Where the Budget Goes, and What It Cannot Cover

Five thousand rand is enough to sound good, look lit and go live, on one condition: the computer doing the encoding is already yours. Stretched across a microphone and its mount, one light, a camera and the cables nobody remembers, the budget works. Asked to also carry a second machine, an interface and a proper camera body, it collapses into four mediocre purchases instead of three good ones.

So the exercise is allocation rather than shopping. Decide which parts of the chain your existing desk already solves, spend on the part viewers judge first, and keep something back for the mount and the leads. Everything on this page is stocked locally, so a kit ordered together arrives together rather than trickling in from separate suppliers.