(00:00):
This is quite possibly the world's most advanced webcam. Although calling it a webcam is a bit of a disservice because what it really is is a plug-and-play 4K60p, Micro Four Thirds interchangeable lens camera with Time of Flight, virtually instant, autofocus and AI-driven exposure enhancement that can operate 24/7 without overheating, and it's from YoloLiv, the company that brought us the YoloBox, the all-in-one live streaming, camera-switching solution. But you don't need a YoloBox to use the YoloCam. You can plug it right into your computer over USB, just like a webcam. Let's get into it.
(00:42):
This is the YoloCam. There's not a whole lot to the hardware, so we're going to start with a quick tour and then we'll jump into the software. First of all, on the front you can see the mount for the Micro Four Thirds lens. This does work with any Micro Four Thirds lens, so that's a lot of lenses from Panasonic and Olympus, however, it has been optimized for two specific lenses – the Panasonic 25mm f/1 .7, and the Panasonic 15mm f/1.7, which is what I have here that I'll be using. While other lenses certainly do work, and you can again attach any Micro Four Thirds to lens to this, these are the ones that the autofocus and the auto exposure will work the best with. On the front here you'll see the “time of flight” sensor; that is the LiDAR sensor that allows the camera to autofocus so incredibly quickly, and of course you're going to see this once we hook this up to the computer.
(01:26):
That's all there is on the front. If we flip it over to the back, you'll see that it has a few ports on here, but not much. You've got two USB ports. This one is for power and this one is for data which supports UVC, which means that you can plug this into your computer and operate it simply as a webcam. Also over that USB port is how you'd control the camera through the Windows software. Now currently the software is only running on windows, however, a macOS version is in development. To the left of that, you have the HDMI port, which gives you full 4K60p output. While the USB port is limited to 1080p, the full 4K can be output over HDMI. And then finally you have the microphone input, which can be switched between mic level and line level in software. There are no buttons on the camera;
(02:10):
everything is controlled through the software. The only other things to point out on the camera itself are the cold shoe on the top; handy for mounting a microphone – and a 1/4-20 port on the bottom. And yes, this is the bottom. The camera has been designed to be used vertically. It can of course be mounted horizontally as well, but it is designed for the vertical live selling market that's extremely popular in China and is starting to grow in Europe and Americas. So this camera is designed to be mounted this way, but if you do want to mount it to the side… it doesn't have a 1/4-20 on the bottom, but it does come with a mounting bracket. So you can attach this on and away you go, and you'll see once we get into the software that you can operate it either way; there's a switch in software to rotate it.
(02:49):
Other than that, there's nothing to look at on the camera. Let's take a look at what else comes in the box. There are a couple of extra long USB cables, one USB-A and one USB-C, both of which connect to the two USB-C ports on the back. And these are both locking cables, which is really, really nice. So you plug that in there, screw that in, and you've got a perfectly mounted cable that's not going to come loose. Now, which cable goes into which does matter; there is a label on each cable that tells you which one's for power and which one is for data. Other than that, you've got that mounting bracket I mentioned earlier and a power brick, which does have removable tips and it comes with a variety of different tips for different regions. That's everything that comes in the box. So let's go ahead and get this thing up and running.
(03:29):
For the rest of this video, you're going to see through this camera, I'm going to turn off these cameras and only operate it through the webcam here, and I'm going to be running this through my PC of course. However, you're going to see me operating this on a Mac just because it's easier for me to record the Windows screen through there. It's being done over remote software, but again, it runs on Windows. You're just going to see it on a Mac. Let's get it set up. The camera is now ready to go. I've got my 15mm lens mounted, my RØDE Wireless Pro microphone on the top, on the cold shoe, and of course plugged into the back. And then my USB-C for power, for data, and the HDMI all plugged in. This is the YoloLive Compose software. We're running out on Windows PC and the very first thing that I'm going to do is do a full camera reset so that you can see what the experience is like straight out of the box.
(04:17):
As you'll see, there is little to no configuration needed, but there are a ton of options if you really want to dive deep into the camera. So we'll start with a reset. Now that it's reset without doing anything else, I want to show you how good the auto focus works. So obviously I'm in focus now. I'm going to pick something up as if I was doing a live selling and just hold it up to the camera and you can see there that the auto focus is super, super quick. It's not just locked onto my face. Even if I hold it down here, it's locking onto the focus on the subject. So it is just grabbing whatever is closest. Now, as you'll see when we get into the software configuration, we can change how that operates, but this is just straight out of the box and it works great.
