YoloBox Ultra: Small But Mighty Mobile Multicam Streaming!
I first used the original YoloBox back in 2020 and at the time I thought it was a really cool device, an awesome tool, but it was pretty clear that it also needed a bit more polish and a bit more refining because they were attempting to do a lot in, you know, one little compact device. The good news is, more than half a decade later, and several versions of the YoloBox later, The YoloBox Ultra is pretty much everything and more that the original YoloBox set out to be. It really is one of, if not the most powerful video switchers, actually, talked about this in a few other videos, I would definitely call this a production suite, a full on production studio, much more than just a video switcher, pretty much one of the most powerful ones that you can buy. And before going into more details on the YoloBox Ultra, I think it would be an ultra good idea to let you know that they did send this to me for free, not to make a video, just to have and provide feedback on, and actually sent this well over a year ago, so it has, it's been a while, but in that time I've been able to use the YoloBox Ultra a lot, and I really like it, I've gotten a lot of experience with it, and the reason I have not made a dedicated video on it so far, even though you've probably seen it in lots of my other videos, is honestly because it can do so much that I really have no idea of how to put that into a single video, which is, it's a good problem to have, right? Like it's good for the customer because you buy a thing that has a lot of features in it.
It's bad for the person trying to do a review because how on earth do you explain all of those things? So I've decided after having it for as long as I've had, I'm going to do my best to sort of explain it, demonstrate it, and contextualize it as best I can. Even if I do end up leaving out a couple of features or a couple of capabilities. I'm gonna try my very best.
So if you're unfamiliar with what a YoloBox can do, basically this is everything you need to do a multi camera live stream to a pretty high level. So everything that like a basic switcher like an ATEM Mini can do, everything that a full on piece of software like Ecamm Live can do. kind of smashed into one little device here, which is sort of also similar to what the RODECaster video set out to do.
And I will definitely be talking about and comparing these towards the end of this video, because these are the two full on sweets that I talk about a lot, things that do a lot more than just switching, but the YoloBox specifically has four HDMI inputs. Has two USB inputs, well actually three because you can also do USB for audio as an in and out You've got two 3. 5 millimeter audio inputs You've got a network connection and you've got an SD card for recording You've got a SIM card slot for mobile networking and an HDMI output And so what's really cool about this is that means it can be a standalone unit You don't need to connect it to a computer. You don't need anything else It has built in Wi Fi, which is how I use it pretty much all the time But you can also then Use ethernet if you want to or the sim card like I mentioned before to stream you can record to the internal sd card If you want to but of course, it also is a capture card So if you connect it via usb to your computer, you can then use it with your phone Anything else you can stream directly to YouTube you can run it through something like a camera OBS You can use it with zoom. There's just a ton of versatility built in here again More than I can really cover in a single video and as someone who is a former high school digital media teacher where I used To do live streams of events all the time graduations sports games rallies all kinds of stuff It used to take us hours to set everything up, hours to break everything down, hours to run cables.
If I were still doing that today, I would 100 percent base that workflow on this because instead of setting up computers and switchers and converters and all that stuff, you just have the YoloBox. be done with it, especially if you pair it with some kind of wireless video transmitter, instead of running hundreds and hundreds of feet of cable, you can just have video transmitter on each camera, pop it here. You do have a quarter 20 mount on the bottom of the YoloBox, so that way you can, you can put it into your setup or add arms around it or put it on a tripod or mount it or just set it on the desk, however you want. And now the easiest way for me to explain what the YoloBox can do is just to show you in real time. All the different things it can do. So right now you're seeing me and hearing me through a stream on the YoloBox Ultra.
And this is the 1080 quality of that. I'm 1080 because I have so many different inputs. I kind of went crazy and basically connected as much stuff as I could to show you not only the capabilities and the versatility, but also just sort of like, I don't know what it, just all the craziness you can do. And basically, like I said, There's no way I can cover every feature and I'm definitely not even capable or equipped of it, but I do have this overhead camera, which is upside down now. And we're going to talk about that in a second, but I want to just walk you through that and show you everything.
Like I'm just going to take you page by page. We're going to show some features, use some features, talk about it. And it should be, it should be pretty darn fun.
But before that, I do want to jump into my overhead camera here, which you might notice. down. Something that is very cool. Something that, like, currently the Rodecaster video cannot do and lots of other switches cannot do is I have all of my source inputs here, and each one of them has a little gear icon, and now what I can do is I can actually flip things. So I can flip this vertically. And there we go.
And now, oops, I accidentally mirrored it. So I need to do vertical and horizontal. Let's see. I got fat fingers today. There we go. Now I've got vertical and horizontal, and now you can see this without me having to adjust my camera.
I didn't have to, my camera's kind of mounted overhead in one way. So no matter how. I have it positioned.
