Archive of Online Surgery Sessions

Basic microphone technique and placement

Session date: 02 December 2009

This week’s session includes Gavin Brockis’  screencast on microphone technique and placement.

#6 Online surgery - Microphone technique and placement from JISC Digital Media on Vimeo.

Topics covered during the session

Topics covered included: microphone technique; live webstreaming.

Transcript of questions and answers (edited to remove personal data)

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Mike: can I ask about live webcasting?

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Moderator: @mike of course

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Mike: on Monday, St Andrews Day, we broadcast our graduation for the 1st time live out to our website.

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Mike: To do this, the guys from came up with their toys, got a programme out video and audio feed from the production company , fed it (composite) into an encoder which in turn fed into an 8 core Mac and produced a QT stream, a Flash Stream and an archive copy to hard disc.

Plugged into our network and I think used Janet to get the streams down to their hosting server in Edinburgh. Our webpage pointed to this.

In future we’d like to do more of this but using our own resources/kit

I’m not sure what is required

Any advice?

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Steve (JISC Digital Media): Hi, Mike. The basic procedure in live webcasting isn’t very complicated.  I’d say that the biggest requirement is a computer powerful enough to encode the signal in real time.

With professional webcasting companies a lot of care has to be taken to provide redundancy in case of problems—you might not have to worry about this as much.

I can’t give you details off the top of my head, but you shouldn’t have much problem in outfitting your team to do this.  I can contact you after the surgery with specific details if you’d like.  OK?

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Mike: yes please!

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Gavin (JISC Digital Media): you will need a streaming server as well Mike. Do you know whether you already have one?

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Mike: Yes I think we do, but I think it is quite old>5 years. So again any suggestions appreciated

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Steve (JISC Digital Media): Five years is a long, long time in terms of computer horsepower.  Any modern PC or Mac will be an improvement.

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Mike: Yep - the other thing is we’d quite like to maintain the quality throughout the chain, we’ve got a JVC GY251E HD camera with SDI out, be good to be able to use SDI as an input to the encoder

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Steve (JISC Digital Media): You’ll want an SDI capture card—not difficult to source.  Having said that, are you sure you need HD for your purposes?  If you don’t have the bandwidth to stream it you’ll be wasting your time (on the other hand, if you do have the bandwidth, it’ll look great!).

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Gavin (JISC Digital Media): you’d need an XServe running OSX Server set up to stream video if you went the Mac route Mike - a surprisingly simple setup though. St Andrews should have a big enough pipe to stream video, but if you’re going to Unicast it then you might have to limit simultaneous views to avoid a logjam…

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Mike: I’m not hung up about Mac for this, call me platform agnostic

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Mike: understood. We do record in HD - 720p MXF and use an Avid Media Composer=>Sorenson Squeeze=>output file for viewing on our websites - people are used to the high quality, and they upload to YouTube very well.

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Gavin (JISC Digital Media): what kind of data rate are you using for the multicast setup Mike?

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Mike: well that’s the point, we had the guys from Edinburgh up and I didn’t get that kind of detail from them

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Gavin (JISC Digital Media): we’ll carry this offline Mike - I’ll chat to Steve when he’s ingested your enquiry. Good to talk to you

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Mike: thanks for your time, see you again. Cheers

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Steve (JISC Digital Media): Yes, I’ll have to check a few things before I can give you a useful answer.  I’ll email you soon.