• Most recent
• Conferences
• For organizers
• The rig
• Buy me a Mate
• Search
• Fundraiser
• Twitter

• Parts
• Power box
• Rig operation

The good

This is a rundown of the main bits I'm using now. I'm planning on expanding this a bit and also include a full bill of materials. A full rig will set you back roughly €3000. With the choices I've made I started with trying as cheap as I could, and then upgrading the bits that proved to be not up to the task they were given.

• Magewell capture cards
  For my fixed rigs I use 3 of their PCIe model - I only need 2, the third is there for redundancy. Note that of the 2 ports you see one port is input the other is output. So this 2-port card can only capture 1 stream. Magewell provide official drivers for Ubuntu, both LTS and regular latest version. The driver is a loadable module which once inserted creates a /dev/video${NR} source for each card you have which exposes the input to the OS in the same way a webcam would be. For my mobile rigs I use 2 of their now older USB model. The good thing about this model is that there all ports go into the box, meaning there's not something that sticks out of the card which can break or snap off. It's USB 3.0 so it can handle the full stream without issue and the SDI side uses an MCX connector which snaps into the card. This is the weak point as an MCX connector is typically rated for about 1000 inserts, but they're cheap to replace. Each of my mobile rigs comes with 3 of those cables, just in case, but so far none of them failed on me. The USB model doesn't need a special driver and exposes itself to the OS as a really, really good webcam. One problem with the USB model is that when you disconnect the input (specifically, you unplug the laptop during changeover) the card will tell the OS that the webcam turned itself off, which will terminate the stream. I scripted around this by simply having ffmpeg auto-restart after 3 seconds. If you know of a cleaner way, do let me know. Both types of capture card cost about the same: €250 a piece but it'll likely be nearer €300 due to shipping and customs. You can purchase via AliExpress, but this company only ships using DHL.
• Panasonic HC-V770 camera
  A requirement for my rig is that components are powered off of a 5V source which limits the kind of camera I can use. The really good ones require at least 12V. This is pretty much the best you can get which does 5V. There's not a great deal of static in the image, you can fix focus and brightness and it zooms quite well. There's a bit of ghosting when you're zoomed in far and there isn't a lot of light in the room, but overall a very well built and well performing device. Well worth the roughly €400 price tag. It's being discontinued, so they might become difficult to come by.
• Velbon Videomate series tripod
  There are currently 3 models in this series: 438F, 538F and 638F. Price starts at €60 but it's worth every cent. Fully extended the top is at about 1m90 (the higher, the better), it has a quick-release place which I leave fixed to the camera but most importantly, it pans (moving the camera in any direction is called panning) incredibly smoothly but you can also set it to a specific point and tighten it to the point where nothing will move. The 6 is more expensive than the 4 but the main difference between them is how heavy they are. Heavy tripods are a bit more stable, but of course when you need to transport it a lot the ligher one might be the better pick. For my mobile rigs the organizer needs to provide me with a tripod so all my other rigs come with a 638F.
• HDMI to SDI converters
  All video signals I get either start out as HDMI or are converted to that. From there on I convert the signal to SDI, which I do using these converters I get from China. Each rig requires 2 so I pack 3 just in case. The older model (identified by having just a single LED) would be less forgiving about the HDMI signal being fed to it. The current ones are rock solid. When you purchase these, be SUPER careful you get the HDMI to SDI version and not the other way around. They look exactly the same except for which side is marked input/output.
• Belden 1694F and 1505F SDI cable
  I use SDI (digital over coax with a BNC connector) to transport the captured image to my rig. HDMI cable, in my experience, quickly gets flaky when the cable lengths increase. Per rig I bring 3 10m lengths of SDI cable and using a cheap coupler I can combine multiple lengths. The 1694 is the type they use in film studios because it's VERY well insulated. The 1505 is a slightly thinner version of the same, that is easier to come by, cheaper, thinner and lighter (10m of 1505 is 800gr, 1694 is 1kg), but because of that can't be extended as far as the 1694. The F means this is the flexible type - the core is 7 thin twisted wires instead of a single thick one which allows you to bend it more than the normal A cable would allow before breaking. You still need to be careful with noisy environments, like next to power lines in India, but I've made runs of 70m in less noisy environments by just tacking on additional lengths and it just worked. The 1505 likely can only reach 50-60m in that same environment.
• Neutrik NBNC75BRU11 and NBNC75BJP9 BNC Connectors
  These connectors are specifically made to fit the Belden 1694F and Belden 1505F cables, respectively. They're again not cheap, a piece about €2.85 for the BRU11 and €2.50 for the BJP9, but they work really well and last forever.
• Roland DUO-Capture EX