(04:56):
The distance for me from the camera right now… (haha) I'm looking for, my tape measure… is approximately 110 centimeters, so to my face is 110 centimeters. When I hold up the object, so I hold this up, I will measure that out. It is currently about… let's call it 50 centimeters to the sensor; give or take. So this is a great comfortable distance for this type of setup. Now, this shot seems a little bit wide, so the first thing I'm going to do is actually crop it down just a little bit. Now, because this is not a zoom lens, I'm going to crop it in software, but again, I've got a 4K sensor, so I've got plenty of pixels to work with here. So I'm going to start by going to the zoom setting and just cropping this in a little bit just to make it a little bit tighter like I might use for a demo like this.
(05:43):
So again, now if I bring this up, we have perfect time of flight, auto focus, nice and quick. Alright, let's dive into all the different settings in the software. Starting with the picture settings, the first thing you'll notice is you've got Landscape versus Portrait. Of course have it mounted in portrait mode. If I click the Landscape button, that's just rotating it in software. Nothing's actually changing in the camera. That's just so that we can do the rotation to preview it properly in software. HDMI Output; I'm not going to push the button now because that'll change what I'm actually recording on this output here. However, you can see that there's auto, 4K, 1080p, or 720p. It is always going to output 60 frame per second. So right now it is recording at 4K60, which I can see on my recording display over here. Under Image Settings, you've got something here that's going to be coming soon.
(06:30):
There's this Image Version that right now is just set VO default or V-zero default. There is no other option. More options will come, but you can manually go in here and change the Sharpness, Contrast, and Saturation of this. So if I take the sharpness up – let's just take it all the way up – you can see there's quite a lot of artificial sharpening here. It's a bit too much. If I take that all the way down, it's a little bit softer and that really is just going to depend on what you're doing. You may find for example that if you over sharpen some things, you might get a moiré pattern in clothing, so you may need to adjust that or you might just want to leave it at the default. Contrast and saturation; same thing. If I take up the contrast, it's going to get pretty contrasty pretty quickly, but if that's what I want, I can do that or I can back that off to make it a bit flatter.
(07:12):
And the same thing with the saturation. I'll go ahead and set that back to default, take the saturation and crank that way up. Definitely too much or way down if you want to do a black and white video for some reason. So there's the controls in there. Then you have Distortion Correction. I'm actually going to take my zoom all the way back out and then take the Distortion Correction and turn that off. And you can see around the edges of the frame, there's a little bit of lens distortion that is being corrected for if I toggle that off. So for some reason you want it off or it just isn't working well with your lens, you have that option in there. And then Lens Shading Correction doesn't really make a difference on this lens. You can see a tiny little bit of vignetting that is de-vignetting when I turn that on;
(07:50):
if your lens is getting a bit more vignetting, you might want to play with that setting as well, but I'm just going to leave it all at the default and now let's zoom back in just a little bit again. That's everything under Image Settings. Next up is Focus. This of course is a biggie. So first of all, you have Focus Channel. It doesn't matter if you only have one of these cameras, but if you have multiple cameras, you can have multiple focus channels to make sure that they're not interfering with each other. Then you have Type; Autofocus Continuous, Autofocus Single, or Face autofocus, and under that your Focus Box; Large, Middle or medium, Small and then a custom box that you can position or scale however you want. For most uses, Middle is probably your best bet; even though large is the default right now,
(08:31):
Middle seems to give us the best performance with always focusing on whatever it is that I bring up into screen without accidentally grabbing something else. I'm going to go ahead and leave it at middle for now. Going back up to autofocus, you have AF-C (continuous), which of course is what we're seeing now. Then you have AF-S or AF Single. So now at this point, if I hold something up, it's not going to focus on it. But if I wanted it to essentially manually focus – focus and lock on something – I could position something in screen, go ahead and tap on it – you see it focuses on that – and now it's going to stay focused on that. So if I wanted that manual focus experience, that's essentially how I do that; AF-S and then put something in the frame, tap on that, and away we go.
(09:11):
And then you have auto focus Face and you can see here that it has great face detection following my face around. If I do this and I hold something up, now it's not going to focus on that because it's always staying on my face. So this is very much going to depend on the type of video you're doing. Are you doing stuff with your hands where you don't want the camera to possibly focus on anything other than your face or do you want the type of focus where whatever you hold up is always going to be in focus even if it's not blocking your face? Obviously if I block my face, that works great, but even if I don't, that works great as well. So it's just up to you and what you're doing. When you go to Custom Focus Box here, you can actually rearrange this, scale this… position it wherever you like.
