Auto Focus

Cable Therapy: When Going Wireless Becomes a Technical Nightmare

• Sam Lewandowski

Share episode

Reliability or convenience? That's the critical question Brooke and Dan tackle in this deep dive into the technical underpinnings of podcast and video production. 

We pull back the curtain on why seemingly simple technical decisions can have dramatic consequences for your recordings.

Our journey through the evolution of our studio setup reveals how wireless camera systems initially promised convenience but delivered frustration. When wireless connections dropped at PodcastVideos.com, recordings would stop without warning, leaving clients with incomplete sessions and no indication anything had gone wrong. 

The transition to hardwired connections using direct HDMI cables to our switcher eliminated these silent failures, ensuring consistent recording quality regardless of network conditions.

We explore the unexpected costs involved—from $200 ethernet adapters for our previous cameras to the complete infrastructure redesign for our current 4K setup. 

For remote productions, hardwiring provides not just reliability but critical security benefits, preventing unauthorized access to your equipment on public networks. The technical insights shared apply whether you're building a professional studio or creating a mobile recording kit. 

As Brooke wisely notes, "If it can go wrong, it will"—which is why minimizing failure points through direct connections remains our strongest recommendation for anyone serious about production quality.

Ready to upgrade your own setup? Take our advice and invest in quality cables and connections—your future self will thank you when that critical recording completes without a hitch. 

What's your experience with wireless versus hardwired setups? We'd love to hear your stories.

Speaker 1:

Welcome back everybody. This is the latest episode of Autofocus from PodcastVideoscom. It's Brooke Galligan over there. Hello, and I'm Dan Kraft. We're talking today about the difference between wireless and hardwired communications here in the studio. This is the cameras we're talking about. Obviously, our microphones talking about, obviously, our microphones are wired, always, yes, and these are run all the way up front to where the equipment is. The actual recording takes place up there. Now the cameras are here in the room, obviously. Now talk to me a little bit about how we get the video from here to there wireless versus hardwired.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, is the. This is the 4k setup that we keep talking about, and so what we have is we have all of our. We have three, uh, black magic micros, um, they're all attached to the wall and they're all hardwired with hdmi, and so we have hdmi cables that run from in here all the way to the front, to the lobby, and they plug into a switcher and it's the ATM mini is what we're using for that so they plug into the switcher and then the switcher is where it records. So we have an ISO switcher which records all of the channels all at once. So once you hit record, all three of those channels are recording, and so you have those and it records to an external SSD.

Speaker 1:

And this is the cabling that is carrying the actual video feed. This is not the power to the camera. The camera itself is also plugged in, just on the wall below. That's providing power to the camera. This is what we're talking about is the hardwire that takes the video feed from the camera up to the mixing equipment.

Speaker 2:

Yep To the front desk Yep.

Speaker 1:

Now we also hardwired up the last generation of the camera. We had the 1080Ps, the Logitech Mivos, but we'd originally had them beaming wirelessly. Now we hardwired them because wireless was giving us a few issues.

Speaker 2:

They were always recording. They were hard recording to the SD cards and so as long as you hit record on the camera they would record whether the wireless was in there or not. Same thing with these, like if our wireless or something goes out, um, like there's some. There's like if the internet goes out here, the switcher and the computer won't be able to talk because they're connected through ethernet. But the um, but the switcher and these cameras are all connected, hardwired, so they will always, like it will always be recording what's coming off these cameras we might have to upload it or yeah, as long as there's electricity in the building later.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, but we know the recording is taking yes, as long as there's electricity. It will not work if there's not electricity and important thing we should point out here wireless versus internet. There's internet from the building outward, in the modem outward, and then there's the wireless which is just the hands-free sent up here within from our modem and router apt. Okay, we've had issue. We had some issues with the cameras when they were beaming it wirelessly they still weren't beaming it well.