This is going to look upside down from the camera, but now I can just flip it in here and it looks normal, which is flipping awesome. So the other thing you might notice, I might be able to play with this is you can actually see my overhead camera right here. You can see the lens in this frame. frame a little bit. So there is actually, I mean, there's a lot of things. So let me go here.
I can show you this. There's a lot of things that pop up. You've got chroma key. You can rename scenes. You can rotate, you can duplicate.
You can, if you have a PTZ camera, this is where you can control that. You can also then crop. And so when I want to crop stuff, what I want to do is I basically want to scale this almost all the way up and I want to move this around just to cut out that camera lens. I want to fit it to the frame and then I can click done.
And now camera one. Does not have the, I basically cropped out the tip of my camera, the lens without having to change this camera over here, which is pretty awesome. And I'm just checking, checking out stuff over there. So some other things that I have hooked up, I've got a lot running in and out of the YoloBox Ultra right here. I have four HDMI sources, two USB sources, microphone, audio monitoring, and power, and we can even go a little bit further. But I do want to show you the sources that I'm using.
So this camera right here is my Sony FX3 running through HDMI 1. This camera over here is my Sony a7S III running through HDMI 2. This camera is my Sony a7IV running through HDMI 3.
And then because I wanted to Throw a couple curve balls into the mix. I've never really played baseball, but I can still throw a few curve balls. This camera right here is my red one cinema camera from 2007, which is outputting a 4k signal, even though this is a 1080 stream right here. And that is running into HDMI four.
I didn't have to really do anything crazy to make that work. And then if you want to see the camera, this is that red one cinema camera, the big one right there. If you're asking, Hey, Tom, how am I seeing that camera right now? Well, you're watching me through here. Let's see if I can do any, there we go on the DJI Osmo pocket three. So this is just connected through USB. Now it's tracking me.
I can move around. I can do all the cool stuff that the Osmo pocket can do, but I can also do that with this camera here, which actually I have to hold up my hand and then it should see me and now I think it's tracking me. Yes. This is the Insta link.
Webcam, InstaLink, yeah, it's not a 360 camera, it's just a regular webcam. This also has, you know, tracking capabilities and all that kind of stuff. But what's really cool. And what you can kind of see here through HDMI 3 is that these are USB cameras mixed in with.
HDMI sources. And I didn't have to do anything special to make that happen. I just connected them and they worked all of these cameras, actually.
Uh, even the red, the old school red, and I tried to find the oldest camera I have that had an HDMI output and that worked. So that's the setup that I'm using right now. And the microphone that I'm using right now is the Sennheiser profile running in through this USB connection here. And as soon as you connect a USB source in your audio, it shows up as one of your audio sources. This could be any USB microphone.
This could also be a USB mixer, like a Rodecaster, Rodecaster Pro 2, Rodecaster Duo, that can be connected through here. Although, same with the Rodecaster Video, even though you connect the whole mixer that has all the channels and stuff, it shows up as one audio source. So you don't get to break out all the channels and control them through here. It's just one single audio source, but you can connect a separate, Mixer entirely instead of just a single microphone here.
So that's what I have going on in my switching screen here. And so now I thought it'd be fun to sort of take you through a little bit of everything as much as I can, and just show you what the YoloBox Ultra can do and what some of the features are and how they work. So this menu right here is my overlay screen. And that basically means you can bring in images. Like this is something I loaded onto the SD card.
This is the logo for my adult rec league hockey team. Wonder who designed that super cool logo right there. I can pop that up on screen. I can turn that off.
That's the only graphic or overlay that I've created here, but you don't have to just use graphics like that. I can click the plus icon and then I have all kinds of options. You can put, you know, different clocks.
You can do timers, you can do images, you can do video overlays, you can templates too. So. For example, here's Frank. I know Frank.
Frank is awesome. But I'm, frankly, I am not Frank. So whenever you select a template, you then do get a ton of options.
So overlay name, I can put like, let's put TB if we made one for me. The title, um, I am not Frank, but I, I'm Tommy B today. And we can make my title a little bit bigger. My title being white looks fine, but maybe I want to choose like a, you know, a brighter blue color here.
And. Subtitle color. Maybe I just want that to be black.
If you want to change colors too, you don't have to just use these. You can do color and then you have the whole spectrum there, which is pretty awesome. And let's see, I don't know that I'm chief support.
I am going to be a person. And then I also have options here. In addition to just sort of changing all that, I can also auto hide it after a certain amount of time. So right now.
When I bring up the title, if I click on done, it will just pop up the title there. So hello, that's me right now. It's me. I'm a person. It's true.
And it'll turn off when I turn it off. If I go back into this, I just hold that. And now I can go and edit it. Now I can go down and we can turn on auto hide. And let's just change this to like five seconds for the sake of this example here. And now when you bring this up and you're like, Hey, who's that guy on screen? That's Tommy P and he's a person.
So, there you go. And then it just disappeared on its own. Look, no hands. So, you have a lot of flexibility when it comes to your overlays. And I'm sorry this camera keeps shaking.
