 Welcome to part two. This is a direct continuation of part one So if you haven't seen that then I would watch that first and then come back where you're going to be really confused when we get To the scene where this will massacre at the wedding Now if you're brand new to all this audio stuff, you may have never seen anything other than the three and a half millimeter Jack that's on your headphones. We've already talked about XLR Which will probably be coming out of your microphone and the other common connector will be a quarter inch Which is like a headphone plug but bigger all of these Connection types have a male connector, which is like your headphones have and a female connector Which you get it the point is you may run into a situation where you end up Needing to connect to female ends of something or you need to get a female XLR to a male quarter-inch Luckily they sell adapters and connectors for all the stuff So even if you've never seen something just search for it. It probably exists So now that you have a microphone you now need a mixer and most of the things from here on out will be assuming that you're using XLR microphones Mixers often look intimidating the first time you see them because there's lots of knobs good news is they aren't quite as complicated as they look Your mixer will take the sound from your microphone You'll be able to tweak it in different ways And then you can send it back out probably to two maybe to three places the first place you'll be sending it to is the computer so that OBS or whatever software you're using can use it and I'll link a video on the different ways to do that The second place you'll send the audio is back to your own headphones If there's just one announcer you can just plug right into the headphone out on your mixer But the chances are you'll have multiple announcers So for this you will need a headphone amplifier Which is a little box that you can find for around 30 dollars And you connect the mixer out into this little box and it generally gives four headphone outputs Each with its own little volume knob This is nice because now you can have two or three announcers and you can spread out as much as you want So back to mixers They have big mixers and they have little mixers if you've only got two announcers Don't just buy a mixer with only two inputs I mean you could but you usually want to give yourself a little room to expand just in case because Either hey, someone else wants to jump on a broadcast for a few minutes Or you need room for our next topic, which is the secondary or atmospheric Microphones I guess we could call them and you may not realize this but when you watch a game on television There are microphones everywhere. They are all around the field. They are on the basketball hoop backboards guys are holding them on the sidelines They are inside or on foul poles There are even microphones inside the padding of some nfl lineman Now there's a reason why your broadcast will not have a professional feel right off the bat Namely because they cost a crazy amount of money An nfl broadcast can take over a hundred people to pull off. There is a lot that you do not see But say you're happy with your announcer audio What are the next few things you can do to step your game up? One is a crowd microphone, which can add a lot, especially if you're inside a press box or the closed window All this takes is finding a spot outside where you can put a mic that won't be bothered and run an xlr cable to it If you're on the road traveling with a team then these secondary microphones are going to be a little tougher But you can still generally always point a microphone out of an open press box window And it's not going to be incredible, but it'll be better than nothing Just make sure that it's not picking up your voice if you're announcing near The second place you can point a microphone is toward the field and try to get some on-field action Now this will vary a lot from sport to sport You can find other videos out there that will explain it on a sport by sport basis But it might be something as simple as for like baseball you can point it at home plate I didn't do this in my setup So I can't really give you a personal recommendation on the best type of microphone to use I know the parabolic microphones are used a lot to provide longer range But they often get up to at least 500 even for the smaller ones So when doing microphones like these which may be quite a ways away from your mixer Can you use some type of wireless transmitter? Yes, I've seen them around $200 for both the transmitter and the receiver although they're usually more Although like most quote-unquote wireless sound you generally need to plug in the receiver and the transmitter So there's a wire But they do sound good that said you can run an xlr cable for about 100 feet And there are lots of ways to do it over an even longer distance There's also the option to use an adapter that will allow you to convert either an rca 3.5 millimeter or xlr connection to Like cat 5 ethernet cable which will allow for some very long runs at a much lower cost because you can get cat 5 or cat 6 cable for not a ton of money You can find cheaper versions for less than like 20 dollars. I used one it worked great I think I ran at 75 feet But the higher end ones claim that you can run an ethernet cable over like half a mile And I'm not speaking figuratively when I say that it's like thousands of feet Although I can't say I've ever actually seen a demonstration of that. So what other sources can we bring in here? I know a guy who used to walk down to the field before a game Interview a player or a coach on a little audio recorder And he'd walk right back up plug that recorder into his mixer and play the interview as part of his pregame show So any sound you can get out of a recorder like that or a phone or a computer you could use Into your mixer and if you have a producer that would be really neat to have audio playing under you As you come back from a commercial break or something like that So speaking of producers They can be really helpful and boost the quality of a broadcast in addition to handling all the technical stuff They can be checking your levels throwing music on at certain points Like we just said or even doing research about stats relevant to the game There are people handing professional announcers notes all the time throughout games I don't recommend just trying to talk the whole time even through Where a commercial break typically would be because that's a lot of talking for a long time You need to give yourself a break Even if your commercials are just silence or some quiet music Just make sure it's not copyrighted If you're using youtube they have a list of songs that you can download and use Another option is to have the color analysts take care of the production aspect if you have one Now there are pros and cons to them either being right beside you or being away in a different spot The nice thing about being remote is that they can often have a bit more space Which is especially helpful if you have a lot of video equipment as well They can also monitor things through speakers rather than headphones that they want That's just personal preference The downside is you'll probably need to run microphone cables a bit further and obviously they can't pass you notes Although google docs is a thing if you both share the same one at the same time And one person can type to the other so they can see it or You can give your producer his own microphone and connect things in such a way that his sound Can be heard by the announcers in their headphones, but not over the main mix And this is perfect for saying stuff like hey, we're coming back from the commercial and giving a countdown You have to either have the right kind of mixer or a second mixer to be able to do that But having done it it's really cool to have that option And I mean it beats walkie-talkies or texting back and forth, but hey whatever works One final thing on producers if you are the announcer and the person buying and setting all this stuff up Make sure that your producer at least has a basic idea of how everything works Meaning like the sound flow of what is coming in from where If something stops working in the middle of the game You don't want to have to stop your broadcast the troubleshoot You want your producer to at least to be able to think oh the field microphone isn't working Maybe something came loose in this spot or that spot I'm going to run down and check it or send someone else to check those connections So now what? Pull out a sheet of paper draw a diagram with all the parts that you'll need It doesn't have to be pretty draw little microphones for each one you have Don't forget about your announcer headphones Include all the connector types of each parts and how long does each cord need to be Then number all of those microphones and headphones and adapters and cords and list them off And that's the easiest way that you're going to be able to get a general idea of where you're at And what you need and your price range and then you can adjust accordingly from there So hopefully that'll give you a good start into broadcasting on budget and learning some of this stuff for the first time So if you have a really tight budget, then obviously a reoccurring theme was Can I do it this way or can I do it that way? Can I do it without a mixer? Can I do it with this microphone that I found on the clearance shelf at the dollar store? Can I broadcast through a potato and the answer is usually probably yes? But there is also usually a catch or a trade-off And it's just up to you to figure out that balance. Good luck. Thanks for watching