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Live Training Broadcast Test

PhotoJoseph's picture
November 8, 2015 - 10:00pm

Wanna know what's hard? Live broadcasting over the internet. Apps like Periscope make it look easy, and if that's all you expect from it, it is easy. But add in source switching, quality demands, and the ability to record your source locally without degradation… and it's a whole different ball game. Not to mention things like a good looking set with quality lighting. Man this is hard!

But, it's essentially done. It's done enough to get to work, at least. I have changes to make and the quality isn't there yet, but that may require a new computer and possibly even a switch to Windows for the broadcast system (those who know me well know that's practically heresy, but if that's what it takes, that's what it takes).

I ran a test on Friday, shown below. It's a bit rambling and a little scattered as I get used to the system, and you can tell I'm a bit distracted trying to monitor audio and switching in realtime, but I just need to get used to it. My quality issues right now are…

  • There were apparently some dropouts on the broadcast side, as reported by someone watching live. My bandwidth should not be an issue, so it's most likely the CPU topping out. It will hover around 70% but spike to 100% often, and that's not good for the broadcast.
  • This is low frame rate; around 15fps. What you're watching here isn't the live broadcast (obviously) but a locally recorded version, uploaded to Vimeo. There's no reason for this to be anything less than 30fps other than the power of the computer, which is maxing out and therefore only laying down about 15fps — at least as far as I can tell. I'll run some more tests, writing to an external drive, to see if that makes a difference, but since the internal is SSD I have a hard time imagining write speed is the issue.
  • There's a bug in the broadcast software that's killing me. Wirecast won't record a 1080p source to a 1080p capture without scaling it down and back up again, leading to a soft image quality. The images on my screen you're seeing here are actually 1600x900 instead of 1920x1080 because with the introduced softness, I work round that by lowering the resolution so everything is bigger on screen, and therefore the softness is forgivable. But it doesn't make me happy. I want to be showing my screen at 1920x1080. Although to be fair, that might actually be too high resolution for some viewers, so while this bug is forcing me there for now, I may actually stay there. I'll gauge that on user feedback.

Anyway, here's the video… enjoy!

 

Author:
PhotoJoseph

Joseph, I finally got a chance to look at this and the set up looks great and the switching from you to the screen and back is seamless.  I can see where the optics on the screen views are a little fuzzy/soft and the letters are not quite clear.  So obviously I can see your concerns for perfection along those lines.  But over all the session went well and as you noted will get smoother as you do more of these.  So I am staying tuned. I see you are using El Cap and the most recent Lr update.  I have been holding off on upgrading to ElCap for a little longer but did go with the new Lr update. I was one of the ones protesting the new import format mainly for the removed functions.  We will need to see what the upcoming upgrade in Lr looks like with the removed functions added back in.

Florian

Florian Cortese
www.fotosbyflorian.com

I see the softness you described by it doesn’t really bother me. I guess I’ve been conditioned over the years to expect that. 

The audio is predominately coming out the left channel which feels a little off since dialog normally comes out the center (or both left/right equally).

Can’t wait for the Live training to start.

Thomas

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