It's attached to my desk and I keep moving the desk. I'll try to stop doing that. You have a lot of flexibility when it comes to your overlays and all the different things you can import here. Then we can jump over here to different platforms. So this is when it comes to actually streaming.
These are all the different platforms currently I could stream to, but I can add more and even, you know, custom ones that aren't official platforms right now. Like I said, I am streaming to YouTube, so I don't want to mess with that there. Uh, we can invite guests. I don't have a guest right now, but when you're doing a stream, you can invite a guest. We can go here, you can enter their email to.
To send them a link and then you can have somebody join you as a guest. Let me just turn that off there. And you also have a few options in terms of how your guests work.
And I think there was something else I should actually show you too, before we jump too much into that, is we talked about these video sources a little bit. But I do want to point out everything you can do right now. I have four HTMIs and two USBs, but there's also other things you can add as sources, videos, PDFs, a different live stream, you know, all kinds of stuff.
And then I can also then create different scenes. So one of my sources could be like, you know, a news layout, for example, and then we'll do news layout one. And two. And then there we go. And now, actually I should, I should have, I should have flipped those.
So look, I can swap the video. Perfect. . Um, and now we've got me and the Yolo box right here. And we can even throw in some backgrounds, maybe I don't necessarily need the YOLO box one. So this is getting similar into, if you saw some of my videos on like how the road caster video works is actually incredibly handy to have right here. And you can build scenes within the Road Caster video.
This is very similar to that. Also stuff like you can do in Ecamm live. I will say that the YoloBox has more flexibility in building scenes currently internally than the Rodecaster video does.
So it does definitely does have that advantage. I mean, this looks great. And I did that in two seconds. I could even add in a custom source, which then means I can basically create everything from scratch and I have a ton of flexibility there.
So this one's actually like really helpful. I might leave this for the stream because it's just. It's nice. I'm a little offset. We're a little, I guess we could put comments down there, which since I am streaming, it is possible for me to see comments and I can even pop those up on screen.
So Heather was helping me before I started figuring out how where I wanted my comments to be. And I can actually choose, you know, all the different things for my comments, how big I want them to be, how small I want them to be. Do I want to auto hide them? Which I do usually 15 seconds is a good auto hide for comments.
That's something that I really like to use. So there's. Heather, my mics don't sound on, she said, but that was because we were testing things and I had plugged something into the wrong cable and then I found out my microphone was on.
But that's really nice though that you can just pop up your comments. It can auto hide or I can take it off on my own. So we have a lot of flexibility. That's the, the input stuff. That's the video sources. Now let's talk about, we talked about guests.
Now let's talk about audio because audio is half a video, right? If you go to the audio tab, you basically have this whole mixer, which all with all of these different sources. In my case, it's a lot of HDMI sources and it's also some USB sources as well. USB one and two are my two webcams that have their own microphones and I'm not using those. And USB three is my Sennheiser profile that it's connected through USB.
So that is turned on because that's the one I want to include. If I turn this off, then it would not be working. Not be in the mix. Then I have my program mix.
I can monitor through my headphones. If I want to, you can also add which things you want to monitor by clicking the little headphone icon. And you do have this AFV button, which is not America's funniest videos. But it is audio follows video. Lots of more advanced mixers have this feature and it's really helpful. It basically means when you, and actually even some of the, the less advanced ones, like even ATEMs, you know, basic ATEMs will do this as well.
It basically means when you cut to a camera, it will use the audio from that camera that is different than something like video follows audio, where you will automatically switch to an audio source. To a video source based on the audio. This is your, the reason you would want to use it is you might, for example, have somebody set up, like you could have someone set up over here on this camera with their own microphone and they're far away and you want to cut to them and hear them, but that's generally kind of an unusual setup. That probably wouldn't be what you're doing. Typically audio follows video is really helpful.
If you want to incorporate environmental sounds, like say you were doing a small Sports events. That's what you were streaming. And you had a camera that was kind of down, like in the crowd, right on the sidelines of whatever the sport is. You can hear everybody cheering. You can see everything when you cut to that camera.
Maybe you want to hear some of that fan noise, that crowd noise. And that's going to let you do that whenever you cut to that camera. So it doesn't just look like this isolated, quiet thing. You cut to the camera. You can hear the audio there.
This just lets you mix that in all those different ways, which is pretty fun. And that's, and anytime you add or remove sports events, you can basically how they pop up there. Now you do have a few other audio options. If you want to do things like noise reduction on line in or mic in, or you want to adjust the gain right there, you can do that through that menu right there. Now, moving over to this option, this is a background music option and I don't have anything loaded, but basically what I could do is if I had a music track here, I can then.
Play that at a low volume as background music. So if I were doing a stream and I just wanted to control everything through here, cause that again is, is kind of the bread and butter of the YOLO box is you don't need anything else. You don't even need to plug in an external screen.
