Building A New Video Production Studio

hello everyone welcome back to streaming alchemy i'm john mahoney and on today's show we're going to be taking a look at a studio build we just did for a friend that we think you might find some interesting bits in uh it covered a lot of different areas so we'll dive into all of this in a moment but to start i again want to welcome everybody to if you have any thoughts any questions uh any suggestions feedback please just put them in the comments below uh we'll address everything we can right here on air uh also if you would like to join us live on the show please just uh click on the link below and you know it's it's in the show notes so you should be able to connect and somebody from the studio will get you on air with us so thank you and thank you everybody for your patience i know we did not have a show last week and that was because we were down in florida building a new studio for a friend of ours and there were a lot of interesting parts to getting the studio build together uh and it help it helped us think through the process for analyzing what needs to get done and then building a plan around executing on that and it also taught us you know some of the things that you forget when you don't do these types of things in the field as often where you have to have more flexibility around certain things and you know things don't always go uh the way you plan but there's always a plan to deal with it and that's that's probably the best way to look at it so let's actually get started uh we did the studio build in florida and it was for a production studio that will basically mirror a radio station where there'll be multiple guests but all of this will be with video so be basically the visual radio metaphor that we were looking to capture here and as we started this there were a set of design criteria that we really uh ran with so let me go through that here so the requirements we had were first that this studio was going to be operated by an on-air host so it had to have everything accessible and really uncluttered in the design for how we would interface with how the hosts would interface with the studio uh the second thing because this was going to be designed around more of a talk radio style where there'd be a lot of interaction between people there had to be clean lines of sight between everybody everybody had to be able to make easy eye contact and there couldn't be a lot of gear in the way and that was also necessary for line of sight with cameras because this was going to be visual radio we needed to have cameras that could capture people from multiple angles and that required a very sort of low footprint low height level design for the studio as i mentioned it was going to be around the radio which would be more talk format and there were a couple of things first there could be multiple guests in the studio so that could be from one to three guests there could also be from one or two hosts so in total four people in the studio at a time but the mix of uh who's hosting and who's guesting could vary so we needed to make sure we could easily support that the other thing is this was going to be a multi-camera shoot so we have four cameras in the studio two of them are ptz cameras and two more are fixed len cameras so we would have a variety of shots we could take capturing host capturing the guest and so we had to design for that we had video calling so they use live to air and they're going to have up to two of the four available live to air guests could join people in the studio so again keeping that same model where you could have a mix of guests and hosts this will also give us remote guests as well the other thing which was also very important to them is that they have a phone call in system they use so if people wanted to call in via phone they had the ability to do that as well this would be stream to social media so facebook possibly linkedin youtube the usual suspects for social streaming uh it would also be recorded locally but one of the other requirements was that in the future they may want to do syndication and that would require another outbound process for encoding and distribution so we had to leave that possibility open in the design so so let's uh let's basically go through the main components in this but actually before we start let me just check on people that have signed in so we have uh akan from sweden great to have you here at khan so say hello thank you for joining us i appreciate that we also have david from costa rica david thank you for taking the time to join us here uh we have joey from the uk joey thank you for stopping in and we have matey uh so thank you it's always good to see you out and and christian christian hello thank you for joining us so let's jump in and take a look at the the main components that uh we'll be using here so i really split them into two groups the first would be the two main components we use to process video and that would be a new tech tricaster mini so this is the first generation so it has you know some limitations compared to later versions but still a very powerful switcher for all the video processing and the second is they're using a live to air system to bring in remote guest so these are the two main video source components in addition to cameras that will be coming into the studio and from the audio side this was interesting they have i mentioned they have a phone system and so that's something that they will be using to bring in callers and that audio will be coming in via dante the they also using a radio station style mixer and this has a two components a a control surface which sits on the desk and a rack mount component which actually handles all the i o connections and does the serious processing that goes on behind all of this so that's the aeq capital ip and we'll talk about that a bit more but in this setup we're going to be having video coming in through sdi and ndi and we're going to