Month: July 2022

How to Maintain Online Privacy

Online privacy as a concept has evolved and changed as time has gone on. While it still includes things like never giving out your personal information, new ways we communicate can impact your online privacy. Anything could leak information online, from screen sharing to what’s behind you in a video call, so maintaining online privacy is paramount! So no matter if you’re a content creator, entrepreneur, or even an educator, we’ll discuss some tools and tips to help!

Online Privacy While Screen Sharing

Always be aware when sharing or recording your screen. If you’re hosting a webinar on eCommerce or recording a video about online deals, check if you’re logged into your accounts in your browser or not. A lot of the time, your zip code will be stored, revealing your location. There are, however, a couple of ways to remedy this.

If you are screen recording with XSplit Broadcaster, queue up the sites you will be sharing, then use the color matte tool to block the areas that can reveal your location. You can also use a VPN to spoof your location, so if you accidentally allow a website to detect your location, it won’t reveal where you actually are.

A person sitting on the floor using a laptop that is a part of online security.
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Hide Your Background

Working by a window can be pretty nice for your mental health. However, sometimes your window can reveal your location. You can easily circumvent this by removing, replacing, or blurring your background with XSplit VCam. XSplit VCam uses AI to remove and replace your background in any video application. Not only can you use images, but you can also use a YouTube video or a gif as your background! You can use any webcam or even your cell phone.

So people can think you’re in Italy, while you’re safe in Romania! Or are you? They’ll never know!

Password Management

It’s been a rule of the internet since the beginning, but many people still don’t follow it. Never use the same password more than once. The second there is a data leak, or just one of your accounts is hacked, now all of them are. However, strong passwords are almost impossible to remember, especially as you increase the number of websites you use.

This is where password managers come into play. Now I use LastPass, but basically, all managers work in the same manner. You install a plugin to auto-fill your passwords and generate unique passwords for each site.

The password manager has a single login, which creates a point of failure, so make sure to do something special for that password, as long as you can remember it. Set a recurring date on your calendar for digital spring cleaning, where you clear out all your cookies and change your passwords.

A person using a laptop in a public space is a place to consider your online privacy.
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Private Search Engines

Speaking of cookies, aren’t you tired of spending all your hard-earned money because targeted ads are just too good these days? So you can reduce some of that endless harvesting of your data through search results by using a private search engine.

A page like Startpage will block cookies from being generated from your searches and when visiting various pages. You can install this as a plugin to Chrome, but generally, having a different web browser for your work is good, especially if you’re using a work PC. You don’t want any risky searches popping up in auto-fill. There are alternate tools as well, such as duckduckgo and hidemysearches.

Secure Messaging for Online Privacy

Having messaging services open while streaming or sharing your screen in a meeting is risky. Whatsapp will reveal phone numbers, and Facebook Messenger will reveal, well, I mean, Facebook just wants everyone to know your business, right?

So if you’re doing any type of screen capture while broadcasting, it’s probably best to keep your messaging services closed. Discord does offer a streamer mode for just these circumstances. Discord’s streamer mode will hide personal information like user IDs, hides server invite links, and disable any pop-up notifications.

Best of all, it is automatically activated when it detects that software like XSplit Broadcaster is open, so there is no need to panic if you’re live and notice that Discord is open.

One final tip would be, don’t log in on your browsers or use a different browser when you’re live anywhere. Use incognito modes and stay aware of what you’re doing!

How to Hold Successful Virtual Events

Virtual events are here to stay, even as the world returns to normal. The ability to keep costs low while hosting a more comprehensive range of speakers and guests from around the world is something that event organizers will want to take advantage of in the years to come. However, if you’re looking to make your event stand out from others, we have a few tips on how you can improve virtual events.

Rehearsing your virtual events

Nothing is worse for the viewer or producer than hearing “we’re having technical difficulties.” No matter how technically savvy your guests may be, it’s always essential to have a tech rehearsal before the event. Test that your guest knows how to use their camera and un-mute their microphone. With your virtual event, this will save you a lot of hassle in the long run.

Make sure everyone has a call time at least 15 minutes before they are live so you can do final checks. If they are displaying any materials like videos or slides, ask that they send these to you in advance so you can verify they are working correctly. They can always view these items in a preview window you can send them. Something you can learn more about here.

Virtual events taking place on a laptop with a mug next to it on a table.
Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

Controlling the scene

While your speakers might be the experts in their field, they may not know the basics of live stream production. This, after all, isn’t what they are there for. They are taking part in your virtual event to share their expertise.

I’m sure you’ve seen many events with chaos in the background or guests not centered in the frame. XSplit VCam solves both these problems. You can blur, remove or replace a guest’s background, and auto-framing will keep them perfectly centered in the frame.

Best of all, this doesn’t even require much setup. Using the team license manager, you can send your guests a license and standard backgrounds for all members you’ve invited to your team account. They just need to look out for the email. This will give everyone a unified look at your event.

Audience interaction

The beauty of virtual events is it is easier to moderate and incorporate the audience into the event. Now, of course, there is a live chat, but depending on the platform you are using, you will have access to tools like polls or be able to incorporate a chatbot for more interactive activities for the audience.

