Chris Hamady

Our son has been asking us for years to create a YouTube channel for him so that he could publish Minecraft tutorials and "let's plays" online. We finally aquiesed and setup his YouTube channel. That was the easy part (not really). The next thing we had to do was figure out how to capture his tutorials. Prototype 1 included putting a Firewire camcorder in front of the TV and recording the screen directly to iMovie while he demonstrated Minecraft. This resulted in a borderline bad video image and less than effective audio capture.

Prototype 2 had us routing the video and audio into an ElGato EyeTVHD capture box connected to a Mac computer. We used a Playstation AV component video adapter. My son would then control the Playstation while watching the action on the computer. The trouble with this was the gameplay was somewhat lagged. There was nearly a full second lag between his changing a setting via the Playstation controller and the video showing the change. He was extremely frustrated and did not want to record. I don't blame him.

Back to the drawing board. Prototype 3: I tracked down a cable that would split the component video signal from the Playstation 3 into two component video signals. The first video signal went directly to a component input on our television, and the second went to the Elgato EyeTVHD. A RadioShack lavalier condensor microphone was then connected to a Mackie 1202VLZ mixing board, and the audio tape outputs from the mixer were also sent to the Elgato box. Using this scenario, my son is able to watch the Playstation output flawlessly on the TV while he plays, and we simultaneously record the same video output as well as his audio commentary to the Mac computer using the ElGato capture box.

I've created a workflow in case anyone wants to see how this is all connected.

Here's a link to his channel if you want to see Episode 1 and Episode 2.

As Stampy says, Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.