Many people ask ‘how does live streaming work?’. That’s a big question and can be broken down into two stages – the video production side and the IT side. Today I’m going to be talking about the production side of live streaming.
With the majority of our live streams, we have multiple cameras. These cameras are placed within a venue and are operated by camera operators. The cameras output a video signal called HD-SDI which runs along a BNC cable to the control desk. BNC cables can run signals for up to around 100 metres before losing signal, so the control desk doesn’t need to be near the action.
At the control desk, the cameras are plugged into our vision mixer unit. This is controlled by a director and vision mixer who can see all of the camera angles at once and choose which one they’d like to cut to. The director can talk to all of the camera operators to tell them what shots they’d like and so that the camera operators know when they’re live. At this stage, audio is also added into the mix – this often comes from the venue’s PA system so that the stream uses audio directly from the microphones in use for the event.
This is mixed into what we call the programme output which in turn goes into our encoder. Sometimes graphics and or live captions are added here, and sometimes they’re added in on the vision mixer, depending on the equipment we’re using. This then gives us a second programme out which includes the final mix of cameras, the audio and graphics ready to be recorded or live streamed.
If you have a live streaming project you’d like to discuss, feel free to get in touch.
WhatsApp us
