One of our frequent clients, a regular conference with mainstage, Q&A side-rooms, open floor with exhibitor booths, and a backstage interview newsroom, could no longer operate due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only were gatherings prohibited and dangerous, international travel was heavily restricted and inconvenient, often requiring lengthy quarantine periods.
They were looking for an online solution to host the event live for an online audience, with internationally-based corporate executives, complete with branding, slides presentations, and a responsive Q&A session, with each presentation edited and released as a VOD within 48hrs.
In a on-location production, this would not be a difficult task, however the requirement for each person and their slides to be phoned-in from a remote location.
Criteria:
We needed to develop a method for internationally-based company executives to deliver their presentations, interact with the a Host for a live Q&A, and perform an exclusive interview one-on-one with the Host for later release.
Each Mainstage and Q&A segment needed to be isolated and adapted into a short YouTube video within 48hrs, with the option of making adjustments per each presenter’s requests.
Challenges:
At the time of writing, Zoom reigns king of popular video-meeting softwares, with the most users actively on, and comfortable with, the interface and best-practices. The only reliable method that we have found to capture a Zoom video feed is to perform a desktop capture. This would require a separate computer for each presenter on the call.
In our on-location workflow, we record the event in-camera in addition to recording our live-edit, allowing us the flexibility of making adjustments in post-production in case something unexpected happened during the live-recording. In virtual meetings this posed an issue, as there are no dedicated recording devices applicable to the situation.
The entire show needed to be presented to an online-platform, link-access only, and could not have any branding of the hosting platform.
Solutions:
To facilitate these requirements, we broke the project down into individual stages.
View unique instances of Zoom, allowing us to “pin” specific cameras, plus slides, simultaneously for live-capture.
Ingest the unique instances of Zoom to our live-edit software, where they would be composited in various combinations with the addition of title graphics and moving backgrounds.
Record the edited show and isolated feeds of each camera simultaneously, while broadcasting the show online.
Host the show in a non-3rd party-branded environment online.
Solution: Isolated Zoom Instances
We initially looked into purchasing a small fleet of cheap laptops, but quickly discarded that idea as the cost and control-input logistics became prohibitive.
After some additional research, we discovered some multi-HDMI output cards. Installing one into our designated “Zoom computer”, we were able to use one 3rd-party software to manage these outputs, and a second software to run sandboxed instances of Zoom independently from each other. We then attached each of the 4 HDMI outputs to our editing computer.
Due to Zoom’s format of presenting shared slides, we designated a separate computer to select and view the slides, splitting the monitor output and sending that to the editing computer as well.Solution: Isolated Capture, Program Editing, Broadcast
At first we decided to use our current live-edit laptop in concert with a Sonnet PCIe thunderbolt accessory, which hosted Blackmagic Design capture cards, as this method works quite well for our on-location productions already. We quickly discovered a GPU rendering and bandwidth bottleneck once we attempted to perform simultaneous recordings of Zoom and the Program Edit, so we began looking into options with higher rendering capabilities and increased bandwidth transmission.
Ultimately, we designed and built a new desktop, using a 12-core processor, GTX 3060 graphics card, and installed the Blackmagic Design capture cards directly to the motherboard, rather than through a Thunderbolt connection. With a desktop form-factor, we were also able to directly attach multiple drives, allowing us to designate an SSD for system operations, one for accessing critical production assets such as graphics and videos, one for recording, and a large HDD for bulk-storage. This further reduced any possibilities for data bottlenecks that could display as lagged or corrupted assets while live.
With this high-performance computer, we were able to record isolated feeds of 3 inputs and the program live-edit, push a signal to our in-house monitoring screens, and send a live-feed to the online video-hosting platform. Ultimately, in addition to the editing computer’s recordings, we needed to perform local-desktop recording on the slides computer, and set up an additional laptop to record a version with Zoom’s automatic camera switching.
Solution: Hosting
Our client wanted to present a premium experience to all viewers, and as such requested that the video be displayed on a webpage with their own branding, and completely devoid of the hosting platform’s branding. No YouTube recommended lists, post-playback thumbnails, no watermarks, nothing.
After looking around, we went for the obvious choice: Vimeo. With it’s built-in options, we were able to remove all branding, prevent viewers from clicking through to the channel and being distracted, or in any way see anything but the live broadcast, Q&A button, and appropriate branding on the website we embedded the video into. Their analytics tools were top-notch as well, allowing us to see a timeline-based viewer count, as well as when our broadcast was the “active window” on the viewer’s computer. Passing this information onto the presenters turned out to be a significant value add, as they could see the attention they garnered, and at what points in their presentation attendance grew or shrank.
Additional Notes:
Although we initially wanted to output a monitor for each presenter, often up to 8 persons, we discovered that when we surpassed 4 the virtual monitors’ rendering began to stutter. Working around this limitation we decided to use 4 virtual monitors, assigning them to the following:
– Zoom auto switching camera
– Main Presenter/Host
– Guest Presenter 01
– Guest Presenter 02
Using this layout, we would lock Monitor 02 on the Host, as they were most frequently on-screen, and in the case of a guest having technical issues, we could quickly cut to the host to keep the audience informed and entertained, possibly moving onto the next guest presenter in line while our back-end technicians worked with the initial guest.
Monitor 03 and 04 were used in an alternating pattern, with one guest “live” while queueing up the next scheduled guest on the other monitor, allowing a smooth and confident transition for our editor, and allowing us to preview and make any last-minute corrections before going live with the next guest.
Monitor 01 was kept on Zoom’s automatic camera switching, and used primarily for quick-switching sections, especially the Q&A sections, as it proved reliable enough and could take a large amount of heavy-lifting out of the coordination between our Zoom-switching operator and the Live-Editor.
Conclusion:
With this unique set of needs, we coordinated an approach that utilized 6 computers, 12 physical monitors, and 4 virtual monitors to coordinate, capture, and edit a dynamic Zoom call into a polished live broadcast production.