  For all but the smallest events you'll find that there's an audio setup in the room from where you can get a direct feed off of the mixer. This is good, because you want as clean a signal as possible, and this is how you do that. The default type of output from a mixer is balanced audio, sent out over either an XLR port or a full Jack plug. The Roland is a USB sound card with 2 XLR inputs and the ability to send Phantom Power out via 1 of those inputs. Having 2 ports means there's redundancy and being able to send out Phantom Power means that the same cable that gets the signal to your sound card is also used to send power to the microphone - very useful when there's no mixer in the room, but you do have access to a proper microphone. Only downside to this device is that when you plug in just 1 side, the OS sees a stereo signal with only audio on the one side. Trivial to work around, but still something to keep an eye on. These devices cost about €120 but, again, will last you a lifetime. They've been discontinued but enough have been made that you can still buy new as well as pick up a sweet deal on second-hand sites.
• Shure X2u
  While the Roland sound card is great, for my mobile rigs I needed something more compact and this Shure totally delivers. It's cheaper than the Roland, has similar controls, also does Phantom Power and is about the size of a thick cigar. I also rather like that its single XLR-only input is provided to the OS as a stereo signal.
• Audio Technica U841A omni-directional microphone
  At smaller conferences and events, it's not unusual to find that there's no microphone. You can try to rely on the microphone in the camera to grab the audio, but the typical distance means you're likely capturing from the far end of the room, where there tends to be a lot more environment noise. Instead, each of my rigs comes with one of these amazing microphones. They've been discontinued, but a lot of them have been made and you should be able to pick one up fairly easily for about €50, complete with 10m XLR cable.
• XLR cable
  If you ever get to play with pro audio gear, you'll find it uses the 3-pin XLR connector and associated cabling. The joy of XLR is that, due to the signal being communicated over 2 wires instead of 1, it's already far less susceptible to interference. It also helps that the signal is 12V. Having learned from my SDI problems I went with the 6mm diameter cable. It's the perfect marriage of flexibility, durability and quality. My omnidirectional microphone comes with 10m of considerably thinner XLR wire, but that doesn't appear to lower the quality of the signal.
• Intel i7-6700K
  I found that instead of getting a discrete video card to do all the encoding work, it was actually cheaper to spend a few more euro on the processor and have it do everything. This CPU is susceptible to both Spectre and Meltdown, but I've found that my workload isn't affected by the patches for it in any significant way. It's worth noting that this 4-core CPU with HyperThreading gets to endure a load of about 12 according to 'top' which should be a rather unhealthy number. However when you look at the CPU stats below you'll find that there's still a considerable amount of time spent idling. I'd guestimate my current load pegs the system at about 90% of fully loaded. It's possible to set the system to try even less hard at compressing the videos - in terms of diskspace that wouldn't be a problem - but I would argue you're likely better off getting a newer model CPU instead if your workload turns out to be higher than mine.
• MSI B250I GAMING PRO AC
  This is the motherboard I currently use for my mobile rigs, replacing the ASRock B150M. Unlike the ASRock, this one has sufficient PCIe lanes to let me run the capture cards off of the on-board USB 3.0 ports, and by attaching an SSD to the M.2 slot under the board I don't need to attach a harddisk before use. I previously used stand-offs in the corner to keep the mobo off its underlying surface to prevent shorts, but they ended up bending the motherboard to its breaking point in transport, so I've drawn and lasercut a baseplate out of polyoxymethylene (POM). Initially I thought of using plexiglass, but POM is far less brittle and slightly bendable so better suited to the stresses of transport. Using ultra-flathead screws the board is practically flush with the desk I'd place it on and I know I'll never have to worry about the surface it's on shorting the motherboard. I've also made little supports for the M.2 drive so that pressure on the bottom wouldn't result in that card snapping in 2.
• 2TB Western Digital Purple harddisks
  For storage in my fixed rigs I use 4 of these in a RAID 0+1 configuration because I expected to need the throughput to the harddisk, but that turned out not to be the case. Yes, if you want to store the videos uncompressed you WILL need that speed, but since we do compress the videos the harddisks aren't very busy. Which is GOOD because it means I can safely copy the videos already recorded to an external drive without causing issues. The reason I went with the Purple series is that these harddisks are specifically designed to handle a write-heavy load. They're designed for systems where it matters that a write operation is guaranteed to complete within a given amount of time, even if 'complete' means 'fail' here. If I were to rebuild the machines I would just use 2 harddisks in a RAID 1 configuration because the current setup has so much diskspace I can set the system to start recording, come back in a week and it STILL will not have run out of diskspace.
