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A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

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Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#21

Post by alar44 »

killingtime74 wrote: post #20
sylens wrote: post #6

One of the most interested/underrated side effects of the pandemic is that it has forced a lot of people to become somewhat knowledgeable on things like camera quality/positioning, lighting, and sound/noise cancellation. I was pretty amazed at what Bo Burnham could do by himself on his Netflix special given a year and change to experiment with doing all of the A/V work for a one man show in a small room.

Even though he filmed it himself it was a multi million dollar production, no doubt with many technical advisors and staff.

This is definitely the case. It's not like the guy doesn't know anyone in the industry. A few meetings with some of his buddies for rules of thumb with lighting placements and camera angles goes a long long way.

Since this is a tech site, it's probably akin to a programmer calling his infra buddy on the basics of setting up a semi pro home network. "Well you'll need a router, firewall, switch, NAS, and a server. Go for ESXi on your server, and don't worry about VLANs unless you want to set up a guest network. Gimme a call if you have any questions."

Nothing happens in a void. Bo did a great job, but he didn't just wing it. And that's ok.

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#22

Post by marcan_42 »

sylens wrote: post #6

One of the most interested/underrated side effects of the pandemic is that it has forced a lot of people to become somewhat knowledgeable on things like camera quality/positioning, lighting, and sound/noise cancellation. I was pretty amazed at what Bo Burnham could do by himself on his Netflix special given a year and change to experiment with doing all of the A/V work for a one man show in a small room.

I got involved with a local DJ event shortly before the pandemic doing lasershows, and we ended up having to go online immediately thereafter. I had some experience with OBS from using it to composite stuff for video calls (pre-pandemic), so I offered to help run an online version. And then I had to figure it all out.

The way we end up doing it, DJs run their own sets at home (from different countries), then stream to an RTMP server I run on GCloud. I pull those feeds from home and composite them with transitions to the next DJ, then stream to a single Twitch channel. I had to teach myself not just the tech part (which was okay, I'm used to tech), but also figure out how to coordinate DJ transitions in real time with them, while MCing introducing the next DJ and simultaneously crossfading the audio and triggering the video transition. There's a lot of "Okay, 5 minutes to go, you're live on the audio mix. Start when I'm halfway through your introduction text, since there's 2-3 seconds of latency. I'll give you a live monitor feed of the stream audio in real time via Discord, use that as your cue. Aaand that was DJ foobar's amazing set! Coming up next we have " Sometimes it works better, sometimes it goes a bit wrong, and it's definitely not something I'd ever done before :-)

And DJs had to learn about cameras, compositing, audio capture and avoiding ground loops, etc, as well as the whole OBS side. I have a whole tech doc I send them with the OBS-related info, and we do test runs where I check that their audio/video is decent, their connection to the server is good, they have the A/V sync set properly, their audio level is good... Some other folks in this area have put together more general documentation on the audio setups and whatnot.

Also sent in a few patches to OBS, including one fixing a years-old unacknowledged bug that would silently kill audio in streams randomly after a few hours, depending on the exact setup. That one killed one of our shows 3 times and I vowed it'd never happen again. Turns out it was an infamous bug in the DJ restreaming community... that the OBS devs had always maintained was user error...

If anyone's interested in the details of running this kind of event, here's a presentation I gave with 3 other folks from the community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lHn73MsE7c

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#23

Post by marcan_42 »

vmception wrote: post #11
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #4

The before and after on the lighting is so drastic.

Lighting > Lens > Camera > Medium > Resolution In that order, especially when looking at where to compromise

Don't forget sound at the very top. Perfect audio and terrible video is much better than perfect video and terrible audio.

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#24

Post by sneak »

daneel_w wrote: post #3

The overwhelming majority of live streams today is content created on a PC by gamers/entertainers, for gamers/patrons watching it on a PC, and in this context you can safely stop worrying over the two most pressing issues - 29.97 vs 30 fps and partial vs full range. Just go with 30 or 60 fps and full color range, and everything will be optimal for both you and your viewers.

Or just go with 24fps, which plays fine on 30fps displays, uses less bandwidth (or the same bandwidth and has higher picture quality), and looks "better" due to 24fps being the frame rate of movies (and 30fps being the frame rate of straight-to-video daytime tv).

