Question / Help iMac hardware upgrade questions need answers quickly (as usual)

[mrstangblb]

What a GREAT resource! This software is unbelievably helpful, and you guys are, too. We want to continue streaming weekly for about an hour and a half at a time, and using OBS on our 2017 iMac has been such a pleasant experience. Now we want to upgrade our equipment to broadcast in higher resolution.

What we used this past week was simply the iSight camera built in and the built in mic. Obviously that's not optimal. I have tried out my iPhone with EpocCam HD, and it's pretty decent, but I'm not able to get more than 1280 x 720 from what it says in OBS when it brings up the stream. We also have an audio interface coming out of our Yamaha digital soundboard that seems to be working well, so this week for sure we'll be doing better qualitywise.

Now - I'd like to get recommendations on what we might look at to upgrade our video possibilities. I tried plugging in my Canon SX40HS digital camera but could not get it to send any live signal - it would only act as a flash drive for the photos to download. Also tried plugging in my older Canon Vixia HF R300 by both USB and the mini HDMI to HDMI cable, but it would bring in live signal, either. I was using an Apple AV Adaptor that works great getting our signal OUT, but it isn't bringing anything IN (and I didn't think it would, but I was sure hoping it would).

Seems like we need a video interface, and I'm open to suggestions for what you'd recommend for us on a budget that would get us better video quality. What should I do to EpocCam to get higher quality to begin with? The options are only up to 1280 x 720 in the pulldown menu.

What video interface works well on the Mac? We're currently running Mojave on it, and looking at options there don't seem to be many. I see bad reviews for the Mac with an AVer Media Live Gamer, and the Elgato Game Capture HD60 S may be our only other option. I'm thinking about buying a GoPro 8 as well and hopefully running it by HDMI into whatever video interface we end up with.

Thanks for ANY help you can give me - I'm decent with these things and an IT guy that has worked with Macs for 25 years, but we're in a time crunch.

 

[Narcogen]

Absolutely avoid Elgato. Their track record of support and transparency on MacOS is terrible. They've consistently advertised hardware as compatible with macOS and OBS without pointing out that it wasn't both, and then introduced hacky workarounds involving NDI to make them work. No amount of savings is worth it.

Look at Magewell, BlackMagic, and AJA.

If OBS is going to be mission critical for you, strongly consider a switch to a laptop running Windows that includes an Nvidia GPU with a Turing chip (1650 Super, 1660).

For running OBS, MacOS and current Mac hardware is NOT in a good place right now, and there is little to no improvement on the horizon.

 

[mrstangblb]

Those are exactly the conclusions I was coming to - you just confirmed what I was little by little piecing together. I was thinking last night about assembling a PC given what I'm seeing everywhere. OBS is pretty cool software, especially for free! Just getting the sources in has been a royal pain.

Absolutely avoid Elgato. Their track record of support and transparency on MacOS is terrible. They've consistently advertised hardware as compatible with macOS and OBS without pointing out that it wasn't both, and then introduced hacky workarounds involving NDI to make them work. No amount of savings is worth it.

Look at Magewell, BlackMagic, and AJA.

If OBS is going to be mission critical for you, strongly consider a switch to a laptop running Windows that includes an Nvidia GPU with a Turing chip (1650 Super, 1660).

For running OBS, MacOS and current Mac hardware is NOT in a good place right now, and there is little to no improvement on the horizon.