent live stream you may have seen i did on the older box the chat messages kept getting stuck on the screen so when i was tapping one it would just stay on the screen and the next one would cover it up and i couldn't get the original one to disappear it was a very weird bug and it was very annoying because there wasn't any way to fix it other than stopping the stream and starting over now they are aware of the bug and they are trying to fix it and it will hopefully be fixed in a future update in a couple of past live streams i've done i've been doing some tests to see what happens to these devices when they are on a really bad network connection throttling the network connection down to like 300 kilobits per second and seeing what they do when the network can't keep up with the stream and it has been really interesting to see how they both fail because they both fail in different ways i'll leave links to those live streams down below because we did some pretty extensive tests over an hour each on the different devices all right last main category i want to talk about is the audio so both yellow box models have audio input as well as a headphone jack the yellow box pro has two audio inputs and headphone jack and the original yolo box has just one input now the atm mini pro and the iso on the other hand have two audio inputs but no headphone jack the extreme adds a headphone jack so right there you have a lot of different things to keep in mind about which ones make the most sense in terms of how you're gonna be using them the workaround for how to listen to your audio on the a10 mini pro is to connect a monitor that has a headphone jack on it and you plug your headphones into the monitor that honestly hasn't been a problem for me with my a10 mini pro i've always been using it with a monitor with a headphone jack and that's just how i monitor audio there it has been nice having the audio jack on the extreme though and i am very glad they have headphone jacks on the yolo box the other big difference in the audio is that the yolo box has very very limited audio controls right now the only options you get in the audio are the audio can either automatically switch to the active camera or you can manually set it to one of the inputs so if you plug in an external microphone you can have it always use the microphone regardless of what camera angle you're on or if you have audio rather than to each camera and you want to switch between those you can click automatic you do get a volume control but it's again only this little slider on the screen here the a10 minis all of them have fantastic audio processing capabilities you have a full audio mixer in the device and you can even add effects like a expander and a compressor and you can adjust the eq and this gives you a lot of possibilities for tweaking your audio within the atm without using a separate audio mixer this also lets you delay the analog audio input in case you're using cameras that have an hdmi delay and you're using an analog microphone with them i'm a huge fan of the audio processing capabilities in the atem it is a huge upgrade compared to their older atems as well this is not to be underestimated there's a lot you can do with the audio processing in the atemps it would be nice to see more audio processing capabilities in the yolobox at the very least the ability to enable more than one channel of audio in case you want to have music underneath your speaking and lastly let's talk about firmware updates when you're buying a very expensive device like this you do expect it to be supported in the long term both companies have been doing a very good job of releasing firmware updates to both ad features and fixed bugs but i will say yolobox has been doing this a lot faster than blackmagic the blackmagic updates have come out about every three to six months and they've been relatively minor incremental updates last year we had some pretty amazing updates in firmware that enabled a bunch more features on the atems i've got videos about those when those launched but recently we haven't seen that many firmware updates on those i suspect because they're working on other products at the moment yellow box on the other hand has been doing a very good job of adding more and more features to the yolo box like the bitrate selector also letting you use either their multi-stream or the direct streaming mode there's also the new monitor mode where you can use this without an internet connection just as a switcher and recorder and of course the chroma key feature and they've released most of the features on both the yellow box pro and the original yolo box and i know they're working on more features they drop into my live streams every now and then and mention some of the new things that are coming up so keep that in mind is that by the time you're watching this video there might already be some fixes for the things i've mentioned or new features that are possible on the device so it's super exciting to see them continue to push the envelope on what the yolo box pro can do alright so that gives you an idea of some of the differences between the two the big thing to keep in mind is the two completely different methods of working with live video again the yolobox method is a really all-in-one device it wants you to do everything on this device use it as the controller use it as the encoder plug in your video sources it's all here you don't need anything else the hm mini on the other hand you're going to need to add more things but that also gives you more flexibility to either upgrade small components in the future or control it with more different kinds of things and build bigger workflows out of it so don't feel like there's a correct decision because it's a very personal decision about which is the way you prefer to work and like i said before i've continued to find uses of both of these in my day-to-day life well this was a long one i hope this has been helpful please give this video a thumbs up it helps more than you might expect and join me on a future live stream because i'm always happy to talk about the yolo box the a-10 mini answer your questions and help you make the best decision for you thanks so much for watching and i will see you in the next one you

Channel: Aaron Parecki

Views: 17,141

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Id: uOpBIz6nZ50

Length: 27min 14sec (1634 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021