Tutorial: Remote Production with EasyLive
This tutorial will walk you through setting up and producing a simple live event with easylive.io.
Audio Management
Before starting your tests, you should also get familiar with the audio mixer, shown in Figure 7 (below). Note that only the audio associated with the content currently live is actually inserted into the program feed. So if you have a producer behind the scenes talking to a guest who’s not live, neither of their audio feeds will make it into the program feed. You can insert off-camera audio sources using the Audio button shown on the bottom of each input, and, of course, control the volume coming in from each source and the volume going into the program feed on the left.
Figure 7. The audio mixer
You can also mute any on-camera audio source by clicking the mute button on the bottom left of each input and remove audio from the headphone monitoring by clicking the headphone button. Of course, at this juncture, while you’re still in setup mode, none of your audio or video sources are live, so there’s only so much configuration you can do.
At some point, you’ll have to transition into testing mode, which spins up an instance that controls the production and you start to incur a charge. In this mode, you can test all of your inputs and make sure that everything is working as desired. The first time out, you should allocate a good hour or so to get everything working. If you’re an experienced user running a regular show that uses the same setup, it should take only a few minutes.
Going Live
You click the Publishing button to go live; once you’ve dones, the system starts recording the program stream and delivering the feeds to the selected services. Now it’s just a question of choosing the various inputs and monitoring audio. Because the system is cloud-based, you can have multiple production personnel controlling different production aspects; one mixing, one monitoring audio, and another creating highlights, which is shown in Figure 8 (below).
Figure 8. Here’s what I see as the guest: my other guest on the left and the program feed on the right, plus a chat screen, and my webcam input on the top right. Click the image to see it at full size.
To create a highlight, you enter the Recording mode and click Recording, which save the 25 seconds immediately preceding the click. Then you can trim the highlight in the Clip editor shown, and deploy the highlight back into the production or out to social media (Figure 9, below).
Figure 9. Trimming a highlight for adding back to the production or sending to social media. Click the image to see it at full size.
For complicated productions with multiple guests, there’s a multiview feature that opens in a separate window and contains windows for all inputs. This provides the event producer with a way to monitor off-camera speakers and other contributors.
Once you’re done with the production, click end, and you’re taken into the screen shown in Figure 10 (below), where you can download the production, create clips, and publish them on social media.
Figure 10. Once the production is done, you can download the production and/or create clips for publishing on social media. Click the image to see it at full size.
Like any multiple-input live production tool, easylive has a learning curve, particularly when managing multiple remote guests, but if you can drive a desktop tool like Wirecast or vMix you’ll find easylive a breeze. While these desktop editors do a good job with simple two and three-party shows, larger productions start to gobble up CPU cycles and outbound bandwidth, particularly when distributing to multiple outputs. For these types of productions, easylive is a natural.
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