 For decades, the only way to broadcast news events in a timely manner was to have a huge budget for like, a truck that had editing stations inside it and a satellite link to your local station where it could then be broadcast to the masses. But, personal technology has changed this though in a huge way. First was the everybody has a camera revolution that allowed the World Trade Center bombings to be captured from many different angles, albeit in very, very low quality for the most part. Then the next big thing that happened was broadband internet and the ability for anyone for, well, next to no cost, free, right? YouTube to be able to broadcast whatever video it was they'd captured to anyone. Then social took the internet by storm in the late 2000s once mobile internet connections were pretty much ubiquitous. So you were guaranteed almost if anything crazy was going down, someone was there with a connection talking about it. Following that, more internet infrastructure improvements, HD online as well as video streaming gave rise to sites like Justin.tv and later the gaming focused Twitch.tv which leads us finally to the next chapter. Thanks to the unstoppable onward march of technology, for less than a few thousand dollars an individual can equip him or herself with a live reporting backpack that allows footage and personal commentary to be broadcast almost anywhere, live. So this is it. Everything in front of me is what is needed to build your very own DIY reporter backpack. So for me it starts with the laptop. This is a UX 303 from Asus. This is actually the same one that I used in my Can You Edit 4K video on a laptop video which you can check out over here. And the reason I selected it again for this project was A, I already had it, and B, it's got a Core i7 Skylake processor which allows me to get a good enough HD video stream for, you know, to be better than what anyone's going to be broadcasting from a cell phone as well as the fact that it's thin and light and has reasonable battery life. Now obviously a laptop doesn't do anything on its own so in terms of software, XSplit who actually sponsored this episode, the DIY reporter backpack episode, has provided us with a copy of their XSplit broadcaster software which is going to allow us to take our multiple camera inputs, switch between different inputs and broadcast directly to Twitch.tv which obviously wouldn't be the normal destination for something that's not about gaming but we have a Twitch account and they're cool so we're going to go ahead and we're going to do our testing over on there. Now as good as the battery life is on this laptop, it's not going to be enough for what we're trying to do so I picked out the cheapest, highest capacity, 19 volt output battery bank. In our case it's a RavPower 23,000 mAh battery bank off of Amazon and I threw that in the backpack next. Next came the capture device so we've got an Elgato HD60 here. This allows us to take an HDMI input from our camera and turn that into something that XSplit can understand which leads us I guess pretty well into the camera. Now this is a pretty high-end model. This is a Canon XA20 that we use for our channel SuperFun videos but what I like about it and what I would recommend that you guys look for is something with an HDMI output as well as something that accepts a couple of audio inputs because we're going to be using one of the XLR inputs for a lavalier microphone from Rode that I'm going to wear on myself and the other one for a shotgun microphone that is forward-facing so that I can collect sound from whatever event it is that I am actually looking at. Remember guys, sound is as important as video for capturing an event or a moment of some sort. Now I do have a big beefy battery on it but I'm going to pack my charger with me anyway because right here I have a second battery bank option. This one has two USB outputs but more uniquely an AC output so as long as I'm carrying around the power brick adapters for any of my devices I can use this ChargeTech unit here to get supplementary power. With that thing plugged into the camera it lasted for hours and hours and hours and hours. Next up is my MiFi 4G hotspot. So this was actually provided by Bell and they gave me an unlimited data plan so that I didn't have to use my phone for this whole wacky experiment and other than that I don't know really what else to say about it other than if you're going to pick up one of these for this purpose make sure you have enough data on it. And number two make sure you have one that allows you to plug into a computer via USB or some other connection so that you don't have to go 4G to the mobile connection and then Wi-Fi to the laptop. It is an option but having a hardwired connection between this and the laptop is a little bit better. For this one I'm going to choose an outer wall of the backpack so that it has as unobstructed and access to the cellular network as possible. Not that it really makes a huge difference. For our last two pieces the aforementioned remote which I will be taping onto my arm allowing me to start and stop my broadcast and change scenes without actually digging into the backpack. And finally my handy dandy reporter's helmet. This will keep me safe when I am covering live events and thanks to Brandon's bongo tied selfie stick on the top of it here will also allow me to have my face be in the shot so I can give commentary on whatever it is that I'm looking at. So with all that out of the way let's go live broadcast something. Well we have nine viewers apparently. Okay so is it the world's most elegant solution? I think we all knew the answer was no. This my friends is the future. There's not a whole lot happening around here but maybe down this mysterious back alley. If there was anything that was going to happen though you can be assured that I would be ready. Me and my trusty counterpart that I wouldn't actually need. That's another thing that's really great about my whole future of uh feature of live broadcasting concept is that thanks to the selfie helm you no longer need a camera person to accompany you to tell you about uh I have definitely patented the crap out of the selfie helm. It's