Behind the scenes - 600+ user live streamed conference

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Since we hosted our virtual Define Tomorrow conference at the end of November 2020 I have had a number of people approach me asking about the technology we used. In this blog post we will run through some lessons learnt and the key technologies we used to livestream directly from our offices.

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We at ComputerWorld have been creating audio and video content in-house for over 5 years, so when we realised we wouldn’t be able to complete Define Tomorrow in our usual in-person format we felt quite confident we could put on a good show virtually.

Lessons Learnt

One of the first decisions we made was to work with a video production company and I would highly recommend this for an event of this size unless you have sufficient resource internally. This allowed us to ensure all videos where needed were professionally edited and it meant we could share the stress during the actual livestream.

The Define Tomorrow virtual conference had over 60 hours of content from presenters all around the globe, we went for a mix of pre-recorded and live content. This allowed us to offer a good mix of content from a wide amount of presenters. All of our keynote content was live as well as select other sessions during the days, we also encouraged all presenters of pre-recorded content to join the live chat when their sessions went live on the platform.

One of the biggest lesson learnt was to ensure we stayed away from using Zoom for any of our live sessions including the recordings where possible. Whilst Zoom is great for webinars and video conferencing it doesn’t work well with the video production platforms (mainly due to poor quality webcam output over the stream) and the quality of those sessions recorded over it was a lot poorer than the alternative platforms mentioned below.

Where recording a session with more than one person I would recommend that video and audio was captured at each end of the session as well as with the recording platform you choose. There were a couple of sessions that due to bandwidth or connectivity issues as well as compression on the remote recording we weren’t as happy with the final video as we would have been with capturing the recording directly with each person.

Key Hardware

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Camera

Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K

Microphones

Rode Filmmaker Kit x 2

Rode Video Mic Pro

Audio Mixer

Rode Rodecaster Pro

Video Mixer

Atem Mini

Video Production

OBS

Video Production Automation

Stream Deck + Companion

Livestreaming and Pre-Recording Platform

Streamyard

Live Event Platform

HeySummit

Lighting

Neewer 1320 LED Dimmable LED Video Lights

  • We did use various other lightboxes to fill dark areas of the shot where needed

Computing

We used various devices for producing, recording, streaming and viewing the content. I don’t have specific specifications for these just ensure you have sufficient resources for the various tasks and where possible complete a single task per device.