have audio being routed around via dante and through analog connections so let's jump into how these hookups would actually work so if we look at the tricaster for the tricaster i mentioned we had four cameras so they were blackmagic design they have a mini cinema camera and an ursa mini so those are the two they're coming in via sdi and to connect to the tricaster they're using an sdi to hdmi converter because the tricaster mini here is an hdmi model so we bring those in we have two ptz cameras that are coming in and those are both coming in through full bandwidth ndi we also have two up to two remote guests coming in from the four channel live to air system they have and those will also be coming in full band with ndi uh and finally we have an input of audio coming in from the capital ip mixer that's the uh radio mixer we talked about and that's coming in via dante so the model that's being used here uh so we're clear is that all audio is routed into the capital ip mixer and from there any source that needs audio the mix is created there and distributed to those devices so that's the model we're using in setting this up and then for outputs we are sending uh three output feeds one is an audio feed out from the tricaster which will have anything that could be playing on a ddr and the reason we're doing that is so that if you have somebody on live to air or somebody calling in by phone they would be able to hear that audio uh from any media that could be played there the other thing that we have is we have the a return video that's going to live to air because those guests will need to see video coming back to them that are remotely based and we also have a program feed video that would be going to whatever system is going to be used for encoding and i mentioned that we need some flexibility there based on how they want to do distribution so right now this is set up so we have an ndi program feed that we'll use for encoding so the next piece uh is lifetear itself lighter itself is is fairly straightforward we have uh two inputs one is the video return coming back from the tricaster and the second is the audio return for our remote guest which is coming from the capital ip and the audio return is only a single feed because life to air will do the mix minus for the individual guests so all we need is a studio feed with none of the live to air guest audio in it and the rest of that chain will work itself out and then we have four outputs the first is we have ndi video coming out for guest one and guest two if there are two guests and we have dante audio coming out that's routed to the capital ip uh for guest one and for guest two so again everything in and out of live to air is going over ip so the capital ip uh is really the heart of all the audio processing we have going on and in that we have four microphones because we mentioned there's going to be up to four people different combinations of guests and hosts that will be coming in and those are all coming in over standard microphones xlr uh analog signals and so we have those four inputs we have the phone system they have which will be outputting dante uh and that will come in as another mix we'll have the two dante audios for the live tear guests one and two that could be remote video guest uh we also have outputs from the capital ip one for live to air we have another for the phone system another for the tricaster and another for the encoder so the model you're going to see when the tricaster is configured is that we'll have all these video sources coming in but there really be only one audio source that will be coming in to the system and all of that will be controlled through the capital ip control surface so it simplifies access for a single host they don't have to look at the tricaster screen to do level adjustments for anything that will all be done by physical control surface so the phone system is actually it's a a mac mini runs a a small piece of software that talks to a cloud-based phone system and that basically has dante in and dante out dante yen is the return audio those phone callers will hear and dante out goes into the mix for the rest of the studio so in total we have five full bandwidth ndi sources we're going to be dealing with here and seven dante audio sources so it's actually a fairly small production model that we have to deal with with the ip signal flow so pretty straightforward for that and then the two physical camera inputs that we'll also be using so now let's talk about the physical layout because this was the other piece when we started this and this was sort of our initial uh design we didn't have a third guest or second host position sitting over here uh and we really had two guests sitting over here and a host here with what we envisioned would be sort of a pedestal with microphones coming out from it so that was the original design and we had more monitors that we were envisioning having on the desk but after we sort of refined the requirements where we needed this extra host slash guest we decided to open this piece of the desk up to allow a third person outside of the host to be in the studio and we really plan things now around line of sight so we wanted to be sure that all of the microphones because we have multiple microphones here so all of them needed to be low to the desk because the traditional sort of microphone boom comes up and goes down and sort of will block you because it has that arm coming in front or make it very awkward because you're trying to swing it all the time so these uh microphone stands we use were very low profile and the microphone would just come up off of the desk so it's swinging arm with a microphone stand coming up so that allowed us to maintain those lines of sight even though we now had four guests and it required some changes we had to move how we did the microphone attachments but it certainly made uh you know allowed us to keep this design we were able to keep most of it and adapt it