July 25th, 2009.  On a warm July night, EXIT: Stage Left, a web series featuring the story of an off-Broadway theater company and their struggle to put on a play, streamed live to the world.  While many Television shows in the past such as ER, Cheers, and others have done a live episodes, this is the first for a scripted web series.

The biggest question for this blog is “How did we do it?”

The answer to that is, exactly how I do my day job.  My day job is Technical Directing and Compressing live webcasts for a fortune 500 company.  At the company we use Windows Media as our main live streaming solution, but have been working with Flash and Quicktime for certain events. For “Exit” we knew we wanted to go with Flash to offer the most compatibility.  Flash has a huge installed base and works quite well for streaming.  Bit for Bit, it’s not the best looking codec to use, but it is cross platform and browser compatible.

We set up a computer running an Intel Quad Core processor, a Digital Rapids capture card and Flash Media Live Encoder.  We set up our RMTP stream to a server running Flash Media Server.  We originally tested this on an HP AMD64 machine that was a few years old, but it was choking and only allowed 19 or 20 frames per second, which is why we went to a brand new Quad-core system.

Using Flash CS-4, CSS, and HTML I created a simple front end to run the video in.  I searched the web and found AJAX chat and implemented it.

That was the down and dirty funcionality of the Streaming Part.  We were lucky enough to have my friend Greg set up the encoder and test the stream.

Moving on to the video production side of things, is where we ran into a few problems.  We were working with a number of unknowns prior to the actual event.  We didn’t have the time or budget to have a day of rehearsal on the 24th as we were hoping to do.  So that left us just the 25th to set up test, light, and rehearse. This caused us a lot of pain during the event, which is why we ended up running a bit behind.

I’m used to working with full studio configured cameras, such as the Sony D50 that allows me to control Iris, color balance, and black balance from video village.  In this case however we did not have access to a flypack with our limited budget.  Instead we went with 3 HVX-200 cameras and a Sony EX-1.  The sony was graciously donated to the production from Brett at Prompter People and the additional HVX was from SJSU.

We ran those cameras with S-video cables through monitors, and into a Panasonic MX-70 8 input switcher on the main inputs.  A 5th input came from a Mac Pro through an AJA I/O HD via SDI.  The playback of the Audio and Video Roll-ins was from a Final Cut Pro Timeline.  This is also how we rolled in our countdow.

Audio consisted of a Mackie 16 channel mixer, 8 wireless Sennhieser microphones as well as a few off brand wireless mics.  We have a boom op covering one scene where we didn’t have enough microphones to cover everyone.

Throughout the morning and early afternoon, I set up video village while Chris and crew set up all the lighting and the show.  Video village set up took longer than originally planned, as we were waiting on some equipment to arrive after it was used.  This is also due to the new aspects were were not counting on.  The AJA I/O was freshly opened up and drivers downloaded and installed.  This was it’s maiden voyage if you will.  Set up basically contined all the way up to 6:50 at which point we realized that we needed AT LEAST one rehearsal.  Well we didn’t get it.  We did however get about 4 scenes into the show 10 minutes before we went live.  So, we in all essences didn’t have a single rehearsal for the live show.  The live was our rehearsal.

It was crazy.  No one really knew when things were happening and the script that I had, wasn’t up to date.  Things changed in editing the produced episode to they had to be handled on the fly.  We also had problems with our Clear-com, as the wireless wasn’t working and I had only one way communication with 3 of our 4 cameramen.  The 4th was flying free out there.

So that’s the basic story of how it happened and the gear we used to do it.