Hey there @rachael.maas, recently I’ve found it easiest to go live on social using my phone camera - but I guess it depends on your needs! Is it worth investing in a professional set up? 

Here’s an example of an event we went live on Facebook for last week: https://www.facebook.com/meanycenter/videos/1762512134241565  Thought about investing in a small microphone to help with sound in these instances, but otherwise my phone serves me well. 

I’ve also experimented with hooking up our mirrorless Sony to livestream. Not too bad of a process and great quality! But typically I’m looking for something more mobile. We have to be a little scrappy over here in terms of equipment, but would love to hear suggestions from others as well! 

We typically go live on Facebook for press conferences. I use a Cisco desktop webcam on a tripod plugged into a laptop. I used to go straight to Facebook, but in the past year I started using OBS Studio so that I can use things like a “starting soon” animation and overlays during the video. 

What social platform are you going live on?

I haven’t done this in a few years, but when we used to do lives on Facebook and Insta, we’d just use an iPhone (video quality was better than any other device) and we’d make sure we were on data and not WiFi since it would slow things down.

For YouTube, we’d be hardwired in with an ethernet cable (I know, old school) and we’d have an external webcam + mic and an encoder set up. We never had buffering issues or problems with video quality: https://www.wowza.com/blog/the-7-best-hardware-encoders-for-live-streaming

My reply may come late (too late to have helped when the question arose, anyway!), but I’d suggest consider the Logitech c920 HD Pro camera. It’s been around a few years, but it covers the A/V bases on its own, is widely reviewed well, and is priced well. Speaking from my own experience, it’s a great option for the price!

Review: https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/accessories/logitech-hd-pro-webcam-c920

When I first started going live, we used an Elgato Facecam, but found the colors to be off quite a bit. I ended up testing going live with iPhone cameras and found it to work much better. We used Restream to multicast to social platforms