Tutorial: Teradek Live:Air Video Production Suite for iOS

Choosing and Configuring Audio Sources

In terms of choosing and configuring audio inputs, you can use a couple of different approaches. Figure 7 (below) shows the audio mixer.

Figure 7. The Live:Air Audio Mixer. Note that Always On is selected for the VidiU-mini-00117 source, which is the Vixia camera.

For this project, I've got a mic hookup through the camera as the source for my voice in the video, so I want that always on, as shown in Figure 7. My other alternatives would be to turn on the audio for the other video source (Jan’s iPhone), and then I can follow the camera so the audio from that camera is on if the camera is live. But in this case I’ll turn off the iPhone video and stick with Always On for the VidiU/Vixia source.

On the right side of the Mixer, as shown in Figure 7, you can adjust the volume on the overall program screen.

Configuring Your Output Stream

The first step in preparing to output your stream is choosing a streaming destination and encoder settings. Click the Settings button icon in the upper-right corner of the stream to open the Settings dialog (Figure 8, below). We can send our stream to Ustream, Livestream, or to any custom RTMP address. For this example, we’ll choose Livestream In this dialog we’ll also choose various encoder settings, including resolution, bitrate, frame rate, and choose to activate adaptive bitrate streaming. Most of the default configurations are probably pretty close to what you’ll want to use.

Figure 8. Choosing streaming settings.

Click the Output button on the far right of the buttons panel just below the live/program window to see your Output settings. You can see Output selected in blue in Figure 9 (below), which shows the Output Stream panel.

Figure 9. Configure your streaming output in the Output Stream panel.

When you’re ready to broadcast, click the magic Go Live button in the upper-right corner of the UI (Figure 10, below), just to the left of the Settings button. Live:Air will ask if we want to inform our Livestream followers; for this project, because we’re just creating an on-demand tutorial, we click No.

Figure 10. The magic Go Live button.

In Figure 11 (below), you can see that we ae now streaming at 3541Kbps to Livestream. If we checked our Livestream account, we would see the video playing.

Figure 11. Now streaming live.

Mixing Your Video Live

Going back into the editor again, if you want to change camera angles, you click the source to input it into the preview window. Then you can use the T-bar to transition in, or if you want to just use a cut or cross-dissolve, you can do that as well. Again, click the content you want to put into the live feed, and Live:Air puts it in the preview window, and just cut it over like that.

So this is the Teradek Live Air, available for $99 from Teradek. You can also download a free trial version, but the trial version limits your stream to 30 minutes and places a Teradek watermark on the feed.

This is a cool product if you want to mix on-site when you've got IP feeds like an iPhone, an iPad, one of the Teradek Mini or VidiU Mini encoders or other encoders and you want to do your mixing without a switcher or a computer--just your iPad.