to the physical requirements once we got to the location you also see that we have camera placements now so we have a ptz camera mounted on the rear wall which can cover video for these two guests here and we have a camera on the front-facing wall which can actually do sort of profile shots or sort of over-the-shoulder shots between guests and hosts it can do full host shots for either of these hosts or if this is a third guest it can do shots of that third guest we also have the two fixed lens cameras so one of them is actually under a monitor that's mounted along this wall and that will be able to capture the host with a full-on shot and that can be very useful if the host wants to do something where it's sort of a direct talk to the audience so we'll give them that sort of easy stair in the lens type of shot and we also have a larger shot which will be wider angle which will capture more of the studio and provide a high quality sort of establishing shot that can then be switched out for for more close-up shots so that's the the basic camera design we have light poles that we put on the sidewalls and we'll get into what we did there as well uh and we also had to deal with the door that would swing here so we needed to make sure that all of the wiring and walk paths were all uh you know safe and clear because this would be outside people coming in so this needed to be something that people would not uh have to worry about tripping or having things fall on them so a lot of the design around this was making sure that all those things were correctly covered so let's talk a little bit about how this all started when we got there uh the first thing we had to do was go to lowe's and get some supplies so we had uh the date the model for that desk that we were setting up is that there were going to be four 12 view racks and then we were going to put a butcher block table top on top of those racks to form the surface of the desk and so that is exactly what we did we we built four of these racks and if you notice it may be a little hard to see but right here along the top there are screw holes that allow us to go up and fasten the top and we used those with lag bolts to attach the top to these racks but the when the top was assembled uh we actually ended up overlapping the we have multiple surfaces that we needed to connect here so this front service overlaps this rack by about six inches and so we can bolt it in to this rack as well and then this long rack actually comes down and covers the rest this long tabletop covers the rest of that rack uh so that means we have solid anchors on all of the boards that we have here and uh then we also in addition to just screwing them to the racks we use stainless steel plates that had uh recessed screws and we put four of those joining these two uh pieces of uh butcher block here so the desk even though it's composed of individual racks and individual butcher block tops this piece now functions as a single solid desk and the advantage we have if you notice is that there are wheels on these racks so not only did this create a solid death surface but it's also movable you can wheel this thing around which is a big asset especially for a desk the size if you needed to get behind it and do anything or access wiring from a different angle this would let you do that so that was really important to us the other thing if you'll notice is we originally in our design had this death be more of a you uh with a sort of cut off on that second return and then what we in talking uh with my friend there we decided that it would be more flexible and more useful to simply make this a standalone top that could be used for multiple purposes so if they needed to set something up for a production purpose if they needed to squeeze in another guest and give them a surface to work on somebody just needed a laptop and had a clean place to put it it could work all those rolls and excuse me and move around from there so this again made it a little more flexible something we learned once we got there and started to to play with the space so let me see who else has come in so uh ang hai i hope i'm saying your name right thank you for joining us from vietnam that is great uh uh i'm sorry if i am butchering your name thank you for joining us from scotland uh so we also have richard richard thank you that's uh coming from northern california as he put smokey northern california uh we also have ryan ryan hello thank you uh thank you for joining us ryan uh it's always great to see you our all's going well with you i know you've got a lot going on on your plate so with the desk built uh there were a few things one of them is we thought that the tops would have been finished when we got there but they were not so we ended up using lacquer instead of polyurethane normally if you do a top you'd use polyurethane because it's slightly harder as a surface but lacquer also does the job and it dries in a quarter of the time so we were able to do multiple codes oh i just before i get on stephen hayward so uh he just had to make sure that he was here before the party started so stephen thank you so that was you know a few little things and these are sort of we had one plan and brought some things with us but we ended up picking this up and adapting as as we went along there so with the deaths built the first thing we did is we started to mark the desk with painters tape to figure out where equipment could lay out and we did this really because what you do in a diagram uh and sort of scale out in a in a 2d space when you actually get to a live location it can actually be very different and when we tested with our initial design for where things would be uh the lines of sight were really not great and the camera angles ended up looking bad because we you had a lot of gear that was showing on the desktop so we actually used that from this we actually revised how we decided to to do the desktop and you know we then you know from