Just everything can be done. Through here, including tons of scenes and graphics and overlays and all of that really awesome stuff. So that's, what's happening here.
I don't have any background music to show you there. The next feature is probably my favorite, even though it's pretty niche. It's something that used to be incredibly difficult to do, if not impossible. And that is the ability to pop up a sports scoreboard. So right now I have this basic scoreboard right here, but just like I can click the settings and I have a lot of really cool pre built things, which are not only helpful in terms of design, but maybe also specific sports as well. So let's see, I'm going to use this first one here.
For example, I'm going to turn that on can make it a little bit bigger just by. Scaling it up and moving it over. I like hockey. That's something that I actually really want to use. The Yolo box ultra four is streaming my adult hockey league things.
So now what I can actually do is even go to team one logo. I can add that, edit it from the memory card. I have the teams from my adult hockey league here. I'm going to take my team's logo and add that in. And now that's over here on our first one. I don't want that color.
I want the brighter. Well, maybe this blue, maybe not super bright. There we go.
That looks correct here. The other team, let's say we'll play my old team here. So we're going to grab their logo.
Boom. And their team color is green. So we'll pop that in. And now we already have a little bit more styling here. You know what I'm realizing? The red one is super.
Super loud because it has such a fan. Speaking of hearing fan noise, that's fan noise you don't want to hear. So I'm actually going to turn off this camera so that way we don't hear that fan noise. If you've heard that, that's what it is in the background. We can actually even add in a time option. So in this case we want to do a countdown timer and hockey periods are 20 minutes long.
So in this case we'll do 20 minutes. Boom. done. And now I've got a timer there that I can press this play button and it's going to start counting down. And so what that means is as I'm in the arena and I'm looking at the clock, you know, that's happening when there's a stoppage of play, I can just pause that here.
If I need to reset it, I can just reset it. And then if you're doing something where you're not doing a countdown, but you're doing a count up. Then you can do it that way. And now our timer is going to go up instead of down.
So you have a lot of time options, which is pretty cool. And you can just add goals here. So as our team runs up goals and I continue to hold down a shutout against the other team, they're not going to, they're not going to score at all. And of course, just to be clear, you can put in the other team. I'm someone who literally had to do high school football games at a point where we, we were using PNGs for the overlay. And every time we needed to change the score, what we would do instead is we would like rewrite the PNG.
So it's, it's in there. And then we would just overwrite the file with a new one that had an updated score and like OBS would automatically accept it versus just being able to, you know, just tap the buttons right here and have it work. And it's done. Scoreboard display. If you never need it, you'll never need it. But if you do need it.
You probably see what a big deal is. This is the only switcher device that I know that has a built in thing like that. So it is, that's a huge selling point.
If that's something you need now, jumping over here, we have a replay option. This is also kind of advanced. The fact you can do instant replays. So we're going to go into our replay settings and we're going to say, do 10 seconds of replays. You can do the speed.
So maybe we'll do slow motion, right? We want to see like. I know something amazing in slow motion. We don't necessarily need audio for our replay, same frames per second. We can choose all kinds of different options. Even if you want to put like a logo on your replay, put my hockey team again, why not? And that does not need to be that big.
It can just be kind of small, but I could say like instant replay or something, for example. And then what we can do, you can even preset an intro and an outro, which could be like a graphic or a stinger or a transition or something. And what this means, let's go in here and select our.
sources. So our replay source right now, for example, let's say I'm going to choose HDMI one is the source. So that's my main camera.
That's my, this camera right here, the Sony FX three. Let's say I want to do a replay of that. I'm going to turn this on. And now basically what that means is. Any time I want to do a replay of like the last 10 seconds that happened on that camera, like right now I'm flailing my arms like crazy even though you can't see it, I can press the replay button and we can choose if we want to save it for later or play it now. We want to do it now and it's going to jump in.
Oh, I thought I was doing slow motion, but I did fast motion. Oops. Well, it still worked. You saw what I'm saying? So that was a replay of me, you know, flailing my arms like a crazy person.
And then down here, I can still add in an intro and outro if I want to, or if I want to replay that replay that replay again, later on, so built in instant replay options, you do have auto switching. I'm going to come back to that because that's pretty advanced. We have our YouTube comments.
I talked about that a second ago. We have our recording options. So you can choose, you know, what sources do you want to record? Do you want each individual source? You just want the program output? You can adjust frame rates, bit rates, all that kind of stuff because you can record internally to an SD card or through a connected USB SSD and the internal recording Is nice. I would say that the YoloBox really excels at streaming, which is how you're seeing me right now.