30 or 60 makes sense for fast motion, but most things people are shooting are talking heads and stuff like that, which don't really benefit from higher frame rates. 24 is good.

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#25

Post by charcircuit »

sneak wrote: post #24
daneel_w wrote: post #3

The overwhelming majority of live streams today is content created on a PC by gamers/entertainers, for gamers/patrons watching it on a PC, and in this context you can safely stop worrying over the two most pressing issues - 29.97 vs 30 fps and partial vs full range. Just go with 30 or 60 fps and full color range, and everything will be optimal for both you and your viewers.

Or just go with 24fps, which plays fine on 30fps displays, uses less bandwidth (or the same bandwidth and has higher picture quality), and looks "better" due to 24fps being the frame rate of movies (and 30fps being the frame rate of straight-to-video daytime tv). 30 or 60 makes sense for fast motion, but most things people are shooting are talking heads and stuff like that, which don't really benefit from higher fram…

24 is not a multiple of 30.

>and looks "better" due to 24fps being the frame rate of movies

I think this is just Stockholm syndrome from people used to bad frame rates. If the content was originally in 60fps don't butcher it by converting it to 24fps.

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#26

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

> So, what did I do? I switched from Logic to Reaper for my live mixing. Reaper is very cheap ($65, and you can just use it for free if you want), extremely streamlined (it weighs about 35 MB to Logic’s many GB), and has worked perfectly for me. I haven’t had one bad moment with it. It’s what they’d call robust. I’d recommend it for this purpose to anyone.

Guess who created Reaper? Justin Frankel. Guess what else he created? Winamp. Software like this is missing in today's era. Just this one piece of software is the counter arguments to the gazillion gbs of electron apps making the rounds today.

I wish we could go back to efficiency and small sized apps with big ambitions.

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#27

Post by suction »

pfraze wrote: post #15

I spent some time live-streaming a (now dead) project this year. I live-streamed almost all the dev and created an archive indexed by commit ( https://ctzn.network/dev-vlog ). Here are some other non-technical tips: - Don’t livestream everything like I did. You’ll burn out. But do pick a regular schedule like once a week and stick to it. You’ll eventually get regulars and that’s fun. - Use a service like Placeit and…

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Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#29

Post by saurik »

> What I think has most surprised me about livestreaming, as someone who has lived and breathed live performance for most of his life, is how authentically live it feels to me as the performer. I feel the presence of the audience watching me through the ether. I feel their gaze, their judgement, and I swear I can feel their joy when I’m particularly in the zone and the music I’m making is really speaking from the heart. It sounds crazy, but the livestream experience has felt even more intimate to me at times than it has to play in a jazz club or a concert hall.

I wish I felt like this :(. To the extent to which I do--and maybe that is all he is feeling also, so maybe the real issue is that I just don't feel it is "sufficient"--is a kind of "muscle memory" for what being in front of an audience is like, in that if I close my eyes on stage I am sure I wouldn't immediately panic... but it really does feel alone and isolating for me to only have my own video and see nothing but the occasional chat in response. I know people are out there, but I don't have a feel how they are reacting--again, other than as a prediction of "audiences tend to work like X" as I have experienced them enough to mentally model them--to feel like they are still on the journey with me, which is, if nothing else, a lot of the fun on my side :(.

Re: A few things I’ve learned about livestreaming

#30

Post by sneak »

charcircuit wrote: post #25
sneak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just go with 24fps, which plays fine on 30fps displays, uses less bandwidth (or the same bandwidth and has higher picture quality), and looks "better" due to 24fps being the frame rate of movies (and 30fps being the frame rate of straight-to-video daytime tv). 30 or 60 makes sense for fast motion, but most things people are shooting are talking heads and stuff like that, which don't really benefit from higher fram…

24 is not a multiple of 30. >and looks "better" due to 24fps being the frame rate of movies I think this is just Stockholm syndrome from people used to bad frame rates. If the content was originally in 60fps don't butcher it by converting it to 24fps.

No, the fact that higher frame rates are not automatically better because "bigger number, more data" is not equivalent to Stockholm syndrome.

What's better, a gallery exhibition of 20 photographs or 2000? It doesn't work that way.

24fps is not a bad framerate.

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