Hello everybody, Paul Richards here and today is Friday. That means we're live
streaming, and today we're talking about conference streaming. It seems to be
coming up all the time so we said hey why not let's do a little video talk
about some tips and tricks for conference streaming. So we do have a free guide on
our website which I'm going to navigate you guys to show you where that is,
it's just a complete step-by-step guide its a four step guide where you can go
in and just get some tips and tricks from you know, we've got a lot of
conference streaming in the past. I wanted to mention that obviously I dont know
if you've been watching the shows lately, but we've been doing charitable
donations every single Friday, and the way it works is by default we give
twenty dollars and then for every like and subscriber we get during the live
show we add an additional dollar up to fifty dollars.
Now here's the new cool thing that our president said was cool for us to do.
If we hit our fifty-dollar maximum which we did last week we will match it and send
it to an additional charity.
He really likes the CASA which is a court appointed special advocacy
where they help children in need who are appointed by the court to kind of
take over where their family left off,
and help them guide them along the way, be kind of their adult who speaks on
their behalf when it comes to you know children who might be getting in trouble
with the court and everything.
So last week we donated fifty dollars to the Susquehanna casa
and then this week if we can get to our fifty dollar level we will actually be
going ahead and contributing another fifty dollars to
another local CASA chapter, and you can actually email me at paul.richards@haverford.com
and huddlecamhd.com and you can actually suggest the charity of your choice
and we will be rotating you know, the choices that are our viewers are watching.
So part one of a conference stream is obviously the set up, the equipment that
you're using. The good news is that you can do this with a laptop, you can't really
see this but there's a laptop right here doing all of this,
everything you're seeing is being done by a laptop, I'm actually doing it right
now, live video production.
So that's the really nice part about all of this, is that it can be done with any computer
you probably do you want an i5 or i7 processor, a solid internet connection
and we'll talk about testing the bandwidth at various locations, you can
test that at speed.huddlecamhd.com and we suggest like a two megabit
up and down, but that's the setup here. So it's nice to have a joystick
controller we were showing that off there. Our joystick controller is $299 you
can daisy-chain the control to multiple cameras if you want to have multiple cameras,
this might be overkill. And then there are ways which we'll talk about to
automate camera control based on who is speaking,
and to do that we will mention in set up part 2 here we're gonna have a whole
section of this webinar on audio and you can actually switch the camera presets
and or different layouts based on audio which is kind of a cool thing.
So we'll talk about that in this setup, you can see we've just got an Intel NUC computer
we've got an audio source, there's an audio mixer there that's going from USB
to the computer, and then you can plug in XLR microphones,
you can plug in wireless microphones, and we're going to talk about audio just coming up next.
Of course we have an HDMI connection to a television so that we can see what we're doing,
you may not need that if you have a laptop you just got your everything on
your screen there, and then USB connections with the huddle cans for video.
So you can pretty much set something like this up for less than a thousand
dollars and then go up higher as the quality is needed.
So part two which we are going to talk about, is
all the audio and the audio switching. So I actually brought with me today
three different microphones for us to look at.
So let's take a closer look at some of these, first of all not sure if you can
notice I'm wearing a head worn a microphone.
This is the best kind of microphone because it does not attach to your shirt
and potentially ruffle, it definitely gets right up to the
the users mouth and it gets you the absolute best clarity for audio.
So that's the best option that's option number one option number two would be to
pass around a handheld microphone like this,
one of the things that little tip that I learned not long ago is that these
handheld microphones act like a flashlight and they are really, really
good if you use them right.
What I mean by that is that think about a flashlight has a cone coming out from the front of it,
you really do need to speak right into the microphone for it to pick up good, so
if you're holding it like this is going to be a very faint it's not going to...
that's not the way this microphone is designed. A lot of people will hold it
kind of like out in front and around, it does not pick up well, you want to put it
right up in front of your mouth like this.
So that's the first thing, so you've got your head worn, you've got that, and then one
of the most popular ones and and I think it's just for aesthetics purposes is
this is a Lapel microphone.
I'm going to actually use our camera, why not zoom in. So set this as preset one,
zoom in, and as you can see this is a Shure Lapel microphone system so one of
the things people really like about this is the fact that it is completely wireless.
So you can put this anywhere, go back to my normal setup here, and you can
clip this right onto somebody's shirt and you could have like two or
three or four six of these out in the field or eight. You can have a bunch of
these out there and bring them all back, and one of the things with conference
streaming in particular is that you're probably going to want to
have your microphones wireless unless you already have a bunch of microphones
out on the table to connect. So we'll talk about wireless microphones as well
but this is really the third option, and then the final option would be an easy
option here would be like a Huddlepod air, a conference phone. So if you've got
like a table, a small table of people, that will work actually quite well and
it's your third option there, it's the least expensive option, and that does
work quite well so those are the four audio options that I wanted to just
discuss each one has their pros and cons. So audio is kind of big and you can see
in this picture here that we've got three microphones were saying audio switching.
Well there's quite a few programs, we're not going to be able to go into all the
details of this but feel free to contact us to learn more,
basically we can do audio switching based on a microphone input. So part 3.
So assuming that all the audio is set up, all the video is set up, your cameras are
set up. Now you've got a stream and or record your live stream. Well part three is
just streaming. Got a lot of options here, we've done some videos on
reviewing some of these different ones,
YouTube is a great free one, when it's free
you know you do have to realize that youtube is going to monetize your content for you.
