saxman73
New Member
I am a newbie here, a jazz musician trying to stream live concerts through OBS in a small bar in NYC, in this time of Covid, with the help of a few friends.
We are planning to use 3 cameras, probably just iPhones at first, 8 channels of audio live mixed to 2 channels.
We are hesitating between buying a new 16 inch Macbook Pro (2.6GHz 6-core Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 5300M with 4GB of GDDR6 memory) and a suitable PC. I know nothing about PCs and I use a mac at home but, reading the forums here, it seems there is a known issue with OBS not being able to use GPU power on macs, which leads to inefficient use of CPU and issues (throttling, poor performance) on macs. Is this still the case? If yes, this might be a good reason to get a PC. It looks like a PC would also be cheaper, which is important to us. So I have some questions:
1. Assuming we can figure out the audio part on mac and PC both, what would be the better machine to do this with overall, mac or PC?
2. If on a mac, would the mac described above work well?
3. If a PC, what's a good PC that would work well (and preferably not break the bank, as we are trying to do this on a budget)? What are the specs to look for? I am thinking i7 CPU, 16 GBG of RAM, but I don't know much about graphics cards and encoding. What graphics card would be good for this? What encoder to use?
4. If on a PC, how can we connect 3 iPhones to use as cameras? In terms of apps, it seems OBS Studio does this on mac and PC both, and there might be other software but I'd like to be sure. In terms of hardware, what ports do we need and would using a hub work? I just read a thread that suggests connecting several cameras through a hub might lead to OBS not recognizing them on a PC. Does anyone know for sure? Does this mean we should get a PC that has at least 4 ports (one for the audio interface, 3 for the cameras)? Is there a particular type of port to look for?
Any help would be very much appreciated.
We are planning to use 3 cameras, probably just iPhones at first, 8 channels of audio live mixed to 2 channels.
We are hesitating between buying a new 16 inch Macbook Pro (2.6GHz 6-core Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 5300M with 4GB of GDDR6 memory) and a suitable PC. I know nothing about PCs and I use a mac at home but, reading the forums here, it seems there is a known issue with OBS not being able to use GPU power on macs, which leads to inefficient use of CPU and issues (throttling, poor performance) on macs. Is this still the case? If yes, this might be a good reason to get a PC. It looks like a PC would also be cheaper, which is important to us. So I have some questions:
1. Assuming we can figure out the audio part on mac and PC both, what would be the better machine to do this with overall, mac or PC?
2. If on a mac, would the mac described above work well?
3. If a PC, what's a good PC that would work well (and preferably not break the bank, as we are trying to do this on a budget)? What are the specs to look for? I am thinking i7 CPU, 16 GBG of RAM, but I don't know much about graphics cards and encoding. What graphics card would be good for this? What encoder to use?
4. If on a PC, how can we connect 3 iPhones to use as cameras? In terms of apps, it seems OBS Studio does this on mac and PC both, and there might be other software but I'd like to be sure. In terms of hardware, what ports do we need and would using a hub work? I just read a thread that suggests connecting several cameras through a hub might lead to OBS not recognizing them on a PC. Does anyone know for sure? Does this mean we should get a PC that has at least 4 ports (one for the audio interface, 3 for the cameras)? Is there a particular type of port to look for?
Any help would be very much appreciated.