I miss this kind of setup. People who grew up with OBS and Streamdeck would appreciate the efficiency of the software they have. But this… needs top shelf organization skills.
Turn this into a tutorial! Everything from how to manage talent to planning to best practices for cueing. I promise I will like it (can't promise to subscribe because I already did)
Oh my this was interesting on a WHOLE NEW level. I also love that the "real" pros also just use big Stream Decks! Great stuff, really informative and entertaining.
LOL!!! Billy Davis, I went to high school with that guy. We played football together. Small World. Thanks for the content, I’ll trying to add live streaming to my video production business. So I’m in study mode.
There's so much here I can relate to - I was just beginning to develop livestreaming for our organisation when the pandemic hit and suddenly I had to learn real quick (we are an NHS trust in the UK and getting live information to our workers was vital). Due to the tight security protocols we have in the NHS, we couldn't use Zoom and instead everything was done via Microsoft Teams, which at the start of the pandemic, was way behind Zoom in terms of capabilities, but over time, Microsoft really got their act together. The game-changer was when they implemented NDI - now I could pull in separate NDI feeds for each person on the Teams call (like your drones) plus it would have an "active camera" NDI as well which auto-switched depending on who was talking. I used this in conjunction with Livestream Studio running to Vimeo and it was able to have a similar set up to yours using just two PCs, one operator (me!) and no switchers. This included being able to Supersource using the GFXs. The downside was the lack of redundancy mind - if either PC failed then options were more limited, but had an AJA Helo on standby to go to taking any feed I could. Anyway, I thought you might be interested in how smaller operations like mine managed to adapt but now those times are over I'm looking to move to a more hybrid solution with the new ATEM Constellations doing a lot of the work. Thank you for sharing this great behind the scenes video by the way - I will definitely be showing this to my bosses to show them that my setup was actually quite basic!
That's a wicked setup you got there. Great video. Would love to see more in-depth content like this. Could you maybe talk about the business side to this as well and how you got into production and find clients and such?
FYI- You can completely eliminate the potential hassle of “the talent has their mic muted” if you enable the option in settings. You can have full control over who is muted or unmuted on Zoom.
Wow. Good job. And your setup totally makes sense to me. At my last job i wonder, if i really need one computer for each instance (zoom, inserts, 'tape') but seeing you doing the same feels good. If one machine crashes, you don't lose it all.
Thanks for sharing man! This is out of this world tech! Seems very complex, but once you get the hang of it, it's not that complicated. If we only could get rid of the cableesssss.
Nice! I was with a small media company that was just getting into live streaming events (HS grads, seminars, interview, etc.) and something bad will always happened during the event like losing connection, audio issues, and over heating, it was stressful lolll.
An amazing setup and operation. My compliments! Am doing something similar though less elaborate, hosting church meetings and special events for live streaming using vMix and a combination of Zoom and vMixCall run from my basement. Multiple control surfaces for audio and video mix as well as graphics and effects using stream decks, an X-Touch Universal, and a Newtek LC-11 controller. A software package on my main production computer ties them all together to control vMix. Graphics and additional effects from a second local computer via NDI. Feeds to and from other remote production setups via SRT links to expand operations. vMix has been amazing in this regard. I still prefer to use hardware setups where possible though, Blackmagic mainly.
this was a great watch. I am but a lowly twitch streamer but I have managed livestreams for the companies i worked with in the past. seeing this was an absolute blast! :D
OMG I Learned so much from this video. I don't really do this kinds of stuff but i do assist in webinars or anything that uses Zoom or Google Meet. You guys deserve a Sub!
Great BTS video! Man, it would be great if you could break down how the drone computers are set up, what goes where, and things like that. Thanks for sharing!
This is awesome! Can you please share your link that you mentioned @ 4:21 about the set up for Mix Minus (so that the talent can hear you but not the audience)?
Another awesome video guys :-) You make it look so easy 😉 very professional. What’s your guys thoughts on SRT technology playing apart in the future re conferences (video quality, latency etc)?
Do you make a lot of videos like this & how to properly set something up like this? I'm really interested in this type of stuff! New subscriber to the channel!👍
Hi, Thanks for documenting this. With your zoom drones, do all your talent join the same zoom call and then you pin them on the individual drones and then feed that into your switcher or are their 5 individual zoom sessions. If there is a link that describes this, then please let me know. Thanks - Chris
nice setup! mine only have 1 pc with OBS +NDI to capture the video on Zoom/Ms. Teasm, and re-cast to OBS.. i must say, this kind of job are exhausting and you have to stay focus on whatever will happen when we're going live.
have you thought about using multiple virtualized zoom drones on one system instead of multiple separate systems? it seems like having separate drones could get expensive and space inefficient with all the separate laptops, you could also use nucs or sffpcs for more space efficiency if virtualization is too complicated for capture, although you could always passthrough independent display adapters
Hey there! Yes we have definitely thought through a bunch of different ways of making the zoom drones more cost effect and space efficient. Just a couple reasons we use 8 dedicated MacBook pros, multiple monitor outputs even though we don’t use them all the time and the computers can actually handle the bandwidth of them. Reliability and ecosystem. Separating out computers in case of failure or loss of connection (all computers can/do failure do weird things from time to time). Multi purpose computers and platform agnostic. we will put computers out of studio for other temporary setups, rentals, other events, testing, etc. plenty more reasons to touch on and talk about but it is definitely not the most cost efficient, but does make a lot of sense for us and all of our random needs and use cases. Hope that makes sense.
Yeah, I recently ran a day long virtual conference with 12 different 7 person panels, separated by a 2 minute introduction by a conference chair. vMix with Teams NDI inputs worked great.
I believe those nine computers along the wall are all in the same zoom call as the nine participants. Each of them has pinned a participant to the top screen. Then the video from that screen is captured as a feed into the controlling vision switching computer. They are drones because they aren't individually intelligent at all they just sit there providing a feed of a single participant (I could be wrong)
how are you guys solving the animated transition? I think you guys are only person in the world having animated transition in atem!. I was thing about making a macro using media player and a delay but just can't make it work as smooth as A2Z Productions... :*(
just wondering, are this setup using another apps, such as OBS ? and the talent and participants in the. same room at zoom? Because for me, zoom is so tricky
For this stream we did not, we just used a zoom webinar. Sometimes we'll use OBS just to stream to places that the mini's don't support. But mostly we'll just stream from an atem mini. The talent would be in a different room from the viewers or the presenters in a zoom webinar.
It took nearly 9 minutes for me to realize those 9 zoom standalone pin computers are not just “computers”... they were goddamn MBPs. Bruh I’m good with my single 2015 iMac setup.
can you talk more about how you are managing the audio in the stream ? are you patching through the atem ? i have had issues with audio through my Atem
Here on RU-vid watching channels like ours is a great way... The best way is to find companies that already have the gear you want to learn. Better if it's a company that contracts labor. Tell them you're looking for work and want to make yourself more valuable to them by learning their gear and systems. In most cases, companies like ours need to pay people for training or have them learn on the job. I'd bet most companies would gladly give you some free training or at least allow you to come in and train yourself on their gear. When people do that with us not only do they get to learn, they also move up significantly on our contractor list.
I believe there are 4 ATEM Mini's in this setup currently. All really just being used as capture cards. The one you (probably) saw is our main streaming device. In this instance it was livestream program fed into zoom through the ATEM mini.
When you're in the same studio and the audience can potentially hear you, that's correct. But here his mix was set up so only the main presenter could hear him, which means it doesn't make any difference for the show but is actually more clear for the presenter.