Last night the Gold Coast Titans had their end of year awards ceremony, a large event held in the function room of Jupiter’s Casino. While the event is not big enough for a TV broadcast they want to get fans in on the action and they decided a livestream was the best way to do so. Having worked for them in many other situation I was chosen to be part of the team that made this happen.
Last year they used ustream with mediocre results. This year they were keen to try out the YouTube livestream platform. It makes sense: they’ve been pushing their channel hard, and some big events have used YouTube streaming this year with spectacular results.
The inputs that needed to be broadcast were a multimedia presentation (the content on the projectors) and three camera angles that were being operated by people we couldn’t see. The cameras came to us pre-mixed so the only feeds to switch between were the the projector feed and the cameras. We decided that wasn’t flexible enough, so set up another HDV camera up in the box with a static wide shot of the whole room. We also made a looped holding animation in case there were some long waits or technical difficulties. The three provided cameras, the projector feed and our camera went into a physical video switcher.
The switcher output went out as HDMI into a Blackmagic Extreme HDMI to Thunderbolt box. These things are good. The thunderbolt goes into a MBP running Wirecast. This broadcasts to YouTube, but also lets us do some switching in software. We had the looped animation here in case the input failed. We were given a stereo XLR feed from the sound desk - unfortunately, our XLR to 3.5mm adapter decided that tonight it was going to give up on the left channel. Cool. Luckily the camera we had set up as a backup wide shot had XLR inputs so we put the feed from the desk into this, which then outputs the audio over RCA. Our RCA adapter was working fine so this let us feed the audio into the MBP perfectly. I was worried about sync issues (as if a livestream wasn’t difficult enough!) but it was fine.
Were there hiccups? Yes, a few. Did they stop a couple of thousand people tuning in? No, they did not.