• Nichiban Gaffer tape
  As the AV version of Samuel L Jackson would say: If you absolutely, positively have to tape every mother... thing in the room, accept no substitute. Comes in all widths and colours. The white is recommended when you also want to write on it. This is THE BEST tape. It sticks where you want it to, it comes off when you want it to and it leaves no residu. It does have a tendency to peel cheap plaster (the white, chalky paint some places use) off the wall and if you leave it attached for several weeks or even months, results will vary. In hot climates the glue will start to seep out after a few days and on a plastic surface (plastic bag of any description) the glue will practically fuse with the plastic.
• DC-DC step-down power converters
  After an interesting technical problem with the rig (a conference attendee decided charging their phone was more important than my camera getting power, and just pulled the power strip out of its socket... as you do) I decided to simply power everything off of the 12V line of the Power Supply Unit. The idea being that almost all my kit at the time ran off of 5V. I could attach a cable to the 5V and ground off the PSU, but after several meters of cable that voltage would drop considerably. The solution would be to either use a boost converter to bring the voltage up at the cost of pulling more amps through, or using 12V and a step-down converter to turn whatever's left after X meters of cable into 5V. I felt the second of these 2 options was the better one and it hasn't worked out badly for me. The step-down converters are dirt-cheap - under €1 a piece. I 3D print a box that fits this thing snugly and I put on a tiny heatsink using some thermal epoxy. The heatsink is important because with the power I draw through it they do get quite warm. I used to use a thin barrel connector for power input and no heatsink - the box got so warm the barrel socket heated up and expanded to the point it lost the connection with the connector. I always include a spare power box with each rig and the connector isn't within the box anymore just in case. For the output I'm using a 1-to-4 5.5x2.35 barrelconnector splitter. I typically have only 3 devices that need power anyways, so it also means I get a spare. Yay redundancy!
• GX12-2 connectors
  There used to be a time where all my components used the same 5.5x2.35 barrel connector, but some were for 12V and some were for 5V. It didn't take long for mistakes to be made and magic smoke to get emitted. I've since ensured that all components are 5V and they all used that 5.5x2.35 barrel connector, but then I decided to run a 12V power cable along with my SDI cable. At first I gave these cables simply a thinner barrel connector which made it less compatible with the bigger socket, although you could get it in if you really wanted to. The problem here was that this barrel connector does nothing to retain the connection so all it took was someone tripping over a cable to give it a yank and the power could be severed. In my case, it turned out to be the heating of the power box (see previous item) to cause it. So I switched to this 2-pin socket. These things rule. I used the 2-pin model - 1 ground, 1 power - and there's a little notch to ensure you don't reverse the poles. Once plug is in the socket there's a little hood that screws on over the socket. At this point the cable itself will break before this thing loses the connection. Plus the connector is unique within the rig so no mistakes can be made.
• A clicker
  Most presenters prefer to use a clicker, but will happily do without. Because of that it's not uncommon for them to forget to bring their own. It's always nice to be able to offer them one when you can. The one I bring is dirt cheap, €4 on Ali, but it works well and I also love the fact that the USB receiver gets tucked inside.
• All the dongles
  One could argue that speakers should bring for their own laptop whatever dongle it needed to plug into the room's AV setup, but I can think of hundreds of completely VALID reasons (and, yes quite a few INvalid ones too) why they didn't bring the dongle they need to the venue. Instead of running through the venue in the hopes someone might have the needed dongle, each rig comes with several of the most common dongle types that output HDMI. Most common these days are Mini DisplayPort (Macs), DisplayPort (business HPs), USB-C (all the super thin laptops) and recently the Micro HDMI is gaining ground too. I include a few more just in case, but they rarely get used.
• Short cables where possible
  What you'll find when you become a bit serious about videoing is that there are quite a few components that need to be plugged into one another, and they all come with really LONG cables because that gives you flexibility. The downside is that all these cables get entangled, knotted and break from constantly being rolled and unrolled in a far too tight a loop. So I've replaced the 2m USB cable that comes with my sound cards by a 30cm one. The 1.5m HDMI cable that comes with the camera which sticks straight up and might drape itself in front of the lens? Replaced by a 20cm Mini-HDMI to HDMI cable with a 90 degree angled connector on the camera side that sends the cable off to the back of the camera. The power cable for the camera went from 1.5m to just 30cm. The list goes on and on. AliExpress really is your friend here. In the end you'll have saved yourself a LOT of time during build-up and tear-down, improved reliability and even reduced some of the weight.