This is a recorded stream. That's where you're going to get just the best quality and things are going to look, you know, as good as they possibly can. The internal recording is good, but I kind of look at it more as like a backup option, and I do want to interrupt that demo just with a memo about internal recording options, because this is something I'm going to talk about later, which is sort of the different approaches between the YoloBox and the Rodecaster video, one thing the YoloBox.
does is it kind of gives you every feature and every capability, but that does come with some limitations that you need to be aware of. So for example, it can do 4k streaming, it can do 4k recording, but it really depends on what you've got running into it. So it can accept signals up to 4k 30. But once you start adding more than one input, that's when your Recording and your streaming could get bumped down to 1080. So my whole demo is a 1080 demo, even though this is a 4K video. I just put the 1080 footage in the 4K project file, probably more information that you needed to know.
But what that really means is it's important for you to understand and test your setup before you start recording or before you start streaming. Don't just plug in a whole bunch of 4K cameras and assume everything is going to be in full 4K because it's probably not. Ultimately, at the end of the day, this is a small Android based computer. And every time you add an input, every time you add something to it, it takes more processing power, and what it needs to do is distribute that processing power in a way that lets everything continue to work. And so that does mean, sometimes you're able to do 4K, and sometimes you're not.
Something I learned while making this video, is that if you really overload everything, like you have the four HDMI inputs, and you have the two USB inputs, The estimation that I got from YOLO themselves was that each USB input takes about two and a half times the bandwidth of a single HDMI input. So when I'm doing four HDMIs and two USBs, my recording quality is not going to be in 4k and it could even potentially result in some dropped frames because I'm maxing out everything that it can do. All of that really means it's very important before you do any streaming, any recording, to test out your setup.
Once you have things set up and you test them out and Things are working the way they should. It's very reliable and you get super consistent results, but it changes depending on the type of inputs, the type of cameras, the USB versus the HDMI. Just be sure to test everything, so while it can record internally to 4K, you're not always going to get 4K recording, and you always want to double check your recording quality before you do something really important where you rely on that quality, whether you're using an SD card or an attached SSD. And now that I've done that, we can transition back to talking about transitions in the demo that I interrupted. We do have some transition options.
Of course, you don't have to just do the cuts like I'm doing right now, but you can use all of these different transitions here. So, you know, we can do that. And now when I go between my sources, we transition and all these cool things. I don't think there's a star wipe, unfortunately, but that's basically if you wanted to use transitions, how you would do that, I just keep my, Simple cut the simplest transition of all and then you do have some other settings you can go into your streaming mode So right now I'm using direct single platform streaming because I'm just streaming to YouTube But if you want to stream to multiple sources, you can actually use YOLOs like own proprietary service, which is pretty awesome that you can, you can stream to multiple things at once. Oops.
Uh, we can also do, this is something I adjusted for the stream. You can adjust your bit rate. You can do encoding frame rates for your stream, which could be different than your recording settings, local video settings. This has to do with video clips played from the YoloBox. What do you want them to do? If you're playing a video.
And you cut away from it. Do you want the video to pause while you're talking and then you cut back to it and the video continues, or do you want the video to continue playing? You know, those kinds of options. That's what you have right here in the local video settings. You also have options on your HDMI output because in my YoloBox right here, I have my four inputs, but there's a fifth HDMI here, which is the output. So if I want to run this to a monitor, what do I want that monitor to show? Program out, program, output, mirrored output, or do I want to do multi view Where then I can actually have settings if I want to show all my sources, I can literally like, show, I can decide what I want each box to be, or I can choose the specific layouts that I want to use, which is very cool if you've ever been limited by multi view outputs in other switchers. We have a USB C out option, which basically means, The USB C output can default to an input, but it can also be an output.
So you can use this as a capture card. You can also flip your video, mirror it if you want to. I don't know why everyone loves mirroring video. It's weird to me. You also have NDI options. You can go through your SD card and delete it and see what you've got on there.
And you can also. Then do portable storage, but I don't have an SSD connected here. And then we've also got some other things like mobile web control, YOLO deck. If you want to configure that. Now the YOLO deck is pretty interesting.
If you look at this, you might say, Hey, Tom, aren't you holding a stream deck? And this is basically YOLO's version of the Elgato stream deck. The big difference being that what makes the stream deck work is the Elgato software. that you have to then put on your computer. So the Stream Deck ties into your computer, you can assign different functions to it through that software, and then you can use it with all your streaming apps and stuff like that. But these are absolutely incredibly helpful to have. So this is sort of a proprietary version of that, Where if you want to have hardware buttons instead of just the touch screen, or you want to have a dual setup, or you want to position things in different places, you can connect a YOLO deck to the YOLO box, and then you, your YOLO box will be decked out with the capabilities of this.
Again, this is all proprietary, but the good news, that means you configure it directly through the YOLO box. So once these are connected, then you can put whatever features you want on the YOLO deck, so that way you can switch between them using hardware buttons, basically the same way you would use a stream deck, you just. Have a lot more versatility, add some more physical controls if you want them, but you don't need to personally, I've used the YOLO box pretty much every time I've ever streamed with it, just solo. I've used the YOLO solo and it's worked really well, but having this is a very nice flexibility option, especially if you've ever thought, I wish I could use a stream deck with the YOLO box. This is the way to do that.
