"Start Streaming."

“Start Streaming”

Bring your events & content to a global audience in real time.

So, you’ve been asked to stream a graduation. Streaming is a great tool for providing access to an event otherwise limited to the seats in the room. However, pressing “Start Streaming” in OBS is one of the last parts of the whole process.

It all begins with the walkthrough. Get to your location as far in advance as possible. Weeks or months would be preferred, but days can work too. Getting a basic understanding of the environment is key. Bring a measuring tape or laser to get accurate cable length runs. Understand the clients asks, what visuals they want and how to stay out of the way to your best abilities. It’s a team effort to pull off an event like a graduation, the livestream is just one small aspect of it, it’s about the graduates at the end of the day. To make sure you get some good shots of them, bring along a camera. Take some stills from angles that could work for the event. Examples of that would be Speaker/Podium position, alternate angles, wides and active cams all have their place in the productions. Get anything and everything planned out so that during the setup it’s not even a question.

In our case the client was looking for a 1080p livestream multi-cam setup. For a Video Mixer we went with the Black Magic Atem Pro Mini ISO. We’ve been using this for a few months now and love the size factor, it doesn’t take up too much desk real estate and has a bunch of crazy features packed into a super portable package. The only problem I’ve had so far are with the rubber buttons. Sometimes they click easily, others not so much. Depending on the pressure used it can double click by accident and cause quick back and forth cuts to occur.

Along with a 3 Camera Setup for the event the client asked for live video from outside the auditorium of the students arriving. Sounds easy enough, not too long ago DJI announced their SDR Transmission system and it seemed like a perfect fit for the gig. It relies on the groundwork DJI has made with their drones ability to send video over large distances. Unfortunately they too came with some hiccups. For the best signal strength you need the two units (Rx / Tx) to be in the eye line of each other. Outside sets will do great in this ecosystem. Sending wireless signals though auditorium walls not so much. We found in our testing that sending a signal though 3 or more walls seemed to be the limit before the bitrate got crushed and caused pixelation. The sweet spot was under 100ft, a far cry from their advertised 10,000 ft signal transmission. If we were just using these for monitoring I’d have only great things to say, but since this would been used in our live broadcast I don’t think these are taking down Teradeks anytime soon.

Fiber, no not that kind. When we finished getting measurements for the cable runs, we came in around 140ft and that number was reinforced when we heard from their tech team it was around 135ft from the booth to the stage. Knowing HDMI has some limitations after 50ft, potential for video/audio signal loss, we figured the only option was SDI cable which is the gold standard for broadcast. However since we were using an HDMI mixer, we would need to pick up a few SDI to HDMI converters. In my experience anytime you daisy chain, add a middle man or convert the signal, it introduces more areas of failure. To simplify the setup we looked into what is fairly a recent addition to the market which are Fiber HDMi cables. Although most brands only offer unidirectional cables for now, the idea of it immediately caught my attention. Being able to run HDMI out directly from our cameras straight into the Video switcher was an absolute positive. As we did our further research it seemed to combine the qualities of SDI signal transmission with the added benefit of no extra conversion units all while extending the signal length before degradation to match SDI at around 100 meters. This was the best solution for us, if you have a video mixer with SDI inputs I would probably just stick to that. If you end up going fiber HDMI, just make sure you hook them up so the signal goes in the right direction from camera to mixer.

The Tech Rehearsal is where it starts getting real. You’re finally getting your cameras down, running your power and grabbing audio from the mixers. Audio can be tricky and on this shoot it was one of our white whales. During the Tech Rehearsal this was something that kept popping up as an issue. We had the cameras up, video mixer setup with a Mac Studio running the livestream all hard wired with ethernet. We had a Captioner on stand-by for the test as well since we had live captioning on the stream. Everything seemed to be working, but we kept running into issues. Youtube would received the RMTP with Video and Audio, but the captioner could only get Video. We could hear the audio on the preview live stream, but then on the recorded VOD it’d be missing. Originally we had a signal from the audio mixer running into a Zoom F4 which then piped the audio into the ATEM Mini. This is a system we’ve used in the past that had worked without fail. For whatever reason this time around it wasn’t happy. The Audio signal drop was one thing, but then some sort of hissing kept appearing on the audio track for the stream. Eventually, taking my own advice we cut out the middle man and just used a Scarlett interface to take the XLR signal straight into the Mac. This immediately fixed the interference we heard. Second, I wiped OBS and started the setup from scratch with the new equipment in place. Now we were getting somewhere. With the audio issues resolved and the Captioner finally getting the audio signal we could go live… in a few days. Troubleshooting the audio took three times as long as the whole setup, but imagine if we didn’t have that time. That’s the importance of a tech rehearsal.

Finally, the day of the event. If you’ve made it this far without having any panic attacks congrats! All that’s left now is to press “Start Streaming” and listen. Keep an ear out from your team and give direction for each angle. You are the captain now. For our communication we had the Eartek Ultralites. Super simple headset style system that allows for up to five people to communicate. It made it a breeze to make adjustments on the fly while jumping around the different feeds.

Go with the flow. Producing a live show is a lot like editing in post except you don’t have an Undo button. It’s as liberating as it is nerve racking. But don’t worry, take a deep breath and just power through. The end is in sight and she requires no post-production.

“Stop Streaming.”