Speaker 2:

So what was happening is that they were using. So with the mevo app, um used, you can have the multicam app and you can put all the cameras and all those cameras talk to the Mevo app wirelessly. And so, when they were all talked cause, you could have them all plugged, plugged in and you could hit record from the Mevo app and then the Mevo app would tell all of those cameras to start recording but it's telling it over the wire and it was telling it over the wireless, and so they would start recording onto their SD cards.

Speaker 2:

But, like, if, like when our wireless went out or it got overloaded or it went down when the basically when the Mevo. So like, if the Mevo camera stopped talking to the multicam app through the wireless, then the Mevo's cameras would think that the recording had stopped. But it hadn't stopped.

Speaker 1:

So not only would it not be talking to the app, it would actually stop recording.

Speaker 2:

It would stop recording because it thought the Mevo app had stopped recording.

Speaker 1:

And so that's why, recording it to the SD cards that we would later pull out, it would stop, so you wouldn't catch that at all.

Speaker 2:

And so, like if you weren't, because, like you know, when people are up at the front desk. So the whole point of podcast videos is that you can, you come in, you rent the studio, you come in, you do your your pod podcast and you're kind of, and you're, and no one else is, is here to like, monitor you as as you you go along.

Speaker 1:

So there's no, there's not a producer sitting there's. No, there's no producer outside the camera here editing this. We are beaming it to the front where it gets processed, moved on and returned yeah, and so no one's watching.

Speaker 2:

So when things go down, they're just down like nobody's. Nobody can catch it because nobody's watching it. Because that's the whole point is that we want you to feel like you have a safe space. We want people to feel like this is for people that aren't you know they aren't. They aren't going on tv, they aren't used to having camera guys, they aren't used used to having technical directors tell them what to do. This is just people that want to have a podcast and they don't really want people watching them while they try to do this. So that's the whole point of what we do, which is why we have these scenarios where, like, a wireless goes out and these cameras just stop recording and nobody caught it.

Speaker 1:

The power goes out, we know it. The wireless goes out we don't necessarily know it, and it may have already slipped even by the time we catch it. So hard wiring was the solution there. Just go ahead and make sure that the wireless was taken completely out of the equation.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so now we would use the multicam app. You would use it to set angles, you would use it to focus, you would use it to make sure that all the settings are set right on the camera. But you would hit record on make sure that all the settings are set, set right on the camera. But this, but you would hit record on the back of the cameras and so, like you know, we would always hit record and so you would see these red, red, red lights. This is why we always talk about the red lights. So if you saw all these red red lights, you know that then you, we were recording. Everything was fine. If you, if for some reason, one of these lights stops turning red, hey, hey, client, please tell us because something went wrong.

Speaker 1:

It's blue, yeah, if it starts blinking Yellow. I think it had at 1.2.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's not a good one, and so, yeah, we're like let us know. So then it kind of like helps put the client back in charge too of like understanding what's going on with the cameras. So that's why, when we decided to upload, we decided to hardwire everything, and so you can even hardwire those MevoStarts, and so that's when they had these Ethernet connectors and we could get everything into the Ethernet, and so it took off. So the cameras never went off the Internet and then also the cameras, but we still would just hard record, and so after every recording you still have to pop out the SD cards, and these are like the micro SD cards.

Speaker 2:

They're very easy to lose and they were very especially in the car that we have. So if you like cause, like, sometimes we would pop it out and it would just shoot out and you'd be like, oh no that's not as theoretical as we'd like it to be. It's not no-transcript.

Speaker 1:

So now I do remember this. We're talking about a $300 or $400 camera. With the Mevos that we originally went from wireless to hardwired. The adapters to hardwire them were something like $200 a camera. They were not cheap.

Speaker 2:

It was. It was like $200 just to get them on the Ethernet. Yeah, to get them off of the wireless completely.

Speaker 1:

Looking back, would we or you in this case be better off spending the $900 or $1,000 and just making the jump to 4K?

