Don’t Panic
No one knows you’re shitting your pants
What was I trying to do?
During the day, I was troubleshooting the cam and mic audio drifting out of sync issue. The problem is when my camera is set to 720p60fps and there’s lots of action happening in game, the cam and mic audio drift out of sync. When the action dies down, the cam video and mic audio come back into sync.
My hypothesis was if I went to 1080p30fps I could get the quality I was looking for without over-taxing the usb bus.
Here’s what I did:
In OBS I set the cam source to 1080p, 30fps.
I disconnected the Brio camera from my CalDigit hub and used an adapter to connect it to my MacBook Pro directly
Here’s what I did not do:
Test the changes in a stream
Here’s what happened:
I went live and immediately noticed intermittent audio static interference.
I began wiggling every cable within reach
I cycled power on everything nearby
I cycled the power of the entire streaming rig
I went behind my rig and wiggled every cable
By haphazardly troubleshooting by power cycling bits and pieces of the rig one at a time, wiggling some cables while unplugging and plugging in others, I created a cascading nightmare of additional issues across the entire rig, more issues than I can recall. I even managed to pop out my right knee during all this. It popped right back in, thankfully.
I did manage to eventually recover, after stopping and restarting the stream at least twice.
What caused the static?
I’m actually not sure. It could have been that I’d overloaded the USB bus in a completely different way. It could have been that plugging in the cam via the dongle caused the problem, and unplugging it while OBS was running made things worse. The long and the short of it is I don’t really know. After rolling back the changes I made during the day, everything was ok… ok enough.
Now what?
After some more research and looking at my previous research, I did the following today:
I updated the Camera Settings app from Logitech. The version I had was 2.0.20 and the most recent version is 3.1.Something. There’s no auto update and the software was way out of date.
I disabled auto focus in the Camera Settings. According to many folks, having this enabled introduces all kinds of lag (I also wanted to disable auto white balance as well, for the same reason as disabling auto focus. After fiddling with settings I could not get the colors to look as good when auto white balance was enabled - PLUS - every so often the colors would shit over to blue, I’d turn blue, and my chromakey would turn off. I turned auto white balance back on and decided “not to go there.”)
In OBS, I changed the input format from “Auto” to MJPEG. Folks on the internets say there’s just something about having it on Auto that causes lag issues and explicitly changing this setting to MJPEG is supposed to fix it.
In OBS, I bumped the frame rate on the Brio to 60fps from 30fps. The image looks so much better, there’s no blur, and the chromakey is more accurate. I really need 60fps to keep using this camera, goddamnit.
…AND I TESTED MY CHANGES IN A TEST STREAM
I fired up a test stream and had Lara watching on her phone and also looking at OBS. I played for about an hour. In the past I’ve noticed the audio sync issue happens when I’m flying, so I flew on the test range at low level and high speed, then switched to driving at high speed in a jeep. Then I jumped into a live match and played a round of Underground. There was no static and no sync issues.
What’s Next?
I will change NOTHING for at least a week and see if the issue comes back. If it does, I’ll troubleshoot it from there.