(09:50):
It'll warn you if you go out of range in there, which happens if you go into the corner. But if I always wanted it to focus, let's say at the top of the screen, I could do that in here or a focus at the bottom wherever you want. So you have complete control over that as well. But again, middle or large seems to work really well for most use cases. Focus Enhancement is designed to help with focusing on really small objects. I haven't really found much of a difference in there (maybe I'm not using small enough objects), but if you do find that it's having a difficulty grabbing focus on something really small that you're holding up, try toggling that setting off or on. And then finally there is Focus Speed. Now Standard, as you can already tell, is very, very fast. I will say that going into Rapid makes it faster, but also a bit more unreliable.
(10:34):
Although right now it's working pretty good, so that's pretty good, but I think I'll just leave it in Standard because I know from previous testing that Standard works great. But if you do want that focus to go a little bit faster and you find that it works for your particular setup; great, go for it! Next up under focus is Zoom, which we already looked at. So just to see how far we can zoom in; we can zoom in about that far. It looks like about 2:1, or all the way back out. I'm going to set that right about there again. Underneath that is Exposure. So here you have Auto Exposure to start and then you have full Manual Exposure, and then you have the AI exposure that I talked about earlier. So let's start with auto. On auto, obviously it's auto exposure, but underneath that you'll see there's an anti flicker, “close”, not close. It basically means “off”. It's kind of a bad translation, but that is off. And then there's 50 and 60 hertz. Now I'll show you something. I'm going to turn on my overhead lights here.
(11:34):
Okay, it took me a while to find the right combination, but we've got it. You can see the flickering in the lights in the back room in there. I'm in Europe, so I'm on a 50 hertz cycle power and those lights in the back there are flickering. So to eliminate that flicker, all I have to do is click on the 50Hz setting in Anti Flicker and it goes away. So that's great. If you're getting that flickering, just toggle that or it may work fine with it closed or off. I'm going to turn my good lights back on here, give me a second. Okay, that's much better. Alright, let's keep on going through the settings in here. So anti-flicker. Now it doesn't matter with these lights, so I can go ahead and turn that back off. Under Blurring, you have high, medium, low and custom, which all that really is is changing the aperture setting on the camera.
(12:15):
This is an f/1.7 lens, so with high blurring, we're at the highest aperture. If I click on Middle, it's going to drop down. If I click on Low, it's going to drop down even farther and you can see the exposure of the camera compensating for that change, most likely adjusting the ISO. I'm going to go ahead and set it back to high because I do like that, but of course if I want to do it manually and I punch in any setting in here; you can see that it drops to custom. Exposure Compensation underneath that; if you need to make the image a little bit lighter or darker, that's what that is for. Then you have full manual exposure so you can adjust the Aperture, the ISO, and the Shutter Speed however you like. I'm going to go ahead and leave it in auto because auto works really well.
(12:52):
And then finally there is the AI button. Now the AI setting is an interesting option that uploads data to the cloud and tries to not only determine the best exposure based on the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed, but also do some deep learning and adjustments to other parts of the image, kind of like your smartphone would do. Now in this type of environment, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference, but we're going to run it anyway just to see what it shows for this particular setup. I'll go ahead and click on the AI button and click start and you have to choose basically what aperture you want. Again, I'm going to leave it at high for high blurring and then click Confirm. The first time you do this, it is going to prompt you to log in. It is using cloud services, so it needs you to log in, but that doesn't cost anything.
(13:33):
It's just a free account and then it will take some time here to run its calculations and return a result. Now that it's completed has given me three different options. The one on the left is probably the best there, so I'm going to choose that and click confirm. Now, is this really any different or better than the automatic setting we had before? For this particular setup, I'm going to say it seems about the same, but of course your mileage may vary. It is absolutely worth trying it out in whatever setup you're in to see if it gives you something better than what the straight up auto does. Let's move on! Underneath this, we have White Balance Settings; here you've got Auto white balance, which works really, really well. But if you do want to offset that, you can either grab this little chit to move it around and shift the colors a touch, or you can go full manual, dial in your white balance in temperature kelvin, and then also add a blue or red offset to that as well.
(14:24):
I'm just going to go ahead back to auto and set it back into the middle, which is 10 and 10 for center and center because that works pretty good. Then you have your Audio Settings. Microphone type; you can choose between Line In or Mic Level In, and then you have noise reduction you can turn on or off. If you need to, you have an audio latency setting, so that will delay the audio so it can catch up with the video. What I've found is that they're extremely close to being in sync by default, so I hadn't even bothered to adjust it. And then you also have Automatic Gain Control. Once that's all done, you can save your custom setting. So I'll save this custom scene and I'll call it “studio_2”, and that's it. Now I've got my custom setting ready to go. To recall a custom setting, go to the scene menu, and here you can choose the different settings that you might have played with.
