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The first step is to either create a pleasing set to sit behind you or to stretch out and properly light some green screen so that the viewer only sees you (and not your awful mess of a house). Once you're acquired the full list of things detailed above, it's time to put together your modest production studio. You should therefore look into Elgato's Stream Deck, which is essentially a highly configurable bank of LED buttons that you can assign to quickly handle.well, just about anything really. Lastly, interacting with your community can be a pain if you have to constantly shift your attention away from your keyboard or controller. You may as well take care of said derrière. Streaming will require long hours (or possibly days) of sitting on your butt. Despite looking needlessly expensive and being garishly coloured to the point where they can't coordinate with any other bit of furniture in your house, they are actually comfortable. Those of you out to peacock a little might also want to invest in a gaming chair. Sites like Ebay and Catch are littered with kits of low-cost/quality solutions here, plus Elgato sell a more professional grade one. Having a collapsible chroma key panel (or “green screen”) should be pretty high on your buy list. Looking beyond the main “must haves” of streaming, there are one or two accoutrements that can better sell you as a serious professional (even if your low starter numbers are woeful). If you're looking for something cheaper, we've also rounded up the best laptops under $1,000. Personally, we'd recommend the ASUS ROG STRIX GL502VM-DB71 as a middle of the road laptop with enough grunt to handle a balance of broadcasting and some of the more popular streaming games at a decent graphics setting.
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Alternatively, you can absolutely buy a modest, secondary laptop to serve as a broadcasting workhorse to ensure your main gaming rig suffers no power drain whatsoever. While using a laptop, singularly, to both game and stream is not usually recommended, it's possible if you have decent specs or one of the best laptops on the market.
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Your CPU is what will be taking those rendered or “created images” to transcode into a streamable video format that gets piped out to the Internet.
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By and large, your graphics card (or GPU) will be largely responsible for rendering the game you're playing. When sizing up specs for a means to broadcast, you need to understand what component will be handling which processes.
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