Most of the paid ones here allow you to monetize your own content. And you know,
all of these are really good, twitch is more for gamers. So if you've got a you
know you streaming a game concert that would be good. But ustream is a really
professional one by IBM where you can monetize your own content, you can insert
add roles, you can insert
pay now buttons, all kinds of enterprise options. StreamSpot is a great one,
DaCast is one that's been around for a long time,
Wowza, there's a bunch of these, We have to choose one and you have to stream to it, right.
So that is something to consider, it's not very difficult to do. And the way it works,
I have a little diagram here, is you send an RTSP stream to your content delivery network.
So those are two terms of supply familiarize yourself with, RTSP (real-time streaming protocol)
and CDN (content delivery network).
So those are you know, the to mainstreaming aspects that you're going to want to do.
You've got your video production software, maybe it's Wirecast maybe
it's xsplit there's a bunch of them out there, and you send that RTSP stream and
I would highly recommend a hardwired connection, not over Wi-Fi, streaming out to
the cloud to your content delivery network, then from there the content
delivery network distributes to your video and audio to be viewed by
thousands and thousands of people without flooding your own network.
So with that being said we get to part 4, and part 4, well yeah part 4, we will go
to part 4 and then we're going to talk about some local more local stuff.
So part 4 is the recording, so most of the content delivery networks can record
your... it can record your live stream in the cloud. So you can either
recorded on the cloud or you can record it locally on your computer and you can
do both at the same time. So you can record and stream at the same time it's
not a problem. With that being said you're probably going to look at your
CPU usage and make sure that you have just enough CPU usage so that you're not
tapping it out and you're able to really you know, not stress over your system,
Because recording onto let's say a solid state hard drive might be easier than
one of the normal spinning disk drives. So it depends on your hardware, depends
on your processing power if you can handle it.
I would suggest especially for important, important meetings to record locally and
that way if there's something that goes wrong with your stream, or your bandwidth,
you've got your back up.
But if you don't have the processing power to do that rest assured that
YouTube and all the other content delivery networks will not only stream,
but also record your content. So that's your option there.
So audio really ends up becoming the most important thing here, and all of the
microphones that we talked about can be Wireless. So this is what I'm using here
it's a microphone from DBA called D:fine and actually is used by
you know movies, Broadway, its the top, top, top-of-the-line and you can hardwire
plug it into a USB mixer which is actually what I'm doing now,
or you can play actually plug it into a wireless a belt pack, and the belt packs
looks exactly like the Lapel we did it's actually it is exactly this little
look belt package slip onto your belt and you can plug in various different
types of microphones that right here we have a lapel,
you guys can see that and you could just get a connection for head wear, and
that really is the absolute best.
In fact the absolute best would be a head-worn directly connected in your
computer, so that even the wireless
you know, could have a teeny bit of degradation, it's not much but just saying,
an absolute best would be hardwired head-worn microphones.
The next most popular for sure is these little wireless systems you can get them
in a single or a double channel wireless receiver and they usually pair together
with a belt pack and like we said if you get system like this you can really
plug in multiple different types of microphones.
There's headworn microphones, there's Lapel microphones
there are Cardioid, Supercarioid. We don't have time to get into all the
details of that, but this is what
ideally it really is an ideal solution because most of the time
you now, you've got your cameras in the back that can zoom in, you've got your computer
you're plugged into the network, you're plugged into power, and the one time
that you want to be battery powered and wireless is out there in the crowd.
Now one of the things to know about these is they are battery-powered
so they're almost always nine volts, you want to definitely get name brand
duracell or energizer 9-volt batteries, and you want to make sure they're full
because these things can eat up batteries within two to three hours that could be gone.
So you don't want to start on one or two our conference with half the battery
life you want just recharged... Change those batteries
and use fresh ones, and that is the one major concern is that they're not going to go for eight hours.
Don't leave... when you when you put them away don't forget to turn them off
because I've done that a million times, left it on and the batteries were dead.
Finally the huddle pod air might be an ideal option for you.
The reason why is because you can go 35 feet wirelessly, its USB plug and play,
it's $299, and has a seven hour battery life which is rechargeable there's a
rechargeable battery inside, the audio pickup is not going to be as good as a head-worn microphone.
It will be close to what you'll find with a lapel except you're not gonna
have to worry about any of the ruffling or anything, and it can pick up an area
from 8 to 10 feet wide.
So if it's a little conference with three to four people
you can actually put this right in front of them and capture fairly good audio.
So that's one option, it comes in white and black / kind of a grayish color you can
see behind me and that is a really good option.
So now what I want to do is I want to show you where to get our, and we'll take
a quick look at our conference streaming guide, and we're using a little video
conference call to do so.
So basically from any of our camera pages here there's a little button down
here it is free guide to conference streaming, and you can go in here,
I think the only thing you absolutely have to type in is your email address,
download the free guide and it's going to give you a download button and you can click that.
So this is a free guide to conference streaming it goes over everything we
just talked about from the introduction, to the set up, to the audio, to the streaming, to the
recording, and then some additional resources that you might find helpful.
So I just want to take you guys there so you knew how to get there and download
this guide which will give you further information on you know, what we're
talking about here. If you want to take some of this home, if you want to print some of the stuff out
that would be the way to do it for sure, and that's all I have today for you
guys so hopefully that was an informative session on conference streaming.
We gotta go, I actually recorded this so that we can go live in three minutes and
then i will be back for question & answer.
Thanks everybody!