I went to the effort of travelling to my local tech shop to buy a video capture card. The purpose of this capture card was so my son and I could capture good quality gaming footage as well has have the ability to have face capture and mic commentary capture included in the footage.
After much deliberation we left the store with a 3rd Earth Media streaming pack. The pack itself seemed like good value. It had a mic, a boom arm for the mic, the capture card, one hdmi cable, a USB c to USB a cable as well as a ring light and a stream camera. The gentleman who assisted me was certain I now had everything I needed to video capture with style. I even told the gentleman who served me that I would be happy to be his lab rat. I have since eaten my words. Being the lab rat is a horrible experience.
As I started to removed the capture card contents form its box a feeling of dread came over me. It was immediately evident I had made the wrong decision. Everything in the box was cheap to the touch but I thought I would perceiver and continue onwards, after all I was keen to get setup, so was my son. After fighting with the cheap mic boom for a good twenty minutes we finally had the kit together. We were good to go. Except we weren’t, what followed for the next three hours was one drama proceeding the other. We would gain video footage but than lose audio playback in the recording. We would fix and than we would gain audio recordings only to have the video feedback freeze up. We would fix and have both video and audio feedback returned only to lose the mic volume completely. This went on for hours. Every time we thought we had caught a break our hopes were dashed to pieces until it got to the point where I thought an aneurism was almost upon me. Still aneurism free I had finally come to the conclusion that it was time to return this accursed item to the depths from whence it came. It was a peaceful transfer of power. I simply traded the gear in for the Elgato HDs+. Problem solved.
Lesson learnt. Don’t be cheap. Buy Elgato. Ditch 3rd Earth.