The replaced

These are the items that I purchased and was sufficiently happy about that I kept using them for some time, but eventually decided to replace with a different component for some reason.

• ASRock B150M ITX Motherboard
  This was the motherboard I uses for my mobile rigs. It's the cheapest ITX form factor motherboard that takes the i7 I use and has the required 3 USB ports I need on top of a network port, an HDMI port and DDR4 memory slots. You'll find that the board is a bit curved from the CPU plate. That doesn't seem to impede its function. One problem with this motherboard that I sadly only discovered later was that its ample supply of USB 3.0 ports are in fact connected via a single 4x lane PCIe controller. Each PCIe lane can do about 250MB/s so 4 means 1GB/s. A single 60fps full HD stream is 1920 * 1080 * 4 * 60 ≈ 500 MB/s. This means that with just 2 capture cards you will already claim almost all the bandwidth that the bus is able to deliver - and there are a couple of components on the system that also want to use that bus. Initially I worked around this by bringing 1 USB and 1 PCIe capture card per mobile rig, but the PCIe cards are a bit fragile so I've since included a PCIe USB 3.0 controller card, as per the next item in the list. It worked well enough until I broke a few in transport, and switched to the MSI H270I Gaming Pro AC.
• Startech 2-port USB3.1 PCIe x4 card
  See the previous item about why I needed this. The good thing about this card is that it's got a dedicated 2 lanes per USB port, so we can shove the data from BOTH capture cards through this card without straining the rest of the system. Since it's a Mini-ITX board without a discrete graphics card the PCIe x16 slot was vacant so everything just fell into place. You will notice the 2 capacitors on the card. They stick out and I fear they'll eventually snap off, but until they do it's all good. In the end these worked fine until I replaced the motherboard and ended up not needing these anymore.
• Sony HDR-CX240E camera
  I started out with these cameras because they were, quite literally, the cheapest camera out there that still did full HD. The sensor is a bit weak meaning you get a lot of static in the final image and particularly a black backdrop is NOT appreciated by it. On the plus side it's cheap, it's sturdy and it will get the job done just fine.
• VGA to SDI converter
  When I started out I had a really flakey VGA to HDMI converter which sucked on many, many levels. I replaced that with this item, which did well for a number of months. The problem with this item is that VGA is analog, and this unit was able to convert it to SDI but wasn't very accurate when it came to color reproduction. I worked around it by labelling the 4 units I had and having an option on the rig to select which of them I was using. When someone then plugged in over VGA I would make ffmpeg put a color filter over the image. I made the color filter by connecting a VGA source that showed a test image with squares of known colors. I then took a screenshot of the captured image and using GIMP tested the color quality with the original, adjusting the filter in ffmpeg each time until I got it mostly right. In all, it worked and it worked FAR better than the original option, but I stopped using them because they were a bit of a hassle, was an extra thing I would need to configure on the rig and the constant unplugging/replugging of the BNC connector of the SDI cable was something that some rig operators were apprehensive about.
• Cheap RG-59 coax cable
  Since I'm using SDI I needed 75 OHM coax and RG-59 is just that. I've found long rolls of the stuff quite cheap and bought some. Sure enough, in my early-2000 built appartment things worked just fine. Then I went to film in a period building in Amsterdam that got a bit tricked out. The electrical noise seriously messed up the signal. Turns out the main difference between cheap and expensive cable is the quality of the shielding and in the case of this cheap cable that was a super thin layer of foil and a token braid of copper. The foil would tear when you bend it a few times and the braid weave was so wide it didn't really do much here. If you put cable in for a fixed location where you can control the interference it might see, by all means go for it. But if, like me, you're constantly unpacking and repacking these cables, get the proper stuff.
