Room setup¶

Here’s a detailed graph of how we typically setup our rooms. This can be overwhelming, so we have also broken it up into audio and video.

room-setup

Audio¶

room-setup-audio

The audio setup described here uses the equipment listed in the hardware section. It uses two headset mics for presenters, two handheld mics for questions and two omni-directional mics for room noise. Room noise is the clapping and general buzz that happens in the background during a talk. This is useful for the stream, as it makes viewers feel as if they are in the room. These two mics are not sent to the room audio system. The final two inputs are from the presenter’s laptop so that any audio or video played during the talk can also be played on the stream and recording. The presenter’s audio is run through a Direct Injection (DI) box so that the laptop output is converted into a usable signal for the mixing desk.

All the inputs run to an audio mixing desk, where the sound technician mixes the levels for the room and the camera. The two mixes are handled using aux buses and main outputs or sub-groups. Sub-groups are better, because they allow everything to be post fader and the two feeds are independent. If you are using the aux buses, make sure there are two - one for left and one for right. They should also be set to post-fader output so that changes to the fader levels affect the room as well as the stream. The main-mix or one of the sub-groups is run to the camera. This is for the stream and recording. We run it through the camera so that we do not have to handle synchronizing the audio and video in software. The aux bus or the other sub-group is run to the room’s speakers.

Video¶

room-setup-video

The video hardware we use is described in the video hardware section. There are two cameras in every room and an Opsis for capturing the presenter’s presentation. These inputs are mixed together using Voctomix. The Opsis output is streamed over the wired network by the capture PC to Voctomix. The output from Voctomix is streamed out to the stream servers and recorded locally for upload to the review system.