Blurred Lines: How to Manage and Integrate On-site and Off-site Audience and Presenter Interactions in Live Webcasts

Challenges in the Audio Workflow

When connecting a remote presenter to an outgoing webcast or webinar production, I prefer to receive the incoming video chat signal on its own laptop and feed that signal directly into my video switcher via HDMI, for video only. The audio is connected to a soundboard via a DI direct box that lifts the electrical ground, as this is what cause an unwanted audio buzz. The audio from the remote video chat presenter and the local audio are then routed into my video switcher, before being hardware-encoded for the webcast or webinar.

On webinar platforms such as Adobe Connect, we have the ability to allow remote presenters to send their audio and video directly to the webinar audience, in addition to the live video cameras and audio that we mix and send, but this can really complicate the audio workflow. If you’re not careful, you can create an unwanted audio feedback loop. The problem is that if your audio technician is amplifying the local audio and the incoming video chat audio through loudspeakers for the live audience, they have to be very careful not to send you back the same signal. The webinar audience already has a direct feed of the remote presenter and if you send this same signal back into the outgoing webinar feed, you create a self-perpetuating echo that turns into a feedback squeal almost instantly.

A talented audio technician with the right equipment (a soundboard with sub-groups) can avoid sending you a redundant audio signal, but it is much less risky and easier to keep the video and audio in a different workflow. This isn’t the only situation where you have to be really careful about not creating audio feedback loops. If a remote presenter has their speakers turned up too high and the webinar or video chat noise cancellation can’t keep up, it’s possible that your local audio can feedback into the remote outgoing audio. It is for this same reason that radio stations ask callers to turn down their radios.

My preference is that remote presenters wear headphones (most people have a pair of in-ear ones that come with cell phones) to prevent creating a feedback loop and to overall improve the audio quality as the noise cancelling doesn’t become too aggressive. Of course I would also prefer if presenters also placed their laptop at eye level so we aren’t looking up their nostrils and positioned themselves in a quiet room with soft front lighting. I find that external webcams, such as the highly rated Logitech C920 HD Pro Webcam, do a much better job than do laptop webcams for both audio and video.

If the environment is noisy, then having the presenter wear a webcam headset with a boom mic (USB or mini audio connector) will improve audio quality significantly. The same audio feedback problem can happen if the remote presenter audio levels are too high and the local microphones have an open polar pickup pattern (like an omnidirectional or PZM/Boundary microphone) and the audio technical has left their feed open when not in use. Ensuring that all local presenter microphones are the handheld-style (whether on stands or not)—with a more selective cardioid polar pattern—will virtually eliminate yet another potential audio feedback source.

Taking more control of remote presenter audio and video by isolating it from the live webinar signal also allows you the opportunity to give the presenter valuable feedback before you take them live, and prevents the audience from seeing them making the usual physical webcam adjustments so they look good on-camera. There is nothing worse than a remote presenter launching their webcam feed live and only then do you realize they have positioned themselves in front of a bright window (and are horribly backlit) or some other regrettable and avoidable mistake.

Of course, I would prefer if the presenter didn’t use a webcam but had a videographer actively filming them from their remote location. The easiest way to get an HDMI or HD-SDI signal into a laptop is with HDMI to USB or HD-SDI to USB capture hardware. I personally use the Magewell USB Capture HDMI for this purpose, as it works for both Adobe Connect webinars and Ustream webcasts and doesn’t require the broadcasting workstation, desktop computer, or laptop to do as much of the heavy lifting of the video processing compared to some video capture cards that don’t do any scaling. USB video class (UVC) device is the protocol that webcams comply and hardware such as the Magewell USB Capture line that meet the UVC protocol are among the few hardware options that will allow you to connect professional video cameras to a webinar broadcast.

Advancing the Slides

When producing live webinars or webcasts with remote presenters, it is important to decide who advances the slides. Typically, in webcasts we only send a single video feed, and cut between the video camera feeds and the slides, but with webinars, you show slides and video at the same time.

In the case of a remote presenter on a webinar, we usually have them advance their own slides for the webinar audience, and we push the same slides locally according to the timing of the webinar slides from a local laptop. Of course, this requires that you to obtain the slides from the remote presenter in advance. It isn’t a bad idea to have a backup presenter who can speak to the remote presenter’s slides if they are unavailable at the last minute.

In our last webinar production with a remote presenter, this very thing happened when our presenter’s return flight home was delayed after takeoff and the presenter was still in the air when it was his turn to present. Fortunately, the client did prep for this possibility (and the possibility that the technology connecting their video and audio would fail), and a replacement speaker who was attending locally, and who was familiar with the content of the presentation, made the presentation. The presenter later joined the live and online audience for the Q&A to fill in any gaps in the presentation. With webcasts we have a local person rehearse with the remote presenter and advance the slides for the live audience, the signal of which we split and take a feed to our video switcher for the webcast audience.

Handling Q&A

Now Q&A with both a live and an online audience is another area where a bit of planning, coordination, and rehearsal comes in handy. Webcasts, being a one-way video communication, lack the ability for audience to easily interact with other viewers and to submit questions. Ustream does have a chat window that viewers can use with a Facebook login or a free Ustream user registration, but we have found that many business people do not want to mix their private Facebook lives with their business persona, nor do they want to take the extra step to register a free account so that they can chat with their name attached to their user.

Enabling a public chat allows chatting without any registration but the username then is an assigned name such as user12345 and this forced anonymity makes it hard to follow up with users offline without asking them to publically share their contact info. As a workaround we encourage our webcast clients to create a simple custom Google form that they can embed on their website below the webcast video. Viewers can submit questions, along with their contact details, and the questions go to a Google Sheet in the creator’s Google Drive account. There, they can curate the questions that they will have a moderator ask into a microphone, in turn with the questions from the live audience.

With Adobe Connect webinars it is much easier to enable both chat and viewer questions in the specialized pods (Figure 5, below). Both of these webinar and webcast solutions allow the organizers to respond to questions that didn’t get asked or answered offline at a later time.

Figure 5. The entire Adobe Connect webinar feed is composed of Pods that contain live video, slides, polls, chat, graphics, Q&A pods, and more. Click on the image to see it at full size.

Managing the blurred lines of presentations with mixed live and online presenters and audiences takes a lot of planning. Going through the exercise of committing connection diagrams on paper and considering issues of audio loops goes a long way to prevent unwanted feedback, both through the loudspeakers and from the online audience.