Review: Mevo Start All-in-One Live Streaming Camera

Multiview

These are all important features, but our focus is using the Mevo Start as part of an NDI-based multi-cam live-switched solution. One key feature for live-switched production is Multiview.

Like the previous Mevo, the Start has a Multiview mode in which you can preset multiple "virtual" camera angles or preset crops of what the sensor is capturing. Honestly, even though it's set up for 9 virtual camera shots, you're really only going to have two or three at the most (Figure 9, below). It lets you tap between the two and you're live-switching. If you're using a Mevo Start in front of a podium, you can have a wide shot and a close-up shot preset in the app and cut between them as if you have two different cameras with the same view.

Figure 9. Switching between multiple framings

When you go into the settings, the left-most icon turns on the Intelligent Follow. The Find Faces button does just what its name suggests. Figure 10 (below) shows my face found, as you can see by the circle around it. In addition to Live Follow and Find Faces, you can activate Auto-Pilot and use the Auto-Pilot slider to choose how fast you want it to track.

Figure 10. Choosing Follow settings

Auto-Pilot is a very handy feature for that person at the podium who likes to move from side to side a bit. The Mevo will follow the person's face while in the closeup shot, and cut to the wide shot if it ever loses tracking on the face.

Compared to my webcam, the Mevo looks a little bit softer in the screenshots shown in this article, but that's because I'm probably a bit closer to the camera than the Mevo's minimum focus distance. Also, I have the Mevo set to 720p, at the lowest data rate. In other tests, I set the Mevo to 1080p at the higher data rate and it looked a lot better, especially when cropped in.

Audio Features

Next, let's look at audio. Click the Audio button in the main UI and you’ll see the Audio M<ixer built into the camera, shown in Figure 11 (below). You might wonder why a camera with only one input has an audio mixer. Because you can set the input to mic level or line level, if you're getting a board feed, the mixer enables you set it up appropriately.

Figure 11. The Mevo Start Audio Mixer

You can add more external microphones with the Mevo Mic app, which turns any phone into a microphone. This means you can have several of these apps on phones and you can have microphones on two different people, a host and a guest, and you can then mix the volume of the different sources independently.

Remote Control

Next up is a feature that I am especially excited about: remotely controlling the image in the camera. Here I have some preset modes like Vivid, High Contrast, Flat, Black and White, Sepia, Backlit, Outdoors, Stage, and Normal (Figure 12, below). Stage mode is like a spotlight, with a single bright thing.

Figure 12. Image presets

Lastly, in Custom you adjust a whole row of settings shown on the top bar in Figure 12. You’ll see when you customize settings like Shutter that the effects take place instantly. If you're doing a chromakey, having a fast shutter is good because it makes for less blur. A slow shutter makes your fingers blur and makes it hard for the computer to be able to cut the background out.

You can manually control the ISO, which goes up to 6400. At this crazy level you’ll lose some detail, but for a camera with a sensor this small, the image is at ISO 6400 is remarkably clean. I would expect something way noisier. Given that the Mevo has a webcam type-sensor, but the image looks surprisingly good.

Next is white balance. This is one thing I wish the Mevo could do better. Your only choices are Automatic, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Daylight, and Cloudy. I have the same settings in other devices. Honestly, that's not enough settings.

What the Mevo really needs is the ability to adjust the color temperature on a slider. You also need a separate slider for tint, because something might be a little bit too green versus a little bit too magenta in the face.

As yo can see in Figure 13 (below), my face is still a little blue because of sunlight coming in from the window. If I could make the image a little bit warmer, it would look great. If I select Daylight, Cloudy, or Fluorescent, they're all way too orange. Tungsten also looks way too blue. So Auto seems to be able to find a little bit of a balance, but not enough. We don't always have complete control of all of the light, so better control of white balance in the app is needed.

Figure 13. Auto white balance is too blue in this example.

We have manual brightness, contrast, and saturation. We have metering where you can have crop metering, or meter the whole scene. Anti-flicker is important if you’re filming in a region where the AC is different than what the camera is expecting. If you're in the US, it's 60 Hz. If you're in Europe and other countries, it's 50 Hz.

Being able to adjust the settings of the camera to reduce potential flicker of screens or lights is important. Exposure settings are Center, Average, and Spot. Again, having the ability to adjust the exposure in the device is amazing.

The gear icon provides access to all the deeper camera settings. You can change your frame rate, iPhone audio, USB mics, channels, maximum zoom, app settings, etc.

In Mevo Settings you can set a password. I always recommend setting a password so that nobody else can log into your device and mess with it. Another interesting setting is “Power on/off with USB cable.” This camera will power on when the PoE comes on. Turn off that PoE switch, and all of your cameras will turn off.

Conclusion

Let me say again why I am impressed with this camera. In testing, I ran it for more than two hours completely battery operated, completely wireless streaming, and it never got hot.

I could do a luncheon conference, and easily deploy a bunch of Mevos across the floor and live-switch between them. The cool thing is the ability to zoom in and reframe each shot. Even if I paid thousands of dollars for a prosumer camcorder with NDI in it, and then paid hundreds of dollars more to activate NDI, I couldn’t tell the camera over NDI to zoom in.

With the Mevo Start, I have the ability to crop the shot, remotely control the paint settings, the color temperature, the shutter speed. and more, without having to pay hundreds of dollars extra for the NDI capability.

The Mevo features built-in wireless NDI, a microphone input, and the ability to do Power over Ethernet. Plus you can actually stream from the Mevo Start by itself if you want. The price point for all of these features is no higher than the cost of activating NDI in one of those big camcorders.

The Mevo does have some shortcomings. It does not have a 20x, or even a 10x zoom. It has no zoom at all. It is a single-sensor camera and you're cropping the image on the sensor. That said, the 2x sensor crop looks pretty good.

The Mevo Start is a tiny, all-in-one camera that has a lot of really valuable features at a price point that you're not going find anywhere else.