Using a mirrorless body as a stream camera: worth the cables and the heat? Full Setup

Stayed in mine, but only after I stopped treating it as a camera and started treating it as a fixture. Dummy battery so there is no power cliff, a mark on the desk so the framing is repeatable, focus set manually once and taped, and a capture device that is always plugged in. The version that gets abandoned is the one where you have to set it up each time; the version that survives is switched on with everything else.

The overheating question depends heavily on the body and the output resolution, and a lot of the horror stories come from recording internally at high frame rates rather than from a clean output at streaming resolution. Test yours for a full two-hour session before you buy the capture hardware. If it does shut down, dropping the output resolution and removing the battery door cover fixes it more often than people expect.

Before the cables, check whether your body supports being used as a camera over its own USB connection with the manufacturer's software. Several of them added this and it removes the capture device entirely, at the cost of some resolution and less control. It is a much lower barrier for finding out whether you actually want this.

If the actual complaint is the evening light, fix the light first and see whether the webcam problem disappears. A hundred dollars of soft light aimed at the work surface will improve both cameras, and it is the cheaper experiment by a distance.

Honest counterpoint: I did the whole thing, it looked lovely, and I went back to a webcam after about five months. The reason was not the picture, it was that three evenings a week of setup friction wore me down and the shallow depth of field meant I kept drifting out of focus while working. Nice for a set-piece, annoying as a routine.