Live Production Equipment

Hello
I think I'm overwhelmed by how much product BMD has to a successful live streaming/recording, but I decided to have professional opinions here.
- So, Equipment needed:

Event : Conference room with round table.
Cameras : 3-4 PTZ cameras.
Audio : 40 Microphones (delegate/president) to an amplifier to the audio mixer + 4 wireless mics (goes to the audio mixer too).

- What I'm trying to achieve:
-The key Speaker has a computer connected to a projector, so everyone can view the presentation in the projector + in 2-3 wall TVs.
When the key Speaker want to play a video, the video should show visually on the projector and The Tvs+the audio should go to the audio mixer so everyone can hear what's on the video.
- I should be able to stream all this to the internet (YouTube)
- I should be able to send whatever I want (raw video from a camera or the live stream) to wherever I need (projector or Tvs or both).

this setup can be offline too (all the above without the streaming option).

And what's my portability options if I ever needed this to be a mobile setup?

I draw a little plan of what I need hopefully I clarified what I need.

Thank You so much for this opportunity to put my concerns about my futur project.

Hi There

Hi Mounir,

You have a reasonably complex requirement which makes it difficult to describe in a few words, so forgive me if I have misunderstood a bit!

My first reaction is why 40 microphones + 4 wireless mics? You will need a fairly sophisticated mixer just to get the 44 inputs, plus I expect you will need at least 2 more for the video audio as played by the presenters. That itself is a solvable problem with sufficient money. Where I see an issue is for the sound engineer to manage those 40 delegate microphones. You really run the risk of 40 people all trying to talk at once! 3 or 4 all at once is bad enough.

On the technical issues, you should run all the audio through the sound desk with one single input into the ATEM. You don't want to be mixing part on the desk and part on the ATEM - huge risk of getting confused when you have to react quickly.

For distributing the video to any monitor on demand, I think you will need a video matrix, and probably an 8 x 8 matrix from what you have said which also is not cheap. 4 cameras will fill a 4 x 4 matrix without any room for the feed from the presentation/media computer, so 8 x 8 will be needed. This will give you the anything to anything flexibility you described. I operate a similar configuration at our church, and this is a fixed installation so we don't have to worry about the setup.

What I do when on the road (for my own business) is different and may be of interest to you. We have a road case which is kitted out to be self contained, and includes a 16 channel mixer and an ATEM Mini Extreme ISO. The Extreme has 2 video outputs. Output 1 has dedicated buttons allowing you to send any of the 8 inputs or the switched outputs to it, and we use that as a simplified version of your video monitor requirements. We connect 4 cameras, a media computer (for PowerPoint's, videos, etc. ) a livestream computer (to show those who are on the stream), and a control computer. During the actual presentation we will put up on the main screen a general graphic, the speakers slides/video, someone from the stream, or someone in the audience simply by selecting which channel is sent to video output 1. (You can do the same with output 2 but you have to use the ATEM app and buttons are simpler and quicker.)

Hope this helps
Darryl

Darryl

Thank You Darryl for taking the time to reply, I appreciate it.
For your question about the audio input, 40 microphones are going to dedicated sound amplifier which give me 1 single audio channel, all 40 microphones arent available, only 1 can talk, when anyone talks other mics are automatically disabled until he's finished. I already have the audio part working fine.
So I have that single audio input from all the mics.

For the video switcher, can the ATEM 1 M/E Constellation HD do the job, it has 12 SDI outputs and 20 SDI Input, I guess it's far enough.

I remodeled the diagram for better understanding.

and Thank you again for your precious time.

What you need, basically, is the setup I have in two flightcases .

I have a Constellation 2 M/E HD. You mention you have the 1 M/E but based on the number of inputs and outputs it sounds like you also have the 2 M/E.

I feed the projector and any additional screens from one or more AUX outputs. This allows you to clean switch between any source. I often also use the 2nd M/E and switch on that to feed the projector and then feed the 2nd M/E into the 1st M/E and use the 1st M/E for the live stream (or recording).

The most difficult part is the sound though. You want to play video's from e.g. a Hypoerdeck I assume and this video should of course be visible on the live stream but also visible on the projector and screen but more importantly the audio should play throught the PA. So that means that the audio should be extracted from the ATEM and feed back to the audio mixer. On the other hand you mix all the microphones on the mixer and this audio should be feed to the ATEM.

The way to do that is use an auxilary bus on the mixer and to use the mix minus feature on the ATEM. First of all, you want to use an auxilary bus on the mixer to prevent the audio coming from the ATEM to be feed back to the ATEM again. On top of that, you probably also have some kind of music player that plays music during breaks and you usually don't want that audio to be send to the ATEM. By setting up an auxilary bus you can selectively choose which audio sources on the mixer (post fafer) are being send to the ATEM. How to set this up depends very much on your audio mixer. Most digitial consoles have 4, 8 or even more auxilary outputs that can be used for that.

At the same time, you need to use the mix minus feature on the ATEM to prevent audio that is coming from the mixer to be send back to the mixer again. But the mix minus is only supported on the SDI inputs, not the analog audio inputs. So you need to reserve on SDI input (in my case SDI input 20) for just audio input. I personally combine it with it the video of a Mac Mini that is also built into the rack and this Mac Mini runs e.g. Companion and sometimes the LightKey app to also control DMX lights. Because I don't need the audio from this Mac Mini I use that port to override it's audio with the audio from the mixer. I use a BMD Mini Converter Audio to SDI converter for that. This converter takes an SDI video signal (from my Mac Mini) and replaces the audio with the audio coming from the mixer.

The audio from the ATEM to the audio mixer is taken from an AUX output. I use AUX 12 for that. This signal is feed into a BMD Mini Converter SDI to Audio converter. The audio from that is send to the audio mixer. The trick with the mix minus is now to choose the SDI input (in my case 20) where the audio is being feed into as the source for the AUX output (in my case 12) that is used to send the audio back to the mixer. If you do that, that will allow you to enable the checkbox for that specific input under the mix minus feature under settings. Enabling that will preven the audio from the audio SDI input to be send to the audio mixer and that's exactly what you want.

Although this works perfectly, one extra difficulty is audio/video sync. You will probably find that the audio coming from the audio will be ahead of the video. This can be fixed by applying a delay on the auxiliary output of the audio mixer.

At the same time, if you play a video through the ATEM you might notice that the audio is also ahead of the video. This is due to projector of the screens having some processing delay. This can be fixed by applying a delay on the audio mixer input where the audio from the ATEM is being feed into. If the projector and side screens have differently delay characteristics you might have to settle for the best possible option and accept that e.g. the audio/video sync for the side screens is slightly off.

Hope this helps and I explained it somewhat clearly. Otherwise, feel free to ask...

And to add to that, you don't need to feed audio or extra video from the laptop of the presenter to the mixer or the projector. Just use one HDMI feed (converted to SDI) from the laptop straight to the ATEM. In Windows and macOS you can choose to send all audio over the HDMI port as well. So if the presenter has any audio in his slides you can easily enable that by enabling audio for that SDI input on the ATEM. And as audio is also feed back to the audio mixer it will also be heard over the PA.