here we could actually start to lay out the equipment in the final places that we wanted it uh without risking any damage because this here i mean one of the things with painters tape is that you don't have to worry if there's dust in the air or if you you know have other tools around you you're not putting any equipment in jeopardy so this gave us that ability to sort of mark it out generally but once we were pretty sure we had things laid out the way we want it we actually set things up on the desk and started to get a better sense for the physical space regarding you know arm reach and everything else so we were able to do things like install the mic arms which you can see here are the low profile ones i was describing and so we have the four of them there and once this equipment was set up then we could install the gear and start to do the the wiring because we knew now distances and what equipment would be in what locations so we were going to install equipment for this now in three racks so we sort of number thumb the rack in the rear would be rack one which is this rack over here i'm sorry if the ordering is a little weird uh rack two which i'll get to uh uh in a moment is really the rack that's in flux it's where the networking gear is and where we've positioned the tricaster and that's going to be revised because right now it has a single internet in infrastructure that services both the house and the studio and this will be converted to a studio dedicated internet and at that point we will sort of look at redoing that rack and shelve and final wiring for that but that's where all the gear go all the networking equipment goes and the tricaster and then we also have sort of to the right of the host is the audio rack so this is where all of the audio inputs and signal processing will be taking place and right above that on the desk uh you can see where this monitor is just in there uh that's where the phone calling system is so again that's another piece of audio gear that we kept all concentrated in the one location so when we set these up the rack that was in the rear will have live air and we'll have whatever encoders we can use so in this case there were two encoders that were already available one was a wirecast gear which will probably be the main encoder uh for the studio that will take the ndi feed and the dante feed coming in and do the encoding and streaming from there there is also a wowzer you know clear caster this is a slightly older system i believe this one is only configured to work with facebook at the time and that would you know certainly simplify uh streaming to there but if we're streaming to multiple locations either that would need to be upgraded to the later models of clearcaster for multiple social streaming or we would just stick with the wirecast gear and as i mentioned there may be other equipment for syndication that will need to go in so that would be potentially other uh gear that we have to mount in there and we also have a live tear system this was not a rack mount system when it was uh installed so we we worked with the unit that we had there it uh it will do the four gas but this again uh is just sitting sort of in a shelf position as part of the feed so this was the gear that we had so we had three racks that we needed to route all the cabling from and that would go up to the control equipment that was on the top so steven just made a point he said he should just get a bearinger x32 and get rid of all the the rack audio gear uh i think with all of these things a lot of this comes down to what people are comfortable with and uh my friend jeff actually works at a radio station and this is the type of gear that he is used to using so i think if somebody is going to be the on-air host and has developed sort of a rhythm and muscle memory that probably can work really well for them though i do understand if if i were doing this as a general install uh where that sort of familiarity wasn't a requirement i would definitely look at something like the the behringers or the yamahas uh all of which can support dante can support uh analog inputs and you know are incredibly flexible with the number of uh mixers and submixes that they can do so but i think there's there's probably as much operator familiarity as as a technical reason for choosing the solution uh the capital i p as a solution here so so yeah uh ryan ryan just mentioned that they're gonna have to pry that legacy gear out of their cold dead hands yeah it i i it's true i mean i think once people get used to certain gear you uh it is as much a natural part of how you produce as the conversation and the content you're generating so i i definitely understand it there so anyway uh let's let's move on so after we rack mounted all the gear and sort of laid out all the equipment on the uh desktop we actually installed the cameras and so we had uh two bird dog p100s here and so we wall mounted and you know ran everything up through cable channels that go up the wall that can be painted when he's ready to go live and so that gave us you know the two main ptz cameras we wanted and then we ran the cabling for everything else so even though you don't see it over here there is a sdi cable that's sort of sitting right by the side of the desk and that's power cable for the ursa mini camera and then we also have for the cinema camera we have a sdi and the power connections there and there was not a wall mount so this is some of the stuff that when we came up we that was a extra that was was added so we didn't have any wall mounts for that but that's something that we're putting a list together and that will get installed uh in our absence to get that put together so this is basically now all the main gear located where it needs to be and so the one thing then since we're really at the heart of all this is the network setup so i know there were a lot of questions about network and we ended up doing a few things that probably if this