Sending video over your network

At this technically challenging event in central Leeds this week, we had a plenary meeting in the main hall, as well as three smaller breakout rooms, allowing up to four simultaneous discussion sessions at certain points during the day.

The clients brief required the facility for a remote audience to join the physical participants In each room via Zoom.

At the same time, a program stream was to be sent to YouTube for viewing by an external audience. Remote participants had the option to choose YouTube video streams from any of the four rooms when breakouts were in session.

And all this whilst recording all individual camera and content feeds separately for editing later.

The physical layout of the hotel meant that there was quite a distance between the breakout rooms and the main plenary room. We built the control and operations area in the most central place available, but this still made running cable to interconnect the various rooms almost impossible. The only practical option open to us was to share the various video sources over a network using a technology called NDI.

NDI has some specific network requirements for reliable operation, and your venue team are very likely to start getting getting very nervous when the conversation turns to "configuring switch port settings". In fact. it 's more than likely to be outside the scope of your venue IT staff. And even if there is someone competent to make these changes, any large venue would have a properly managed secure network. And that would require requests for change in advance, so that the suggested alterations can be properly assessed to make sure they don't affect other services running on the same network.

In this case we worked with the Venue IT well in advance of the event, and we're able to plug our own switches into the hotels cabling.

Because we were using the hotels physical cabling, we could avoid using WiFi. Video conferencing doesn't like WiFi. Even very fast dedicated WiFi will suffer from frozen pictures and dropped packets when moving video streams around. but the NDI videos were running a higher quality video stream that is normally used for video conferencing platforms like Zoom, so there was even greater risk.

Zoom presenter managed within vMix

We use vMix event streaming software and that allows us to ingest both real time and NDI sources, as well as recording each source as an isolated stream.

For this job we needed two vMix systems:

One handled the outgoing stream as a completed program, with branding, titling for presenters and a feed for the copyright free music specific to the online audience. That system also recorded all the feeds.

The second vMix system was using the built in integration into Zoom to manage the feeds both from and to the breakout rooms.

For any situation that requires remote speakers to present to a live audience over video, there is nothing on the market today that does a better job than vMix.

It's own proprietary 'vMix call' platform is perfect for the purpose, Unfortunately, in my experience it proved problematic with non technical users who were simply put off because of the lack of familiarity. It always worked well technically, but certain high profile individuals who couldn't connect on the first click of the mouse might well throw a wobbly, and insist on lesser alternatives just because they were not familiar with the interface.

By contrast, the vMix integration into the widely used Zoom platform means presenters can enjoy the additional confidence gained from using a video conferencing platform that they are very familiar with.

The feature set for remote presentation is absolutely perfect, allowing event technical teams to isolate individual camera feeds, audio and shared content. And do with them whatever they want to, without the zoom user interface automatically switching views, or displaying menu bars as it normally does.

In summary: these days, it is possible to integrate remote callers almost seamlessly into an 'in person' event in almost any configuration, but the technical challenges are not for the inexperienced.

A great deal of technical preparation is vital to ensure that the necessary setting up and pre programming is completed and tested rigorously before your event goes live.

For more information on integrating Zoom calls into in person events. Contact us hello@confidence-digital.com

The two vMix systems