And down here, the way I have my tools configured. You can show what you want to use and what you'll never use. So it's really nice that you have these options and you can reorder them and do whatever you want, depending on your specific workflow. Let's go over now and talk about auto switching, because this is, this is something that can be.
A little complicated, but it's pretty darn advanced and pretty darn cool. And there's two ways of doing this. One of them is really cool. Auto switch is something that I used to try to figure out in Ecamm live on my own.
And then they built it in here, which is really nice. And I think Ecamm also actually built in a version of it as well. What this means, this is not. The camera will cut to wherever the sound is.
This is basically, you have all your different cameras and you can set them to switch automatically. So what I mean by that, let's go to our video sources. I have, you know, several cameras here. We're going to do HDMI, one, two, and three for now, my Sony cameras. Oh, we could even do the news layout. Let's do that actually.
Let's do the news layout also. So we can loop this. We have a main video source.
Let's say the main video source is actually the news. That's like our main thing we want to do. We're not going to do 10 seconds there. We'll do five seconds on the news layout. And then what we can do is we can have these go in sequence.
So that can just go camera one, two, and three, or we can do random. And what's really cool about that is we have all of our different sources and we can choose how long we want to stay on those. I'm going to keep it really short for the sake of like this sample thing that we're doing right now.
We'll just do three seconds. We'll actually, maybe we'll do six seconds on one and then. Five seconds on the other.
So what's nice about this is if you're switching between your cameras and they're going in different orders and they're going at different times. It can feel a little more organic, not like it's just a robot going through like a cycle of cameras, but it can feel like, Hey, we're switching here. We're switching here, staying here for a little longer here, not quite as long. And now that I've got that all set, all I have to do is turn this on and we should now be switching between all of these different things. Now we're over here on this. Look, I have, I'm totally hands free.
This is what I set as the main shot is this news thing here as we. Go through our auto switching and I'm just kind of waiting for that countdown to happen so that it switches to the next scene. Now we're over here to this scene and we're going to be here for a few seconds. And then we're going to jump to our next scene over here for a few seconds. And what you'll notice in this specific case is it's going from these angles back to the news angle.
And the reason for that is because I set the news angle as my. Main video source. If I don't have a main video source, then we're going to do when we auto switch is we're just going to go through these different things in order. So if you have a main source, it will cut to a different angle and then it will cut back to your main source. And then we'll go to the next angle and back to the main source.
If you don't have that, then it's just going to cut through all your sources. In this case, I have it set to do so randomly. So it's going to go through all of these different. Video sources totally randomly until I turn it off.
And that is how auto switching works. Now video follows audio is a little bit different. So now something I've done is I have connected this road video mic NTG into one of the 3. 5 millimeter inputs for my audio. And that's what you're listening to me on here, but I want to have two different microphones so I can do auto switching in different ways. And I'm going to have to try to like set these in different places.
So we can go over here. Into the menu. We can go back over into switching in auto switching. We can choose our audio sources. We want to use Mike.
That's this video, Mike NTG. And we also want to use USB three, which is my Sennheiser profile. And once you select your sources, you get this little interface here that helps you. Kind of assign different things. So Mike is my road video, Mike NTG.
And what I'd like to do is have that be this shot right here. So this is the top down shot of the Yolo box, ultra USB three, which is the Sennheiser profile. Let's have that be my main camera, my Sony FX three HDMI one. We can also set it that if there is no audio, what camera it would go to. And we can set it if.
Actually, let's do this instead of HDMI one, let's do HDMI two for the profile and then HDMI one for the combo. So that means if both are talking at the same time, we're going to hear that. And the reason you would use something like that is say one mic is connected to one camera because you have a person on a podcast or something and you have another person on the podcast and they're on another camera. So it goes over there.
And then if both people are talking at the same time, maybe you would cut to a camera that shows both people. So let's jump back over here. We have everything set. We're ready to go. We do have some options here, like sensitivity, the higher the number, the lower the sensitivity. So I actually want this to be.
Pretty sensitive. And we also have a minimum duration. So in this case, it's two seconds. That means it's never going to cut to a camera for less than two seconds, which is good because you're not going to cut randomly when someone just like sneezes or clears their throat.
That's a nice thing. And then you can even set a threshold of decibels for your switch. So if you want it to be okay, that there's some noise on a microphone, but you don't want it to cause a switch, you can change that right there. So now we're ready to go and we can turn on video follows. So now what we're seeing is this angle here, because the microphone I'm talking into is paired to this specific camera, this overhead camera here, and that's the Rode VideoMic NTG.
