Elgato Facecam - any advice and also experience with latency please?

[Phil1]

Many apologies if this is the wrong forum, it's just that I thought that if anyone really knows about this you guys will.

The problem concerns getting a much better image and sound than my basic Logitech webcam. The reviews suggest the Elgato Facecam is the best and most reliable webcam below £200. The main usage will be Zoom, at least initially.

I've tried various cameras with a cheap video link & separate mic (RODE Videomic Pro) but found lots of problems getting a picture, also the autofocus played up and there was a disconcerting latency.

So I am looking for a replacement videocam. However, while the internet reviews recommend the more expensive Razer and Logitech etc, Amazon reviews tell of endless problems with all of them, except the Elgato Facecam. It seems time to consult the experts!

Has anyone any experience of using the Elgato Facecam? Of course it doesn’t have its own mic so would there be any latency problems with it and the Rode Videomic Pro or do webcams have no latency to speak of?

Any and all advice very gratefully received as from my questions you can see I’m out of my depth!

Many thanks

Phil

 

[Entropy512]

Many apologies if this is the wrong forum, it's just that I thought that if anyone really knows about this you guys will.

The problem concerns getting a much better image and sound than my basic Logitech webcam. The reviews suggest the Elgato Facecam is the best and most reliable webcam below £200. The main usage will be Zoom, at least initially.

I've tried various cameras with a cheap video link & separate mic (RODE Videomic Pro) but found lots of problems getting a picture, also the autofocus played up and there was a disconcerting latency.

So I am looking for a replacement videocam. However, while the internet reviews recommend the more expensive Razer and Logitech etc, Amazon reviews tell of endless problems with all of them, except the Elgato Facecam. It seems time to consult the experts!

Has anyone any experience of using the Elgato Facecam? Of course it doesn’t have its own mic so would there be any latency problems with it and the Rode Videomic Pro or do webcams have no latency to speak of?

Any and all advice very gratefully received as from my questions you can see I’m out of my depth!

Many thanks

Phil

For the most part, probably not the correct forum. I'm not sure what would be here on dpreview.

What do you mean by "cheap video link"? Which cameras? How can autofocus play up if you've put a camera with HDMI output into manual focus mode? (I've used my Sony A7M3 with an Elgato Cam Link for some video conferences, I put it in manual focus mode and prefocus on where I'll be sitting.) I used a separate Bluetooth headset which is usually pretty bad for latency, but it was fine for the call. (Audio problems were always on the other end, such as one person attempting to use their laptop as a speakerphone...)

Pretty much all of the "cheap" HDMI capture solutions do not support hardware compression, so if you're having latency problems with any of them (manifesting as an audio sync mismatch), something is really strange. If you mean end-to-end latency between you and other people on the Zoom call - there's nothing that will help you unless Zoom can reconfigure its audio codec to reduce latency at the cost of quality/bitrate. But I'm pretty sure Zoom's servers re-encode everything anyway for a multipoint conference.

The Elgato Facecam advertises itself as supporting uncompressed video, so if you have a latency problem with that, your problem lies elsewhere. I know the Logitech C920 has some significant framerate/resolution limitations in uncompressed mode - 1080p at high framerates needed H.264 which has a latency penalty if done in hardware on most cheaper webcams.

 

[Phil1]

Many thanks for your helpful reply.

I was using AF as recommended in a video which sounded reasonable as the DoF would be quite small at the short distances used, but I now realise that I should have been much more adventurous & used MF.

When I did get the camera working there was a disconcerting lag between the video on my screen and the sound when I spoke. I understand that the Elgato Camlink (a possible alternative solution) has a much lower latency in this respect than the very cheap version I have but even with this, the example I found on the Internet showed delay which was a lot less, but still very annoying. So, all in all, I thought it would be simpler to go for a good webcam, even if it needed a decent mic and fortunately I have the Rode Videomic Pro which I think will probably be OK for this purpose.

From what you say, the Elgato Facecam has low latency so I am hoping this will solve the problem.

Thank you very much again

Phil