SmashBoxxTV Podcast

[Anon]

My biggest constructive criticism was that I liked the graphics however thought they were too large and covered up too much of the players body and tee pad. I'd rather see the graphics on the side/s or much smaller on the bottom center of the picture.

Another note on the graphics... I'm sure whomever designed them was very happy with the animated in's/out's and all the moving bits and bobs on the lower-thirds.

However the bitrate they were streaming at often couldn't handle it. So the graphic would 'freeze' for a moment and then 'catch up' and pop on stream.

When streaming at lower bitrates its often smarter to make the graphics very simple with basic on/off animations (if any at all) so they don't spike the bitrate every time they are cued up.

 

[jvphobic]

Graphics

Anon... noted. Thanks for your input. Our next broadcast is GBO. So we will work with them on creating some simple lower thirds and hole graphics.

My goal is to never have any lower third graphics on screen when the players are throwing. The only thing on screen should be the small hole & distance, and the bug in the upper left. If I don't feel like I can get the 8 sec graphic done in time before a player throws, I don't put it up.

One of my big dilemmas is that I am pulling in two 720p streams and pushing out a 720p stream out to YouTube. What I see is a clean and crisp image of what goes out to YouTube, and not what you guys see when YouTube shows it. I do also monitor the chat and am on a conference call with Terry and our cameramen. The bandwidth at the studios prevents me from watching the final YouTube product. Once I am able to secure more bandwidth, I will be able to see more of the final product. At this point, I am relying a lot on our watchers to warn me.

I am actually working on a fail-over system right now so that we don't run into problems when the Windows based Wirecast crashes on my system. It should fail-over to a backup stream.

 

[jvphobic]

ThomasP, I hear your issue on the audio levels. Currently Wirecast has no built-in solution for audio leveling or compressing. I have looked at other options for pushing out our broadcast but there are downsides to OBS and Tricaster. OBS isn't quite as well supported as Wirecast and doesn't have all the features, but it is a very nice open source program. And a Tricaster is expensive and not as easily upgradable as my own PC with Wirecast installed.

Ultimately this falls on me. I need to be more diligent about leveling the audio with as loud as Terry is going to be. His interviewing level is much higher than his play-by-play level. Ultimately this could be solved by having Terry be the loudest asset and then the rest of the commercials and interviews be quieter. No one really cares if the commercials are the quietest part of the broadcast. Wirecast pulls in a direct RTMP stream from our server, so I have to manually set audio levels. And some of our commercials and stuff were handed to me moments before we went live, and I wasn't as efficient as I should have been.

Thanks for the suggestions and we will work on making the next broadcast look and sound better.

 

[Anon]

A relatively simple solution (but would take some prep time) would be to just pull all the commercials into Premiere/Etc and normalize all of the volume levels to -6db or whatever works for Terry's vocal level.

Then just setup a preset and have Media Encoder batch them out.

Not the most elegant fix and obviously anything delivered to you 5 minutes before the broadcast would be troublesome. But its a start.

Edit:

If i'm watching the stream I'm usually trying to communicate any production issues with you. I know sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle. I'm a production guy (Sports, news, live music, etc) so I can't help but watch with a critical eye.

 

[jvphobic]

Re-encoding them in Premiere is a good idea. And it might be something I do for the future.

Our next big hurdle, and the hurdle of all video producers is what to do with all of our video. We are going to be racking up hundreds of gig of video a weekend. I would love to catalog it all and archive it, and meta tag it. Uggggh. I do plan on keeping backups offsite on a cloud service plan.

 

[Anon]

Re-encoding them in Premiere is a good idea. And it might be something I do for the future.

Our next big hurdle, and the hurdle of all video producers is what to do with all of our video. We are going to be racking up hundreds of gig of video a weekend. I would love to catalog it all and archive it, and meta tag it. Uggggh. I do plan on keeping backups offsite on a cloud service plan.

Yea backup/archive is a bear. A couple years ago we finally upgraded to a SmallTree shared storage setup and it was the single best purchase we've made. Not the most sexy way to spend money... but the peace of mind is insanely worth it. RAID 5 for max performance and redundancy.

We still end up dumping stuff to archival hard drives every 6 months or so but it has definitely simplified the operation.

The Premiere transcoding is a good 'best practices' type of step to take. I like processing all of my clips/commercials/etc into a less compressed format since almost everything is delivered in H.264 these days. H.264 playback is very CPU heavy and encoding in Wirecast also happens to be CPU heavy. Anything that can take some of that load off is a good practice. Even if it comes at the expense of storage space (less compression = bigger files).

 

[Aim For The Chains]

Re-encoding them in Premiere is a good idea. And it might be something I do for the future.

Our next big hurdle, and the hurdle of all video producers is what to do with all of our video. We are going to be racking up hundreds of gig of video a weekend. I would love to catalog it all and archive it, and meta tag it. Uggggh. I do plan on keeping backups offsite on a cloud service plan.

ever thought to reach out to some tech companies and see about getting stuff to "test" for free? Many co's might be interested as sponsor too! Its not uncommon at all with storage for many popular YT channels. They live on free ****! :thmbup: You guys are getting big(ger) lol.

 

[jvphobic]

Those SmallTree devices look nice. But, I use a Windows machine. BUT... I have some experience with Synology devices that I like quite a bit. I may look into getting one of those later this year. They sync directly with Amazon S3 and can be my backup. But, the Thunderbolt devices are NICE.

 

[Anon]

Those SmallTree devices look nice. But, I use a Windows machine. BUT... I have some experience with Synology devices that I like quite a bit. I may look into getting one of those later this year. They sync directly with Amazon S3 and can be my backup. But, the Thunderbolt devices are NICE.

We interface with our SmallTree via 10Gig ethernet. As long as the client has afp/smb they can connect and mount the SAN just like a normal local drive.

Its more 'working storage' than 'backup storage' even though it gets used as both. 24TB does fill up faster than you'd think

SmallTree is more of an enterprise type solution (and carries enterprise cost$$$). Those synology devices would certainly be suitable for backup. Or even a Drobo which might be the cheapest way to get some peace of mind.

 

[jvphobic]

We tested a Drobo in our office environment and I didn't love it. I replace it with a few Synologies and am very happy with that. Odds are I would get a Synology and use it as redundant storage and backups. Possibly have one at my house and one at Terry's house. Then sync to the cloud. Synology lets me back up to Google Storage as well.

 

[jedeye]

Absolutely loved the coverage.....very minor critique, on a note for professionalism. Terry, in golf (ball or disc), it is preferred to announce scores as "minus" and "plus," rather than using the term, "negative." This is simply a point of diction, the word, minus, of course, being the opposite of plus (while negative is the opposite of positive). It sounds more professional to say, that McBeth shot, for example, either 28 down, or a minus 28, rather than saying he is at negative 28, while some female competitor, for example, finished at plus 10. I know it is small, picky point, but it makes some of us (especially former ball golfers) cringe. Keep up the good work, gentlemen!