Producing a Live Concert Webcast with the Next Computer Radius and the Roland VR-3

Concert Day

As you probably know, without sufficient outbound bandwidth, the whole live broadcasting exercise is pointless, so I asked one of the helpful staff at the venue to check outbound bandwidth before committing to produce the concert. Checked with www.speedtest.net, outbound bandwidth was around 800 Kbps, which was fine. I checked bandwidth again the date of the concert and it had dropped to around 700 Kbps, which was still sufficient for my purposes.

I had set up the complete rig the day before in my office, getting reacquainted with the VR-3, which works much like the VR-5. I arrived at 12:00 PM for a 2:00 PM concert, and was broadcasting a test stream by about 1:00 PM. That left plenty of time to tape the microphone cables down and fine-tune the settings on the VR-3.

As with most live events, video is simple, audio the big hassle, a problem exacerbated when you're recording a musician who cares primarily about audio quality, particularly if her former teachers or classmates are watching. When I tuned into the Livestream feed on my encoding station, I heard two different problems.

The first was a second channel of low-quality sound that seemingly came out of nowhere. It turned out the VR-3 has internal microphones to record ambient sound; once I turned those off, the second channel went away. The second problem was a lagging echo in the audio, which was harder to diagnose.

Ultimately, I figured out that the playback mixer on the computer was inputting audio from Procaster on the encoding side, and Livestream on the playback side, which occurred about five seconds later. I turned down the Procaster feed and heard only the Livestream input, which sounded fine.

A bit of a panic there, but quickly resolved with no harm done. With everything working fine, I focused on changing the camera angles as necessary and enjoying the music.

Once I finished the broadcast, Livestream automatically posted the live feed as an on-demand clip that you can view here. Note that I didn't stop and start anew just before the concert, so the clip actually shows some warmup and tuning, with the concert starting about 9 minutes into the clip. There is no way to edit the on demand clip once created, though I know this is coming in the next version of the Livestream software.