 Welcome back to my YouTube channel, Daniel Rosel here. I want to talk today about one of the pieces of technology I've been making the most extensive use out of for the past couple of years. And that is the webcam I'm speaking into today, the Logitech C930E. It's the webcam I've been using to record my video blogs and my screencast and all that kind of content for about the past year. And I've become very, very fond of this webcam. And through trial and error, I figured out a few things that have improved the recording quality. And I thought I'd pass them on in this video. Now, the first thing to say about recording with a webcam for vlogging. Now, it's very possible to record into a computer using a DSLR or a mirrorless or a camcorder. You typically need something called a capture card to get that to work, to take the HDMI output coming off the camera or camcorder and get that into USB that the computer will work with. And it's true that you're going to typically see better quality using one of those than using a unless it's a super high end webcam. Now, the reason that webcam quality tends not to be on par with stuff like mirrorless cameras, etc. Is that it's a really small form factor. The actual size of the camera is small. And because the size of a webcam is expected to be a pretty small thing that traditionally fits on top of a monitor, the sensors going into these webcams don't tend to be the biggest. I read an interesting tear down article of this webcam. The C930E not to be confused with the C930C, which is its kind of gray market Asian counterpart. And during the early days of the pandemic, when webcams supply chains were crazy, a lot of the Chinese version of this webcam is getting dumped onto European and American markets. So you want the C930E at the end and not C. But anyway, like other webcams of this kind of classic webcam form factor, you know, a little box about an inch wide like this, it has a relatively small sensor. And typically when you have a small camera sensor, you're going to notice poorer performance in low lighting conditions. Now, this goes whether we're talking about using a pocket gimbal like the Femia records and videos on or the DJI Osmo or anything else. That's a small camera with a small sensor. You can get often really, really good results shooting on those cameras during daytime, but as soon as the sun goes down and you're relying on artificial lighting, it can go very, very far down. Now, the C930E does have a little bit of illumination just to the left and right of the camera lens. Looking at me as I speak into it are these little small lights. Now, these, I just have to say, don't throw off enough light that if you're looking to record your video blogs at nighttime, it's not going to look good to give you guys an idea for the lighting setup I use when I record these blogs. I have over my head here about a 10 inch LED panel that's providing most of the lighting. I have another little light off to the side. And then behind me, I have this kind of RGB stuff, and there's an RGB light facing backwards as well, shining on the wall. If I take it up here, you can see it's actually an RGB tube. So I'm using a few different lights. Now, let me show you what kind of a recording would get if I were to take off my main lighting. I'm going to just turn off the remote. And now we've gone to no lighting. And now you can see the webcam starting to try to compensate. But, you know, that's basically as good as we're going to get. So I'm going to turn my light back on again. And you can see the second that my light comes on, it goes from being absolutely terrible to being half usable. So if you are doing vlogging and you want to do it using a webcam and not using a camera or camcorder and a capture card, it's essential that you have some decent lighting on your side. I'm not saying my lighting is perfect. It's very basic, in fact, but you can see that just having one key light filling me in here from the top versus me having no lighting on me whatsoever, it's a night and day difference, literally. My second and third recommendation I'm going to make together when you're shooting video blogs using a very, very small camera like this. I think it's a good idea to try to help the camera to record good footage as much as you can. Now, this Logitech I'm typically recording into OBS Studio. And I found that I have much better results when I manually set the white balance. Now, I have a separate video on YouTube, how to manually set the white balance using OBS. One thing that you can do is hold up a white balance card and then set the white balance on that. Or if you have a white object, I happen to have this pill container on my desk that's white. So what you can do is hold this up into your webcam and manually adjust the white balance until you get that white. Now, this becomes especially important when you're using colored lights. As I mentioned, just in the last tip, I have a few different RGB lights I'm using when I shoot these videos. There's a bit of blue lighting. There's a bit of orange lighting in the background. And I have sort of a soft white light coming on to me here. Now, if I could just go for the automatic white balance, trust me, it doesn't look good. I have a little bit of a kind of red tint to my skin at the moment just because I slept horribly. My skin's a bit irritated. But if I leave the auto white balance on, I look like a beetroot. So for whatever reason, if you're using a bunch of different RGB lights, the camera has a hard time picking out what white should look like. So I find it very important to manually set the white balance and also manually set the focus as well. There is auto focus on this webcam. It's pretty good. As you can see, this took about a second to focus on my fingers. Now back to my face. But if I was recording this typically before I started rolling, I would manually set the zoom because they're going to be staying in pretty much the same distance from the camera. So manually set the zoom, manually set the white balance. You can do both of these things in OBS Studio. And I found that it just makes a really, really big difference. OK, the third and final tip is to use a dedicated microphone if you're doing video blogging and you want to record using a webcam. Now, as you guys can see, I am using a podcasting style microphone. I'm using the Audio Technica 80 2020 via the Beringer Euphoria UM2 Audio Interface, a bit of a mouthful and getting that into OBS Studio. But previously, I just used to use a lavalier microphone just clipped onto my T-shirt, whatever. Now, I found that they both delivered much, much superior audio quality than using the internal microphone on the C930E. But just to show you guys what they sound like, I've added them both as sources into my OBS Studio here. And I'm going to swap over from the microphone you're listening to, the 80 2020. And now you are listening to audio pickup from the built-in microphone on the webcam itself. And I'm just adjusting the gain a little bit to try stop the levels from clipping. But you should hear I'm going to give you a few more seconds to listen to the difference in audio quality between the built-in microphone on the Logitech C930E business caliber webcam. And now I've gone back to the 80 2020. And I hope you agree with me that the audio quality is better. I hope those three tips were useful. I do think that the Logitech C930E is a really, really decent webcam for shooting, vlogging, streaming, talking head videos or screencast. It is not 4K capable. So if you need your 4K capability, you should go for a different and perhaps higher end, more expensive product. I would just say, I think for a lot of these really, really basic videos, I don't think 4K is necessary. I think 1080p is more than good enough just to recap on my three, three tips. Tip one is pay attention to lighting the sensor on this webcam like all webcams is small and using lighting or no lighting is going to make a dramatic difference. One more time. Here's me with my light turned off. Here's me with the light back on and it just doesn't get any better with the light off. It doesn't like adjust that's as good as it gets. Second tip is manually set your focus and your white balance before recording. I recommend doing that always and just use some kind of a white object. If you have something like a pillbox or a piece of paper, just to set white onto, especially important if you're using colored RGB lighting somewhere in your scene. And finally, I recommend not using internal audio. It's fine for, you know, just doing business chats. But if you want to do video blogs or streams or something where the audio quality is going to be more noticeable, I recommend using a dedicated microphone like the one I'm using or any other microphone for that matter. And you should definitely notice a big improvement. Thanks for watching this video. I hope these tips are helpful. If you want to get more videos from me, do feel free to click on the subscribe button.