were a larger studio we we clearly would have taken a different direction uh and also if we were using different gear uh so long story short everything both dante and ndi are running on a single switch and uh i'm not talking through multiple vlogs they're all in a single subnet and the two reasons really driving that were uh first the number of sources we had was was really very small and we had tested performance with all that it looked fine and the second was that a lot of the gear that we were connecting uh only have a single nic installed so anything else that we'd have to do would then require some sort of usb dongle coming off with ethernet which we haven't found to be incredibly reliable so when we set the studio up we did this with the understanding that we'd only have one switch available to us it's a managed poe switch so it could power the cameras uh and we were able to set up any of the core configurations we wanted and it really was a sort of a compromise of of sorts for how to do the networking here but we also figured if we needed to upgrade things in the future adding a second switch for that uh and treating them dante and ndi's two separate networks would not really be an issue for us so it was something we felt wasn't a commitment it simply was expeditious for us to do this but i still want it to go over some of the things that you should keep in mind when setting up a network for both ndi and for dante so the the one big conflict in these is that ndi likes uh quality of service disabled and dante likes it enabled with specific values and that's a difference in the nature for how they each work uh so i'll get into those as i go through this but basically things in common you want to turn off anything with energy efficiency uh and that is not a uh you know if you were dealing in a non-video non-production network i could see using that but all of the energy efficient things could uh power down ports on the network and that can cause havoc with any of the signaling that goes through uh you for ndi you would normally disable quality of service disable jumble frames and then everything else you're doing is really uh around well there's enable flow control the other piece is that if you're using multicast or udp uh we use udp and that's how we we we like to set things up typically but if you were using multicast you would need to enable igmp snooping uh and you know change certain uh settings for that and you know this would be something that would allow you to uh you know optimize sending a single ndi feed to multiple sources the other is you'd want to block any of that traffic from going out to wi-fi because that could saturate any sort of wi-fi you'd have set up and of course the last thing is you need to ensure that mdns which is sort of key to discovery is enabled now there you could potentially use access manager and other things but i think as a baseline setup for ndi this would probably be a good start point on the dante side uh even though the bandwidth is low for what's required for the audio ordnate still specifies that you use a gigabit speed switch and that's that's definitely you know something that uh i would recommend wholeheartedly uh there are sets of quality of service that need to be enabled and a lot of that has to do with the way uh dante uses precision time code to keep everything synchronized and you want to make sure that if nothing interrupts the time synchronization because that's where you get that gobble and crackle and other things that happen so they have a set of setting a set of parameters that you should set around quality of service and you also want to you know disable energy efficiency again for the same reasons it just it can lead to issues and uh you would have igmp snooping enabled uh for any type of multicast which dante certainly supports so these would be you know you can start to see that there are you know some things that could conflict with the two but given the scale of the network that we're using uh and the limited number of sources this actually worked and simplified the setup for us so let's see so uh coming back to the comments so ryan just mentioned that he can't wait for you to play with the netgear 4250 uh for those that don't know the netgear 4250 is a a new series that netgear has come out with higher end gear that is pre-configured uh to be optimized for things like ndi and they have sort of standardized configurations in there uh so we are definitely interested it is a it's fairly expensive so it's not a it's not a throwaway let's get this and play with it so we'll need to do a bit more research but that is is definitely a switch that you know people should take a look at and and matey just also mentioned that he's using the uh tme digiface dante for dante connectivity which is rock solid yeah in the systems we set up we are using dante virtual sound card but i agree uh we actually love the the digiface we have clients that are using it with live to air and it is as many points out it is just a rock solid piece of gear we've had nothing but great feedback from that so thanks for sharing that okay so uh next thing after we have sort of the networking set up is the wiring and there's a lot of wiring we spent a lot of time on our backs going through the underside of the desk to get everything uh hooked together and uh so we wanted to share a few things uh we don't have to go through the wiring itself is not particularly interesting but the way we did it there's a few points that i want to make the first is that in each of the racks what we do is we dedicate specific channel sort of these riser channels in the rack for specific classes of wiring and normally we will use the front for all electrical wiring and we'll use the left rear for analog audio runs and the right rear for digital audio runs and this stops any type of interference going across the wires so i mean the physics of sort of an electrical signal in a wire it basically creates