Confessions of a Caster — Part 3 — The Audio and Video — The Technical Side

The technical side is just as important as the art and location overall. You may have all the right words, analysis and quips for the perfect moments but if your mic sounds like nails on a chalkboard. Nobody is going to be listening to it.

And not only will nobody listen to it, but nobody will also hire you either. Presentation is the most important thing of a cast. You need to look good and sound good from a technical perspective.

Let’s start with the Audio.

The Audio

The most important thing as a caster is your microphone and your mixer. If you’re a producer, you need to make sure that your sound goes through headphones instead of speakers.

I use a Shure SM7B with a Cloudlifter plugged into a GOXLR Mixer with a RODE Boom Arm. This setup would be top tier in most microphone/mixer setups. For starting casters, I would not put in the huge investment in yet. It could be essentially chucking money into a fire pit (like most things in esports).

Starter Options

There are two microphones that I recommend as starter options, and they are the Blue Yeti USB Microphone as it is quite good quality for a USB microphone. The next one would be the Audio Technica AT2020 USB+ which is also quite good and under $200.

With the USB microphones, you do not need a separate mixer, you can operate using either OBS’s mixer or Window’s mixer if you are producing.

You can also use Reaper VST Plugins for OBS which Alexis from Online has a great set up for. This allows you to have a noisegate, cut out background noise, add a compressor and do everything that a mixer has to do. However, this will only work on OBS not for your microphone in general.

And that is the end of the starter options, the starter options are bare bones but if you want your voice and sound to be sharper. You must invest more.

Advanced Options

If you want to invest in your equipment immediately. You’ll want to get into an XLR microphone namely the Shure SM7B. All the XLR microphones require a mixer which has the ability for a USB slot so you can plug it into a computer. You can invest into a variety of mixers such as the GOXLR and the Focusrite Scarlett.

The GOXLR is more for producing/casting than it is for purely casting while the Focusrite is purely for casting. There is the GOXLR Mini but as I said before this is still more focused on the producing/podcasting side.

If you’re not going to be creating any podcasts or producing games from your casting. You’re fine to use the Focusrite as your mixer.

With your microphone, you will need to check whether it is a dynamic or condenser microphone. This is incredibly important for wherever you will need a Cloudlifter to amplify your microphone or how to set up your mixer.

For example, a Shure SM7B is a Dynamic microphone while a Neumann TLM 103 is a condenser microphone.

A condenser microphone does not need an external cloudlifter as it would have it internally. A dynamic microphone such as a Shure SM7B may need a cloudlifter. My opinion is that yes, you do need a cloudlifter.

With the GOXLR mixer, you will need to learn how to set it up. Harris Heller has an amazing video on how to set up everything with a GOXLR mixer for a single and a dual PC set up. This will make your voice sound amazing!

This is essentially the Reaper VST set up with Steroids.

The Video

The only thing that is important is your lighting, green screen and webcam unless you are producing. If you are producing, that is a completely different kettle of fish altogether and I highly recommend that you have a dual PC set up in you’re into producing.

This will not be discussed in this article. It is confessions of a caster not of a producer. Producing isn’t my thing and I’d trust Mordred and Louis Crossing from ESL to know what to do.

For the webcam, make sure your webcam can reliably provide a 1080p quality and that you have a green screen (or even an ability to put a background behind you — some Tournament Organisers may want this.)

I’d mention that your computer would need to be good enough to run the Webcam without it turning choppy. However, most computers even lower-end ones can run 1080p Webcams reliably without any quality issues.

I use the Logitech C922 HD Pro, it is a great webcam. You can set this up as a tripod behind your PC or even on your monitor. As long as the camera lens is level with your eyes (and make sure you look at it when you are talking like the lens is a person).

You can play around with your webcam and how it looks in its own camera settings on your PC.

I generally leave everything on auto-focus and auto-balance unless you’re either too white (which you can manually adjust in Logitech) or you’re always out of focus for some reason. You should only adjust the options if you absolutely need to.

For the green screen, you can get various green screens from Amazon. You will need to measure behind you on the length and height of what is captured by your webcam. After you’ve done that, get the appropriate green screen for yourself. If it is 2 metres length and 2 metres height, go get that sort of green screen. It is better to be over than under.

Once you have the green screen set up, you can go through the set up of a Chroma Key (and never ever wear any green!) and set up the image that the Tournament Organiser gives you. Think Media have a very good video on setting one up.

As the video goes into, the next part is lightning. You need to make sure that the lightning is even across the green screen. This will ensure that the green screen will be all the same shade of green. This will allow you to remove it all easily. You also need lighting to make sure you look good.

I’d use key lights to shine directly onto the Green Screen from the left and right of you to make the green screen the same shade of green. You can put the Key Light facing the green screen behind your monitors but make sure it is quite high up so the light isn’t shining on you but behind you on the green screen. This isn’t as effective as getting two key lights.

For your own personal ambient lighting, I’d use either a Ring Light or two Key Lights facing the wall (usually behind your monitor setup. This will provide ambient lighting for yourself without shining a light directly into your face making you look like a ghost.

I use the Elgato Ring Light and Key Lights, you can really do this set up with any key light. Just make sure you are using the warm yellowish light and not the intense blue light. You want to look warm and cuddly not cold and harsh. Elgato allows you manage all of this in their settings and they also have stands that allow you to clamp to the desk or stand on its own for the green screen.

You can go into the various DSLR set ups if you wish but this is essentially an investment for very little additional quality. It isn’t like the quality increase that you would get from a Blue Yeti to a Shure SM7B.

I know some content creators do use the DSLR setups but this is for incredibly different reasons. Most of the time, your webcam will only be used during pre-game, post-game and a technical pause. Most of the time, the game will be the main part of the screen.

Final Words

As you can see, I’ve focused more on the Audio aspect than the Video aspect in casting. The audio quality of your voice will be heard 100% of the time. You will always be utilizing the microphone and mixers more than your Webcam, Lighting and Green Screen.

You want to upgrade your quality in your audio before your video. If you start to do podcasts then you would want to focus on your video quality, what is behind you (or just use one of the office background effects).

You will most likely be using vMix for your casting as your producer will provide you with a vMix link. When provided with the vMix link, make sure that your web browser is using your microphone, your headset and your webcam. Otherwise, you might be blasting your audience with your webcam microphone and trust me, it isn’t pretty!

Either way, I hope this has helped you out from a technical aspect and happy casting! I’ll most likely post an article on producing a high quality broadcast in the next article. You can use this article in combination with the production article to create a high quality broadcast.