How to DIY your own Elgato Key Light (Budget friendly alternative)

As you might know, Elgato products have been pretty hard to get recently, with most of them being completely out of stock. So today I want to show you my DIY solution to make your own Key lights as an alternative to the Elgato Key Light.

Let’s get started

As part of my new series about Streaming, this setup you can easily make your Twitch streams and YouTube videos look so much more professional.

Let’s have a look at what we can achieve with just a webcam and using two of these lights. You can go from something that looks dreadful. To this. As you can see the video quality drastically improves, and this is still using the same Logitech StreamCam.

This is what you’ll need.

I’ll also provide links in the description below for each part.

• First the light: I am using the Raleno Video Light S192
• Then a pair of camera ball heads with 3/8 inch tripod screw
• And lastly, a mount. I found this budget friendly microphone arm from neewer to be great
• You can also use a super clamp and magic arm from SmallRig if you want to mount the light to the back of your monitor arm.

Now that we have all our parts, this is how I built my DIY Elgato Key Light.

First you want to attach the microphone stand to the back of your desk. Then insert the arm into the holder. Continue with unscrewing the golden adapter screw and also removing the smaller adapter screw from the ball head, now you can simply attach the ball head to the arm.

Next, you simply want to attach the video light to the ball head. The ball head helps you adjust and fine tune the positioning afterwards.

If you would like to mount the light to your monitor arm like so, you want to use the super clamp and magic arm together to clamp on to the back of your arm.

Pros and Cons of the Elgato Key Light

Before we finish I just wanted to give a short list of pros and cons for each of these light panels. They both come quite close for specs, but the Elgato Light outperforms in the connectivity area, allowing for full smart control via WiFi, App or through a macro pad such as the Elgato Stream Deck.

	Elgato Key Light	DIY Key Light
Brightness	2800 lm	650 lux/1m
LEDs	160	192
Colour temperature	2.900k – 7.000k	3.200k – 5.600k
CRI	> 92%	> 95%
Brightness range	0-100%	0-100%
Battery	—	8000mAh
Connectivity	WiFi	—
Stream Deck	Yes	—
App controlled	Yes	—
Price	200€	85€

Conclusion

And this concludes my tutorial how I built my own Elgato replacement! I haven’t had the chance to personally test the Key Light from Elgato, but what I can say is that with this setup you’ll be also getting a high quality lighting system, that will drastically improve your videos or live streams.

My only downside is that you can’t control these lights from your computer or using a stream deck, but I think once you’ve set the brightness and colour temperature it is not that big of a deal.