• Cheap no-name nylon/gaffer tape
  The thing cheap tape skimps on is the glue. In a warm environment it'll sweat out of the roll, or you'll have stuck something to a wall and it won't stay, or you want to pull it off and the tape comes off but the glue remains. Yes, you can get tape cheap from China or wherever. I've even seen venues where they skimped on the tape by giving their techs horrid *paper* tape. This is another one of those things where if you go cheap, you will pay for it with your time.

The ugly

There are bits you can purchase that might even be fair in their own right, but which are simply wholly inadequate for the recording of talks. Basically, these are the bits that SUCK.

• BlackMagic Capture Cards
  I'm probably the only person on this planet to tell you this, but BlackMagic SUCK. Their 3G-SDI 150 euro capture cards are indeed cheap, but they only support full HD at 25 full frames a second, or 50 interlaced frames a second. All European cameras do 50 fps and many, many laptops do 60 fps. Most converters that spit out HDMI also go for 60 when given half the chance. To make the card work, you will of course need a driver. This driver will create a device for you under Linux which is NOT a /dev/video${NR} but something unique to them, so you need special software to access it. Someone wrote a program that is able to read from this device and output it into a Video4Linux loopback device, but it's just a major hassle and it should come as no surprise that this little tool is completely unsupprted. Finally, the use of their specific driver requires you also have a matching firmware loaded onto the card. I've tried updating the firmware using their own tool, and it locked up my machine HARD. After reboot the card didn't respond anymore. I had this happen with both the single channel BlackMagic Mini Recorder as well as their dual-channel Duo 2. I've tried reaching out for support - nobody's home unless you buy these things in bulk. Everybody at BlackMagic can get stuffed!
• Cheap VGA to SDI dongles
  These things you can find for next to nothing on Ali. It's basically a little dongle with VGA on one end and an HDMI port on the other, often with a helpful mini jack plug included to feed the audio into the thing aswell. The problem was, I never got them to work well. When I had these I didn't provide power from the rig, and this device needed USB power. I figured: easy! Just plug it into the speaker's laptop... Yeah, turns out infosec speakers have an opinion about plugging random chinese crap into their laptop. I had brought a USB power bank for just that occasion, but the thing either couldn't get the power it needed off of it, or the power bank didn't register the power draw as sufficient to stay on long enough. Long story short: I couldn't get the thing to work reliably and as a result got to edit in the slides manually.
• Cheap tripods
  You can recognise these by the need to twist the handle on the tripod's boom to loosen the head so it will rotate. It's practically impossible to twist the handle without shaking everything and you can't leave it loosened because the camera won't stay in position. These tripods typically also don't extend beyond 1m50 which means you get a not very flattering angle on your subject. An example is the Hama "Star 75".
• Passive splitters
  For both VGA and HDMI signals splitters exist which are nothing more than one port on one side and 2 on the other. They're either powered by the incoming signal, or simply connect each incoming pin to the matching pin on both outgoing ports. With an HDMI connection having intelligent devices on both sides a negotiation is performed to work out what resolution will be employed. With such a splitter in the loop it often results in only 1 port getting the signal. On a similar setup using HDMI the second port gets a significantly higher amount of static and distortion. Some HDMI splitters try to do things the right way by terminating the connection with the one device and negotiating a connection with the other 2, and they take all the power they require via that incoming HDMI port. That port is the laptop, and if that's one of those super light ones like the MacBook Air or, heaven forbid, a tablet, it's not going going to put any power on that port if it can help it.