Speaker 2:

No, it just depends on what you're trying to do, yeah, where when you're looking at like, like, if you're just doing a one person, like you're on your computer. What was great about the Mevos is that once they were hardwire and they were on Ethernet, you could turn on NDI and so, which means that, like the computer, it basically means that that camera can now be found on the network and so, like you can actually start putting lots of cameras like you know. Basically you can start using a lot of stuff through what we tried, obs and other other kinds of streaming systems, and so if you're looking at a smaller kind of setup, sometimes it might be easier to use like a combination of like webcams, like Mevos, like in other other things that you can NDI through and then just kind of like streaming it into one computer and then, just you know, going live with obs we position ourselves as the experts, but I understood about a third of what she just said okay, well, it's okay, but yeah, it's like.

Speaker 2:

But we did because, like we've, we tried obs again and while I could get when I could get, I could get three cameras recording like source recording all at once and with the audio coming in from the roadcaster and it coming out in a in, like basically a stream, and it all looked really well, but like. Second, we had to do five cameras like our, my computer, like the cpu, just like let's go the other way for a minute.

Speaker 1:

A mobile kit we'll talk about those again soon. Uh, and I and we, we've done several different versions of this. But you're out somewhere. You're recording from a remote location. You may not have a whole lot of choice. You may have to figure out a way to hardwire. You may have to depend on a wifi that may or may not be working. Is you just keep an eye on it, you know when it drops?

Speaker 2:

I always recommend hardwiring. If you're in a location where you don't know what's going on, hardwire, like you know, hdmi, usb-c, whatever you need to do to get everything talking with the wires. That's there for you to control. Also, if you start working with things on a network, sometimes they have to be on a public network, meaning that anybody in that area can basically get into what's going on, like get into your camera, they can get into your SSDs, they can get into real in the making.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they can access stuff and start taking stuff out, especially so whenever you're in a place where you're not really sure what's going on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so it's having the hard wire.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, hard wire in there.

Speaker 1:

That's a good best practice.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and so even when we do like, when we have our, when we take the like Amiibo out, like we usually will use either the Amiibo hotspot or the wireless just to do the settings, Like it's literally just for settings, Because that's how you change the white balance, that's how you change the shutter speed.

Speaker 1:

That's not really something you can work through the hard wire, the hard wire change the white balance.

Speaker 2:

That's how you change the shutter speed. That's not really something you can work through the hardwire. The hardwire is for the recording, just to make sure you've got stability, yeah, and you hit record, yeah. But so you're using the wireless just for your camera studies, because it's attached to an app. Um, you know, but if you have like a, like a regular dslr or you know mirrorless ones, um, all of that stuff is right there and you have the have, have like a monitor, and so, um, it's it. It just depends on what you're trying to do. But yeah, you don't want to put things that are talking through a network upon a public network, because now anybody can see it.

Speaker 1:

But you also don't have to worry about the Wi-Fi crashing out or limiting it on the bandwidth if you do it that way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, or you could just completely take the internet all the way out of it and just have everything just close, close hard work.

Speaker 1:

You know just recording to take home, or you're trying to live stream too.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. Well, obviously, if you have live stream, you need the internet. So yeah, that's a good point, yeah.

Speaker 1:

We can't live stream it anywhere else, Can we? I mean Western Union, maybe.

Speaker 2:

No, we could probably live stream it for anybody that walked in here. They could watch it live while we recorded. Sure, those poor people.

Speaker 1:

Okay. So, guys, that's our quick dive into the hardwired versus wireless. When you're here, when you're there, when you're out in public, that's the wireless. It's not your friend sometimes.

Speaker 2:

That's all always secretly yeah, well, you know you want to try to make it. One of the things is like you want to have the least amount of failure points as possible and so like the least amount. So like, if you're adding in not only all these cables talking you know they all have to plug in and talk to each other and and keep power running and all this, this, this other stuff and then you add in the extra layer of like internet, it's just, it just opens you up for more things to go wrong because, um, you know, it's just, there's something to do with anything that's like electronic or anything like that, anything like tech, technology. If it can't go wrong, it will, and so it's like it's always good to just like minimize the things that could go wrong. That's what I always like to do.

Speaker 1:

Good deal Guys. That has been Autofocus for this week. I'm Dan Craft, that's Brooke Galligan. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.