an electrical field around the wire as that signal travels and if you have other wires that are next to it uh they that can induce that signal in them so you can get different types of crackle hum noise that are induced from one wire to another and that's especially true with electrical which are higher voltage uh wires so these are definitely wires you want to keep isolated from everything else uh the audio runs the analog order runs because i mean let's face it today almost all of what we do is digital but the analog audio runs those we keep in a separate channel they are balanced so they are less likely to pick up uh you know to have the any induced interference uh be noticed because in a balanced scheme it tries to take any induced noise out of the lines and we've covered that in in a past show around audio but so we are less worried about that but we still keep them cleanly away from the electrical and uh the network digital runs that will be you know you don't think of it but sdi and hdmi are also digital signals so uh all of those as well as all of the the network based ip protocols uh and standard internet connectivity that all runs in those other channels in that other channel so they all can stay separate the other thing is if you do need for some reason to move them close to each other or have them cross each other you want to do that where they come uh perpendicular to each other so that minimizes the chance of induction uh and induced signals so that will give you probably the cleanest way to do it if you reach a situation where there's just no other way to route the wiring so the other thing in in this is labeling and uh we've installed systems our our systems for clients in multiple sites and one of the things that we find incredibly valuable is having a labeling scheme that you have that's consistent and that exists at both ends of the wire so our typical model highlights four key things about each side of a connection so you want to know on the from side what rack is the device in what device is it what type of connection is this and if it's appropriate what port this connector plugs into and you also on that same side of the cable have the two where is this wire going and so it'll have those same four elements in it and this means that no matter which side of a wire you're on you'll know where it should be plugged into and you'll know where it is going and we all know that wiring mysteriously gets unplugged misplugged or broken and needs to be replaced and having that labeling on both sides with both the from and two destinations labeled will save you a lot of headache uh and even things where you would think the port doesn't matter like in a network switch being able to say can you look at port 4 on the network and tell me if i'm getting signal there can make it make it so much easier to diagnose an issue if you're trying to to track a problem in a system so these types of things will save you time save you headache and is really just sort of pre-planning for production you just you know things will go bad at some point and you want to have the best possible opportunity to be able to repair it in a live environment so that was you know the second thing to keep in mind when you do all the wiring so the other thing uh which we don't often think about is the lighting side of this so in doing this we didn't really know exactly what the room was going to look like and what type of lighting it would need so uh we did have a general sense of dimensions and uh in the old studio there were the manfrotto auto poles which are those expandable poles that have a tension lock which go between ceiling and floor so we had two of those there from the old studio as well as a couple of light panels and so we decided that we would leverage that in addition there were four recessed ceiling lights and the bulbs in those lights were replaced with high cri daylight bulbs so all of the lighting matches and is high quality so the ceiling light now can provide a full sort of general ambient light level uh and it's on a it's on a dimmer so it it's able to to adapt to level and then we have these two side panel lights that we put in and these lights will let you cover almost like a key and fill where you can cover the guest and the host on one side uh and sort of the fill on the other side for the uh other you know the other side of the guest and you know potentially you know sort of a rim light for the secondary host and sort of a side light so sort of gives you a bit of a a uh fill light bit of a rim light uh we also behind the desk have it's hard to see but we have another rear light that would be backlighting for the host that's sitting in the chair so that will provide again a little more separation from the background but when we set this up uh one of the things we were really concerned about was uh having heavy things high up on poles uh so in this install we bolted everything with the lighting into joists in the walls so we used uh an eye bolt screwed that into a joist and then we used uh twist wire cabling with locking anchors and handle that on both sides of the light uh bar here and that means that if the light itself falls or if the uh the pole somehow is kicked or slipped it'll maintain uh rigidity against the wall so it won't be able to fall and hit anybody and i think that's something we don't always think about in our studio settings but safety really is important and the other piece here is that this is the pressure release for the the tension release for the pole so we strap that as well to make sure that you know because let's face it when people are bored in the studio they play with stuff so we wanted to make sure this was clearly not something people would be attracted to play with uh and you know this is again just something that we did as a belt and suspenders because we you know we we didn't feel this was going to fall we felt everything was well installed but we just wanted to make sure that we