(15:12):
There's one other really cool thing up here, and that is the Color Wheel. Now, this is very, very interesting and could allow you to do some very precise color correction, which may be very important if you are demonstrating a product, for example, and you want to make sure that the manufacturer's product colors are accurately represented on screen. So let's just say I want to adjust the purple and blues in the background here from my lights. I start by clicking on the color that I want to alter. You'll see it opens up that part of the color wheel, and then in the color wheel, I can click the color that I want it to shift to. So if I click over here, it pulls up more towards red, here it pulls up more towards blue, and you can see that color changing in there. Let's do it on my shirt.
(15:50):
I'll click on my shirt there and pull that more towards a darker blue or more towards green, and you can see it changing the color of my shirt in there. I'm adding multiple color points in here, so you can actually do this to multiple points in the scene. Let's also grab the red up here in the corner and we'll pull that more towards orange. So now I've got three different samples going all at once, and if I want to preview what it looked like before, just long press on this button here and that'll give you a before and after. There's an advanced version as well. And here in the Professional mode, you have what appears to be a color warp tool. For DaVinci Resolve users, this might look a little bit familiar! The Color Warp tool is incredibly powerful in Resolve, and you have a lot of that functionality in here.
(16:29):
It's definitely quite advanced, but you can take any one of these control points and change its hue, saturation, and brightness, and then of course save presets for this, for all the colors in your scene. It's pretty wild, but I think we'll just go ahead and leave it in the Rapid version. Now that you've seen how easily you can configure the YoloCam, I want to show you how easily you can integrate it into any system. Starting with YoloLiv's own YoloBox Instream. Now, this is the one that is designed for vertical streaming. It can take both USB and HDMI input. So we're going to take the USB from the camera that's currently going into the computer and plug it directly into the box here. So I'll just grab that USB, plug it into the webcam input on the YoloBox Instream, and there it is. So that was easy. Next, let's use an HDMI input. And for this I'm going to go into the YoloBox Extreme. However, the YoloBox extreme is for landscape streaming, so I'm going to rotate this camera, which means we need to do a little bit of configuration here so that you can see what's going on behind the scenes. Let's switch cameras like that.
(17:39):
Okay, I think I've got everything in place. You can see there's a whole lot of extra gear on the table here; we're going to connect it to all of this. Again, starting with the YoloBox Extreme. So let's take the HDMI from the YoloCam and just pop that into input one on here, and with no additional configuration, it just works. There we go. Now we've got video over HDMI, so a higher quality signal going into the YoloBox Extreme. And remember that the Extreme can do 4K, so the 4K output from the YoloCam. We'll now have a live stream in 4K with this camera using the YoloBox extreme. Another cool thing to know is that coming soon, you'll actually be able to control the YoloCam from the YoloBox directly, but for now, let's go ahead and configure this onto another piece of hardware.
(18:26):
Take the HDMI out of there, and let's plug this into the RØDECaster Video. Let's launch the RØDECaster software RØDE Central, open the Scene Builder, and there we go. There's that camera input working perfectly inside of RØDE Central. The next thing I want to do is connect it to the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO, so we'll just disconnect it from the RØDE and plug it into the ATEM. Here's the multi-view, and there we go. Working in the ATEM, as you would expect; just plug-and-play. Super easy. The last place I want to connect it to is my Mac. Now, you will need a Windows PC computer to be able to configure the software as you saw, but also as you saw, even at its default out of the box settings, the camera works just fine. But if you want to tweak it, you're going to need a PC until the macOS software comes out.
(19:14):
But just to show that it does work with the Mac today, let's grab this USB cable, and I'm going to take a USB-A to C adapter because my MacBook Pro only has USB-C. Plug this guy in… launch Zoom. Open the settings, go to video, take it off the FaceTime camera over to the YoloCam, and there we go. That's it. Just plug and play and it works perfectly. That's how easy it is to get the YoloCam working with any system over either USB or HDMI, all the way up to 4K. Again, as you can see, it is total plug-and-play; simplicity at its finest, super easy to use, and a really good quality picture. If you want to know anything more about the YoloCam, click on the links in the description or add some comments down below, and I'll be sure that my friends from YoloLiv are there to answer the toughest questions for you. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.
Comments from YouTube