And I talk into both, it should cut to this camera over here, and now this camera. It's a little hard to do when you're just one person with multiple microphones. But hopefully you're at least seeing the idea. So that covers As much as I can in essentially real time of showing you what's connected to the YoloBox Ultra and how it works and the different things that you can do and hopefully that gives you an idea, at least some idea of the versatility and all of the different functionality because you can't spell functionality without fun. Okay, so now that we've covered all that I do want to try to contextualize the YoloBox Ultra especially in relationship to the Roadcaster video because these are the two things that I think even though they're very very different in a lot of ways they are the closest competitors because other things like ATEM Minis or the Feelworld L4 or the Ulanzi DD02, I can remember all these product names that I've talked about recently Those are, like I've said in the past, those are mainly for switching.
You plug in multiple sources and you switch between them. You have basic transitions, basic keying, maybe picture in picture options and some simple audio. And that's really where the Yolobox Ultra and the Rodecaster Video, even though they are quite different, they are the biggest difference.
Powerhouses in this, I don't know, this product category, this product segment, whatever business y term you would use to describe them. And that's their prices dictated because you can get something like an ATEM or the Ulanzi for like 300. The MSRP on the Rodecaster Video is 1, 200. The MSRP on the Yolovox Ultra is 1, 400.
So significantly more expensive, but that's because you're also getting significantly more features in both of these. But if you're looking at these and you're thinking, well, which one would be the right one for me to get. The answer is that they are both excellent, but they might be more suited for specific workflows. They might be better suited for specific workflows.
So talking about the YoloBox Ultra, some advantages right off the bat are exactly what I'm holding in my hand. This is the whole device. So the form factor, the compact size of it, the fact you do just have a built in display, you can connect another HDMI display if you want that output, but you don't have to. You have this right here. Touch interface works just as good as a smartphone, and you have a built in battery, which lasts a pretty long time, kind of depends on how much streaming, recording, how many inputs you have, so the way that you're using the device, you know, affects the battery life. So if you're doing a long stream or an important event, it's probably a good idea to plug this into external power just to be safe, but it can definitely get through, you know, an hour, an hour or two pretty intensive live stream using just the built in battery.
Another advantage would be that you do also have some 4k capabilities. Those are, that is the biggest complaint people have with the RODECaster video is it should be 4k. I have sort of planted my flag on this hill of if this could do everything it does and was full 4k It would cost like five or six times as much as it does. So there's just Technological reasons and limitations why everything can't be full 4k all the time It's not a linear thing like 4k is just four times as complicated as 1080. It's not like this linear thing It's very much one of those curves that just goes exponentially More complex and more intense and The thing about 4K also, this sort of a tangent here, I think these companies all know that people want full 4K switchers, full 4K production suites, and they know that if they release that, that would have a really good chance of just dominating everything.
That would be the go to choice that everyone would go to. So the fact that they haven't released that, You know, these companies don't hate making money, probably. So, the fact that that doesn't exist probably means that it's not something that's feasible right now, at least at a price point that the intended audience for these devices is willing to pay. Because that's another thing too, when you're looking at any of these types of switchers, while they do work for content creators and, you know, solo creators and stuff like that, their bread and butter really are things like corporate events, other live events, churches, schools, those types of situations usually not only don't need 4k capabilities, but they're usually not even equipped to handle it, even if you could, like they have no way of even displaying, sharing, streaming, all that 4k stuff.
So 1080 is more than enough for, you know, most of the workflows that people currently use these types of things for. But all that to say, if you do want some 4k, It's hard from 4k capabilities is a thing that I've said like 10 times now. It's hard to say if you want some of that, this is your option because at least you do have some limited options here, even though it can disappear depending on the number of inputs and the type of inputs and all these other variables at play. The YoloBox Ultra also does give you the ultra cool benefit of those many years of refinement. The original YoloBox, like I mentioned, was pretty cool, but kind of rough around the edges.
They update this I swear every time like a couple times a month if not more there's new updates like every time I turn this on there's a new update to install so the number of features they've added and the way that they've refined everything over the years This is a very full featured platform now, much more so than it was originally. And that definitely gives it an edge, because the RODECaster Video can do a lot of really cool stuff as well, but the YoloBox has significantly more features just built right into it. I feel like it is much more capable of fully on replacing something like OBS or Ecamm Live if you don't want to use a computer in your setup at all.
The RODECaster Video can do that as well, just in a much more limited way. And so I definitely do like to use this in addition to those rather than totally replacing those. And as you saw in the demo that I did, you also have so much customization in pretty much every aspect of this. Every feature has a sub menu that lets you dial in things exactly as you want them for your workflow, which makes it so much easier. Just super helpful. And it's also very friendly to different product types.
Like I mentioned on my feel world L4 review, you can put a cool little logo watermark in there. They have room for one of those, but it has to be like a. bin file. It's real specific. The YoloBox, you just pop stuff on the SD card and you just import it there.