were covered in case of any accident so uh the other piece then is this is the final studio so we the parts that you don't see here are the there will be a poll with a second with the the uh ursa mini camera sitting over here that will be a wide angle shot capturing the bulk of the studio and you you the other will be the camera that will be installed in the front which we we didn't cover uh we weren't able to sell because it was an amount so but this is you know a very low profile great uh line of sight for everybody that's going to be sitting here and very easy access for all of the devices so there are there's the main audio board we have the tricaster mini control surface and so for jeff when he's sitting there uh he is able just to to use his single arm reach in and he can make adjustments or switch position uh switch inputs on the tricaster without really having to do a a lot of looking and and hunting for anything because it would be all comfortably within reach uh the other thing is uh we removed any sort of monitor over here and this is something where when we mentioned we wanted to have the tricaster so that was now set up as a monitor that sits in front and because this will also have control and multi-view this will give you sort of the best of both worlds you can sit back see everything in the studio uh easy access to controls and just a look straight up will give you a line of sight to what's going on in the tricaster uh and this gives you a better sense also of the sort of line of sight if this were three guests here you can see it's very easily conversational everybody can see everybody else and the gear isn't distracting her in the way so this is a better view of what jeff has available to him in you know in terms of right in front of him for the studio you'll also see there is a small uh i think it's a one of the akai i'm not sure exactly which one it was the mini touch surfaces so that gives him macro triggering so something else that's there that will probably when he's working will go right right in front space there in the desk and in fact will limit most of what he'd have to do with with reaching out to the the tricaster control surface totally because it will mostly be macro driven there so i wanted to give you a closer view of the capital ip control surface uh and there's a point i'm gonna just highlight here this unfortunately when we did the studio setup uh there was uh an issue with either the firmware or something in the control surface itself which uh made it basically switch off uh and so we couldn't fully configure everything but one of the great things about this sort of setup here is that not only does it have sort of the physical controls but it also inside the control unit that's sort of mounted in the rack to the side it has a whole suite of digital signal processing so this will allow us to do things like compression expansion uh clipping uh sort of noise noise clipping things that we can would definitely want in a studio setting and it is set up very much as a radio station would use it you can set things up as queued up ready to go or turn up basically like a mute and unmute and you can select uh any one of the channels that you want active for a particular show it has things like automatic uh talkback to guests so when you it's almost like an on-air offer for audio where when you want that guest to hear you but you don't want uh the studio to hear you you can do those types of i'm talking back to those guests and it's it's very convenient for that again radio centric type functions but that work perfectly in this type of studio setting so uh the interesting thing is once we started to to to work with this uh it was really impressive enough that well after we had set up all of the gear over here we realized that some of the things that we have like the dbx's that are here which are 286s they're really uh vocal audio chain processing so they have uh like preamps compressors noise gates de-essers expanders so it really does that whole signal path it is likely if the audio quality of the digital processing is okay that everything in this capital ip unit will handle that and we can reclaim the space or or put it there as as a backup for certain situations the other piece of gear here which probably is not something most people have seen is it's the david 4 and now the david 4 is an interesting piece of gear it's it's really designed to correctly process a audio signal for radio transmission so this could definitely be important for anything they want to do with syndication uh first it it does a lot with vocals so you have things like this some points i wrote down so it has things with multi-band eq uh special automatic gain control that's much smoother than you'd get you know from your typical uh aj agcna uh in a in a standard sort of audio box it has different types of uh combining the signal combining for going between mono and stereo because fm radio works certain ways so it's sort of optimized where if you have mono signals it can correctly format them to be optimized for fm stereo broadcast uh and it also has you know more technical things for injecting digital streams like you see in more advanced radius where you'll be able to see names of songs and you could search for radio stations by genre it has the ability to embed that in the signal going out so lots of things both audio processing and radio specific that may be used in the future so that isn't something that's directly in the capital ip so as an external piece of gear definitely something very cool and when you hear that actually the the sound of that you just get that sort of dj radio sound that you're you're used to listening to very easily with that so a cool piece of equipment on that front as well so as you mentioned the you know in front is the tricaster ui which we think is going to work really well for interacting with everything and there in the sub corner you see the the front ptz camera that's there