Good camera for live streaming outdoor events?

For Macbook Air M1, I have one, I'll try to see what happens to the battery life if I stream with the OBS beta for apple silicon. I don't need to live stream in the field, but it's an interesting topic.

Alright OBS 28 is now stable for Apple Silicon and I have time to do the test.

setup:

- connect Blackmagic ATEM mini pro via USB-A adapter to macbook (using usb-c directly it charges the macbook!) this behaves like a 1080p usb webcam
- OBS 28.0.3 using x264 Software CBR 30fps 2500kbit/s
- OBS using hardware ABR 2500kbit/s (attention!)
- Stream over wifi to a on LAN running nginx with rtmp-module
- computer used: Macbook Air M1 2020 16GB RAM

As of macOS 12 the hardware encoder only allows ABR, macOS 13 will allow CBR with the hardware encoder(!), hence me doing the test with ABR to guess-timate the battery usage.

I was running the Stream for 30minutes for each test.

• x264 CBR takes about 7.5% CPU: 5% battery loss in 30min
• VT hardware ABR takes about 4.2% CPU: 5% battery loss in 30min

Looks like the M1 doesn't really care it is streaming, amazing tech that new silicon.

I tried to be as realistic as I can by only running OBS on the macbook Air, actually encoding an incoming webcam source and actually streaming it over Wifi to the outside. However there's room to optimise the power usage, my laptop screen was always on for example. On the other hand, outdoors is a different beast, could be hot which means the fan-less macbook air might throttle it's CPU. Or could be cold and the battery loses some of its capacity. But generally I'd be optimistic to do a 8h stream with it, on batteries!

Side note: the ATEM mini became much cheaper today, if you want to avoid having a laptop running this is now an even better option