Jumping into live streaming headfirst (part 1)
Many of you have been live streaming for years, but for the rest of us we got forced into the game when the pandemic shut down church services during spring 2020. In my case, we could only have a few individuals in the church at one time, so the challenge was offering a decent experience to our church members at home. No band, at least at first, and we didn’t have the fancy camera rigs and stage lighting. One pastor, one leader on the piano, and eventually a second singer. Yup, thoroughly exciting, but that’s the deal. Here’s what we did:
I set up a Yamaha TF1 (the small version) on a table up front. Another table had the Mac Mini running Pro Presenter and OBS for the live stream. I rerouted all the stage mics and wireless talkie mics straight to this console, bypassing the entire sound system. The main output fed an audio interface which connected to the Mini. Overall level control was through individual channel faders, main mix fader, and the level control on the interface. Pretty simple.
The nice thing about this was that I could completely customize the mix for the stream, since we weren’t feeding the room. EQ, compression, reverb, and the overall mix balance was targeted for our remote audience, which is a different deal from a live room. Since there wasn’t much going on in the room (no band other than the piano), I could monitor decently on headphones, verifying everything by going out in the hallway and listening from the actual Facebook feed on my phone.
We learned a couple lessons also. We set the FB feed to go live about ten minutes early, so we had to remember to keep everything muted until actual service start time so folks at home wouldn’t hear us talking about stuff. Open mics are more noticeable when listening on headphones and earbuds, so turning mics on and off is more obvious (do a quick fade in and out along with the on/off button). You have to keep a close eye on audio levels in OBS, the streaming software, to make sure it’s loud enough (for some reason it’s got to be awfully near the top to sound normal), but without overdriving and distorting everything. Clear verbal and hand signals were established to make sure everybody knew when the camera and audio feed was live, when to transition to something else, and so on. It’s awkward, especially for the poor souls on stage who’ve never done anything like this. With nobody in the room except a couple of oddball tech team folks, there’s no energy or feedback to draw on. It takes practice and a good deal of patience. But we got something out there, and it held us over for a few months.
Gradually we got really fancy, such as buying a video switcher to take different video sources, such as multiple cameras, and learning how to transition scenes. The HDMI output of this device went into our Mac Mini to feed OBS. We learned a bit about OBS, the free streaming software, where you can set up the overall screen layout with main content (camera feed, slides, etc), logo in the corner, lyrics overlaid on camera feeds, or whatever). It’s not that hard, just takes a bit of experimenting and learning how it works.
So with our simple setup we got the job done. Thankfully we had the resources already, such as the TF1 console, so it wasn’t a big expense. I did discover one of the audio interfaces hadn’t had its level pot changed in so long it stopped working when I tweaked it for the OBS feed, and of course our wireless head mic started popping randomly (a lot) with a bad connection to the transmitter. These were old anyhow, so after replacing them we were in good shape. Always something. Next time I’ll describe our transition when we were allowed to have people in the building, requiring both a live stream and in-house mix.