Current full Bill Of Materials

• Camera
  • 1x Panasonic HC-V770 / HC-V777 (get the cheapest. V770 has better built-in audio, but we don't use it)
  • 1x SD card (to prevent a blinking icon on the screen. 1GB or over is fine)
  • 1x Power box
  • 1x 5.5x2.1 barrel connector with nylon plug
  • 1x MicroHDMI 90deg cable
  • 1x Metal 90deg bracket to mount the camera in portrait
  • 1x HDMI-to-SDI converter
  • 1x Velbon Videomate F638/538/438
• PC
  • 1x H310CM-HDV motherboard
  • 1x Intel Core i9 9900 CPU (with cooler, can be the Intel boxed one)
  • 1x 8GB DDR4 Ballistix Sport
  • 1x Western Digital Purple 1TB
  • 1x LC-Power LC-400TFX
  • 1x Inter-Tech IT-502
  • 2x Magewell ProCapture SDI
  • 2x BNC port cover
  • 1x Keyboard
  • 1x Mouse
  • 1x HDMI 1920x1080 monitor
  • 1x Low Profile PCIe slot cover with holes
  • 1x 5.5x2.1 barrel connector with screw
  • 2x GX12-2 male connector
  • 2x MOLEX power connector pin
  • 1x MOLEX power splitter
• Audio
  • 1x Shure X2u USB audio capture device
  • 1x USB-B to USB-A cable for audio capture device 30cm
• Storage
  • 1x Keter/Rigid 20" Toolbox
  • 1x Case Logic DCB-305 Camera pouch
  • 1x Bits and pieces (toiletries)pouch
• Lectern
  • 1x HDMI cable 1m
  • 1x HDMI to 2xSDI converter
  • 2x Power box
  • 1x SDI-to-HDMI converter
  • 1x HDMI-to-VGA dongle
  • 1x USB-C to HDMI dongle
  • 1x MiniDP to HDMI dongle
  • 1x MiniHDMI to HDMI dongle
  • 1x MicroHDMI to HDMI dongle
  • 1x DisplayPort to HDMI dongle
  • 1x Clicker/Laserpointer
  • 1x AudioTechnica U841A microphone
  • 1x BNC male-male cable
• Cables
  • 3x Belden 1505F SDI, 10m
  • 3x Power cable red/black, 10m
  • 6x Neutrik NBNC75BJP9 BNC Connector
  • 3x GX12-2 male and female connector
  • 1x XLR 10m
  • 1x Neutrik NC3MXX and NC4FXX XLR connectors (one is male, the other female)
  • 1x XLR-to-Jack plug (balanced, so 3 poles on jack. Best as a short cable)
  • 1x BNC female-female coupling plug