Question / Help Do I need a capture card? Starting Youtube career

[Farry]

Hello everybody! :)

I want to start my career doing YouTube videos, Im a rookie in this type of things and I need some tips.

I have two PCs next to each other. Is a capture card necessery to make HQ youtube videos when Im able to work on two PCs? I dont really know how am I supposed to do that - play on one, record on the second? How?. I dont want to stream yet.
Im thinking about buying Avermedia Live Gamer HD Capture Card. I heard, that many youtubers use Bandicam to record their videos. Are capture cards required to make file size smaller when using this type of software? Can they work together?

Also, what does it mean, that Live Gamer can accept 1080p60 input but can only output at 1080p30? I want to record in 60 fps, will this capture card let me to do that? Or that 'output' thing only means that I wont be able to stream in 60 fps?

If I dont need one I could buy Logitech C920 HD Webcam instead of HP Webcam HD 4310 and a proper mic, instead of relying on the one attached to a Natec Genesis HX77 headset :) My budget is limited, and I cant afford XCAPTURE-1 / SC-512N1-L.

Thanks in advance for the help. I know this might be confusing to someone, now you know how I feel :D

Cheers!

 

[Jack0r]

A capture card is necessary ONLY if you want to capture footage of a different PC or Console. So if you want to use one PC to stream/record and one to play, then yes, you will need a capture card. If one of your PC's is powerful enough, you might be able to use it alone, without any further hardware. In a single PC the capture card can even have a negative effect on the cpu load etc.

A capture card in general is used to either offload the work from your gaming PC to a secondary one or as mentioned to capture console footage (or a camera, etc.) Some capture cards (like the lg hd) also include their own hardware encoder, but you can often not use it with software like OBS and its mainly meant for recording, not streaming. So please dont buy a Capture Card because of that.

The mentioned 1080p30 limit means that you can only record at those 30fps, so the card would not be viable for you. It can downscale 1080p60 footage to 720p60 though, as far as I know. But I would probably recommend to get a capture card that supports 60fps, if you want to buy one.

Last but not least, tell us the specs of your two PC's and we can probably give you some more tips.