Polls can be done in a couple of different ways. Usually, there are integrated into the platform, or you can polls like the Facebook Polls source in XSplit Broadcaster to automatically count reactions from the audience. It’s good to encourage your speakers to incorporate multiple choice questions in their presentations to interact with the audience.

Depending on the type of show and audience, you can also encourage your speakers to watch the chat. Just remind them not to get too distracted by it. If you have an audience that may get a bit unruly or you are talking about a controversial topic, be sure to have proper moderation.

A person taking part in virtual events on their laptop talking to another person on the screen.
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash

Bonus Virtual Events Tips

Here we have three smaller tips that should help run your virtual event successfully. First up, make sure your schedule is accessible to the audience. Put it up on the screen as a graphic, have a chatbot post a link to the schedule, and have it on your page of whatever platform you are broadcasting to. Trust me, your viewers will appreciate it.

Next, simplify your recoding process. If you are planning to upload VODs of your event, you can make your life easier if you automate your VOD recordings to split based on time so that you’ll have smaller files to upload, or you can upload while the event is still ongoing. This is easy to set in the local recording settings of XSplit Broadcaster. You can even split by file size as well.

Finally, make sure you get a good host! Something that is perhaps overlooked way too often in corporate events is not setting aside a budget for a good host. A good host can carry a bad show and vice versa. So if you are working with a client and they say one of their staff who has never been on camera will be a host, if the budget allows, do recommend bringing on a professional host. A good host will help keep the show moving and save you when technical issues crop up.

So those are the top tips I have for you today to help your virtual events run smoothly. What tips have you found? What challenges have you not found a solution for? Let us know in the comments section below!

Why is NVENC so Important for Live Streaming

You may have noticed in pretty much every article I’ve written about streaming, that at some point I mention NVENC or tell you to buy an NVIDIA GPU. There’s a very good reason for that, NVENC is amazing for live streaming! Now that the GPU market is starting to heal, I thought it would be good to talk about what NVENC is and why I think it’s so important for live streaming!

What is NVENC?

NVENC stands for NVIDIA Encoder, which is a part of the GPUs, your graphics card, dedicated to video encoding. This has been present on NVIDIA GPUs since the GeForce 600 series in 2012, but has gone through many revisions, with the latest becoming available in the Turing GPUs, or basically the 20 series and beyond. 

For the video nerds, NVENC can encode up to 4k 8bit video using h.264. You are able to encode up to 3 streams of video on official drivers.

Photo by Nana Dua on Unsplash

What does NVENC mean for live streaming?

So up until the last couple of years, a GPU with the latest version of NVENC was the most cost-effective way of improving the quality of your stream. Previously encoding was dependent on X.264, which uses a lot of CPU resources.  That is why a lot of 2 PC streaming setups have CPUs with tons of cores in their streaming PC.

The more cores you can toss at X.264, the slower presets you can use, and the better your video quality looks since platforms like Twitch started limiting the bitrate for streams.

For a long time hardware encoders like NVENC were great for recordings, but not so good for streaming since they require more bitrate than X.264 for high-quality video. But with the latest NVENC, you can now get video quality comparable to X.264 even at the slowest presets. So, when GPU prices, hopefully, drop, you won’t need to buy a new CPU and Motherboard, basically a whole new PC, you can just get a new GPU.

Best NVENC Streaming Settings

The best thing about NVENC is that the settings are simple. Set to max quality, enable look ahead and psycho visual tuning. Now if you’re really going to be maxing out your GPU while streaming, trying to squeeze those frames out of Elden Ring, then set it to quality and disable the look-ahead function. That’s it! It’s easily changed in XSplit Broadcaster!

No need to learn lines of code as you would with X.264.  Just set your bitrate as high as you can and start streaming. Since you are allowed up to 3 NVENC instances per GPU, you can stream and record at the same time using NVENC.  And with XSplit Broadcaster that means you can record specific scenes, so you can record scenes that don’t have overlays or record your game or facecam independently, it’s up to you.

So I hope that covers the reasons why NVENC for streaming is so awesome and why I constantly recommend it! Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about NVENC!

XSplit VCam 4.0 Brings A New Design And More!

The latest version of our industry-leading, AI-powered background removal software, XSplit VCam, is available now! VCam 4.0 brings an overhauled design and some new features to help with your remote work, video conferencing, or anything where virtual backgrounds might be helpful!

XSplit VCam 4.0

The new design helps you do everything faster by making all the features you need easily accessible. We’ve expanded the settings menu so you can easily customize your experience and introduces some new features!

First up, we now have multiple custom watermarks which expands on our custom watermark feature. Custom watermarks can also now easily be anchored to a point on the screen with various anchor points, making it easier to position your lower third or company branding.

We’ve also added an enhanced lighting feature, which will automatically adjust how your camera looks based on the lighting conditions. Again, you can fully customize and control how this all works in the settings.

These new features are on top of the usual improvements, bug fixes, and more that you’d expect from a new release!

You can download XSplit VCam 4.0 right now or download the update directly in your app!