a selfie stick attached to a helmet that protects you from the people who hate you and you can rest assured you're wearing a selfie helm. There are people who hate you. Many of them. I'm one of them even though I invented the selfie helm. I invented the selfie helm solely so that I could identify the people that I hate. This bongo tie system could use some improvement. I think a stiffer mount. There we go. That would give us a bit more of that like gopro look. Definitely a lot less bounce while I'm standing. There's a guy running away. He probably stole that camera. So we're back in the studio. I consider this project to be a huge success actually which doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't some things we could do to optimize the experience. So I talked about it while I was streaming but the mount for our selfie camera the webcam that we were using here. Oh I never mentioned the webcam in the setup. It's a c920 from Logitech. So the mount for this could be more optimal. A little bit of motion dampening but with a little bit less bounciness would probably be best and if we could find a lighter selfie stick that might help as well. In terms of the battery configuration right now the camera lasts for like hours and hours and hours but the laptop only lasts for a few hours so I think finding a way to balance those two might be a good approach if I was going to try and build something like this for everyday use. That's another thing. I could have done a better job of cable management of all the different wires and cables to make sure that I could get it on me a little bit more easily as well as being able to extract the laptop to change any settings and then put it back more easily would be another optimization I would make and I don't know I guess that's pretty much it. The only real change then if you wanted to do something like this would be to get a more powerful maybe a quad core laptop if you wanted to broadcast in 1080p at higher bit rates. From my perspective 720p 2 megabit which is what we were doing on the ultrafast encoding preset is I would consider good enough for amateur news reporting but depending on what you're going for you might want to up the ante a little bit which I guess leads us into the conclusion this video is not about this setup really anyway it's more about the broader idea of the democratization of news. I mean 20 years ago 10 years ago even five years ago this would be completely unattainable a way of a way of doing this reliably and with sufficient quality whereas now I mean yes this setup is like $5,000 although $2,000 is the camera you don't have to do that and that laptop is pretty nice as well it is somewhat attainable for real people if they were willing to save up the money and it was really important to them to do this and this brings with it some major advantages as well as some disadvantages so sort of the disadvantages is that journalistic training can be beneficial I mean there was that mind you there was that recent situation with the shooters down in the states where the journalists were running around disrupting evidence and all that but in general they go through school for a reason and just having everyone willy-nilly running amok with cameras recording everything is a privacy issue potentially as well as a factual information issue because these people don't have the necessary training with that said I would also tend to believe that an individual who's doing this out of passion not necessarily to get paid is going to be more inclined to attack the news stories that they feel are important rather than the ones that necessarily drive ratings and sponsorships for their news station in order to maintain the massive staffs that a regular news station would maintain so let me know in the comments below what do you think is this a step in the right direction or should we leave it to the professionals which I guess leads us pretty well into our sponsor spot which as I'm sure the college educated among you figured was coming is Xsplit so Xsplit is the live broadcasting software that we use on the WAN show as well as for pretty much anything else that we do including this really cool stream I did a little while ago where I actually built a whole computer with a couple of different inputs a couple of different views you can just switch between scenes with a hotkey whether that's on a keyboard next to you or on a controller on your arm yeah that's right Xsplit will be the one that you can use to yeah that's right Xsplit allows all the usual video streaming platforms to be streamed to and has great game capture features that allow you to capture your games with pretty much the click of a button but there's more today you can save 10% off a personal or premium license for Xsplit by using offer code Linus at the link in the video description and yes my friends there is even more we are actually doing an Xsplit license giveaway over at the LinusTechTips.com forum so check that out then if you don't happen to win you can save 10% and try out the broadcasting software that we use here at Linus Media Group so thanks for watching today guys if you disliked this video go ahead and hit that dislike button but come on I got like a keyboard strapped to my wrist hello come in base command I read you base command can you hear me anyway if you liked the video though hit that like button get subscribed and maybe even consider supporting us by buying a cool shirt like this one by changing your amazon bookmark one with our affiliate code instructions for which are up there or by supporting us directly on the forum or maybe even buying our Christmas album mind you by the time you're watching this it might be after Christmas so but don't worry too much about that anyway if you're looking for something else to watch now that you've done all of that stuff check out yeah check out the promotional video for our Christmas album even if you don't care about the Christmas album if you don't want to buy it I think it's pretty funny even if it's after Christmas it's just ridiculous it's us singing it can't be that bad it is that bad but that's why it's funny don't forget to subscribe see you next time you