You know, PNG, JPEG, whatever. It kind of does a better job at taking whatever you throw at it. And that does also include your inputs. Pretty much every mixer, every switcher that I've talked about, does a great job at accepting pretty much any HDMI source, resolution, whatever. Even if it's only a 1080 switcher, it'll take whatever you throw at it. The YoloBox though, with these two USB inputs, This is the one that I have found most easily accepts USB webcams.
The Rodecaster Video can do USB webcams as well, but it is very picky about which ones will and will not work with it. The YoloBox, I mean, at least the webcams I have available that you saw in the demo, I plugged them in, I did nothing else, and they totally worked, fully featured. Totally no problem at all.
So with that in mind, what are some advantages that the Rodecaster Video has over the YoloBox Ultra? The biggest one that this has over every video mixer, every video switcher that exists is the audio capabilities. Nothing else comes close to the Rodecaster Video in terms of audio because it's not just that you have two XLR inputs here, but you have a Rodecaster Duo. This Rodecaster that's behind me right here, you have one of those. All of that processing power, basically all of those capabilities, just built right in here.
Even though this looks very simple and unassuming, it is incredibly powerful. So nothing else comes close to audio. And that's not just for XLR, but it's also bringing in Rode USB mics. That's also pairing it with Rode wireless devices.
Like the Wireless Go, the Wireless Pro, the Wireless Me, the Interview Pro. So if you're deep into the RØDE ecosystem, like some people I know, this is a really great device because it just connects with all the stuff that you probably already have and you're probably already using. The RØDECaster Video also does have a totally different form factor, so this is totally subjective on what your preference is, but it's, basically the exact opposite of the YoloBox. This is full touch, whereas this is fully tactile and you need to attach a screen to it or run into a computer to see what's happening, you know, in the device itself. But if you want that kind of very traditional hardware feel with buttons and switches and knobs, the RODECaster video, I know that sort of sounds silly, but depending on your workflow, that could be actually a very crucial thing that you need.
The RODECaster video is, it's built like an absolute tank. Like, this is definitely made to stand up to not only professional environments and professional use cases, but also long term use, long term abuse. And another potential benefit to the RODECaster video, this is subjective, of course, whether or not it's a benefit, but it has to do with how the two companies approach their product and their product reliability. And I really like that YOLO and RODE do it totally differently because then that just gives you more options. RODE with the RODECaster video, the thing that they prioritize above everything is reliability.
And that is a reason why it does not have as many features as the YOLObox Ultra. One of the reasons it doesn't have as many features is because it's newer. It hasn't had the time to develop that YOLObox has, but another one is Whatever the RØDECaster video says it can do, RØDE wants it to be able to do that under basically any circumstance. So if you're just one person with one camera trying to just do one simple thing, it's gonna work perfectly. If you're in some crazy event scenario and you're maxing this out as much as possible, It's still going to do everything that it says, you know, if it can do one feature, it can do it under any circumstances is kind of the Roadcaster videos philosophy. And it also means that Road has been a little bit more conservative with adding in features and updates and things to the Roadcaster video because they don't want something to work most of the time, it needs to work every of the times.
Now that is not saying that the YoloBox is not reliable, but it puts a lot more responsibility on the user to actually understand the device, because YOLO's philosophy seems to be pack in as many features, put in as many options, put in all the ideas as possible, and then the users can decide what they do and don't want to use. What that means, though, is not everything works in every situation. 4k being a really good example.
Yes, you can stream 4k. Yes, you can record 4k, but as soon as you start adding in more inputs, as soon as you start throwing in USB webcams to take up some bandwidth, now things get bumped down to 1080. So if you just buy this thinking that you're going to get four to six inputs of full 4k all the time, no matter what, That's not going to happen.
But at least you do have some 4k capabilities. Like I said earlier, that just means it puts more responsibility on you as the user to understand the device that you're using. Once you set things up, I can't emphasize this enough, it is incredibly reliable.
I haven't had any problems once I have it up and running. The thing is, Once you get your stuff connected, you need to do some test runs to make sure that everything's working, to adjust everything properly, and then it's going to work okay because the way that it works changes depending on how you're using it and what it's connected to. And that is a very different workflow than something like the Rodecaster Video. Which just works exactly the same all the time, no matter what, but doesn't have as many features. So even though I'm sure I did not cover everything that the YoloBox alter can do, because I just don't even think that's possible, and I'm sure that by the time I finish editing this video and upload it, there's going to be some update and some new features added to this that are not included here.
Hopefully that gives you an idea of how it works, what its capabilities are, and how it compares to things like the road caster video, and then other simpler switchers like the feel world, the alonza and the aem. And speaking of switchers, let's switch over here and thank everyone for helping support the channel through YouTube channel memberships. I recently moved everything over to YouTube channel memberships, and it has actually been a ton of fun. So thank you for that. And if you want to know more about the Road Caster video or some of the other switches I've talked about recently, check out one of these videos right here.
2025-03-02 21:11
