How to Produce an All-Day Webcast

Signal Flow

In this section on signal flow, we’ll get a bit more technical, talking about some of the equipment that we used and how we patched it all together. There are a lot of moving parts, so I like to whiteboard it out (Figure 8, below) a few weeks ahead of time so I know all the gear that I need, if I have it all in-house, or if I need to rent something.

Figure 8. My signal flow diagram, created a few weeks before the event. Click the image to see it at full size.

Even at full size, Figure 8 is probably hard to see in detail, but the shapes should be easy enough to identify. The three large rectangles are all switchers. It might be a little overkill, but I tend to worry about things breaking, so I build in lots of redundancy whenever possible.

Our primary switcher is a TriCaster 455. This conference was the first time that I had used a TriCaster for an event this long, so I was a little worried about what might happened if it crashed, or stopped working, and I needed to reboot it. As a backup, just upstream from the TriCaster, I had a more traditional Panasonic HS400 switcher.

All of our cameras fed into that switcher and then they looped out straight into the TriCaster. This gave me the flexibility that if the TriCaster went down I could just switch to the other camera cut from the Panasonic. I would lose the lower-thirds and graphics that the TriCaster provides, but at least I would still have a way to switch cameras.

The third switcher over on the right was a small Blackmagic Television Studio switcher. I like to call that my stream switcher, so this is the last switch before the stream or before the encoder. This configuration allows me to switch from primary switcher to backup switcher. It allows me to dump off to a technical difficulties slide. If everything just exploded, I could still put up a slide that said, “Hey, we’re having problems. Give me a minute.”

It’s nice to build in safeguards like that so that if things break or if you have problems you can communicate with the viewer and let them know that you’re aware of the situation, and that it’s not their problem, it’s your problem, and you’re working on it.

Next, the feed from there essentially goes into our Mac that’s running Wirecast, and then encoding off to our destination point.

For audio, we're running a Yamaha LS9 digital mixing console. All of our mics and inputs go into that. We also use a Dan Dugan Sound Design automixer card that you can get for the Yamaha. They also have an outboard piece of gear for this. Essentially, it's the perfect piece of equipment when you have a panel discussion and you have 4-6 microphones set up. If you ever had to mix that manually it would be difficult because you’re trying to match when someone’s talking to your faders and that sort of thing.

This Dan Dugan automixer does that automatically for you. They use it on presidential debates when you never know who’s going to talk next. I’m a big proponent of that piece of gear.

Running down the rest of our gear list, our cameras were Canon C100 cinema series cameras. The C100 costs $4,500, and you can attach whatever EF mount lenses you want. In this case, we used the 70mm-200mm. We took HDMI out of the camera into an HDMI-to-SDI converter to get the video into our switcher. We use a rack configuration for the LS9, the Panasonic switcher, and the TriCaster, as well as Mac that's recording. Figure 9 (below) shows the studio and the control room during the webcast. You can see that we’ve got the studio behind the glass where the panelists are talking.

Figure 9. Our live streaming studio setup. Click the image to see it at full size.

Testing

You probably heard this before if you've ever done any kind of live event or read up on how to do it: You can't test enough. I recommend that you start testing the stream as soon as your vendor will let you, even if it’s months before the event. Ask your vendor, “Can I get a test stream from where I’m going to be to the destination? Can I watch it on different devices?” Test for the length of your event, even if it’s an all-day event like ours. We were doing a 6-7 hour event, so I tested for 7-8 hours.

I would start the stream in the morning, and check on it throughout the day. I’d make sure there were no dropped frames and that sync was still good all throughout. I would also make sure to do it at a similar time of day as I was going to be doing on the day of the event.

I do my signal flow testing at least one day before the event. Definitely do this if you have the opportunity. I test signal flow a day early because if I need to pull an all-nighter, I'm more than willing to do it, but if I come in at 9AM and my stream starts at noon, that's cutting it pretty close. If you're doing a bigger production like this, try to get into the room, and get your gear sorted out at least the day before.

I recommend running tech and talent rehearsals the day before as well. Communicate with your crew to go over transitions and how they're going to work.

Likewise with your on-camera talent, go over how they are going to set up the sessions. Other key questions: Are there any housekeeping notes that they need to make? How are they going to transition that to the break? How do you come back out of the break?

As much rehearsal as you can do, both with your crew and with the talent, is definitely important.