uh from the rear this is a view to life to air so the what we saw with live to air is typically even though you can do calling and there may be a need for for that like we do here on the show uh this will typically be used for uh pre-planned studio guests so once they're connected all the controls really will be right in front of the desk here so even though this is sort of to the rear it will work very well in terms of the the control and flow of the production with that there so we were we're very happy with you know that sort of layout and the fact that monitor now sits in the back against the wall so it doesn't block any of the flow and it keeps the openness of the studio and this is also you can see for the the third guess this is what we edit there uh this microphone now is you know can easily swing out and fill there or it can just push out of the way if there's there's no second host or third guest so uh very very convenient for that also as a location this monitor we didn't anchor it so if you did want to deal with callers this whole setup could be used to handle callers coming in and just as a talkback mic and because everything is dante we have a lot of flexibility for how these routes can be done so that's just another option for for working with live to air in the studio uh and the layout we set up with the desk so this is the third desk so we have you know other mics we were testing with and other cabling uh but really this is an open rack and we envision that this will be used dynamically there'll be a few things that will be installed maybe shelves in there at some point and gear will be placed there and taken out so it was really designed around that one of the other things you can see here is at the bottom of all of the racks that we installed here we have a cyber power line conditioners with 15 foot power cables so we were able basically to daisy chain this to keep a single common ground into a single circuit that was installed to power the studio so that should minimize hum ground induced hum from ground loops so uh that's just another point here and as you notice it all everything we did is labeled so the racks actually are numbered and labeled so any of the wiring that's there you'll know what rack by the you know the number is on the rack itself so it should be very easy for people to do that and you also notice we have the light down here that we mentioned before that's the the back lighting uh that will get some separation from the wall for the host there so this is the view that uh jeff will have when he's running a show and you can see everything is really in easy reach this space in here is is just like a basically a three and a half foot by three and a half foot square space so you know there's this easy swivel for all of that and an easy reach and jeff is a a tall guy so you know reach is easier for him than for me so uh he's like six and a half feet so definitely uh you know no problem uh reaching all of the gear here the other thing that i want to point out is that this desktop here is actually pretty deep this is almost 40 inches deep and we set this up so that there is almost like a counter that's going across the top which these guests can all sit at so they can pull up and pull their seats in and have leg room before any of the racks are interfering with them so they have have about 18 inches of depth there for them to feel comfortable so that was part of the design here is that we didn't just want this to be sort of a solid desk but we wanted to have that counter edge around it so that it would be easy for people that are sitting there to feel comfortable plus we left a lot of open space under the desk so if people want to stretch their legs out and do that they could do that as well so hopefully i think that's covers everything we did here in this in the studio but uh happy to take any questions on this uh but hopefully this gives you an idea of how you could set up a small studio and i just want to you know footnote this with that we don't do studio design or construction uh as a matter of course this is something that we did primarily for a friend and we tried to bring what we knew so if there are any suggestions any of you have around better ways we could have done things i would absolutely you know love to have uh have that feedback and and to learn from all of you because there's probably people out there that have done much more complex setups uh than we did here so uh so actually uh why don't we call this a wrap here we'll go to the after show and i will uh take any questions and there are a few more comments that i want to get to so uh let's uh let's close out this show and if you can't stay for the earth show i will see you all next friday apologies for missing last friday uh and uh you know if not i'll see you in a few seconds take care hello everyone welcome back to the after show here so uh thank you for uh you know being patient with last week we know you know when we were away we had really hoped we could do a show but we were trying to get things uh uh get things wrapped up and we just weren't able to squeeze it in uh but uh let me get to a few points so matey said he he recommended uh a patchbay for audio uh so there's a few things that that's a great point uh two things on this first anytime you would be dealing with analog audio uh i totally would want a patchbay because you can do not just uh routing but also some patchbays will allow you to do audio distribution so you can plug in one device and route it to multiple downstream devices so that is absolutely great when you can do that the other though is it can make it easier to do quick fixes uh a route a microphone to a secondary device or b just plug in a second microphone and route it to everything you needed it routed to so you know those two things are really important i think this point also is really one of the strong uh features of dante that make it so powerful because what you really have in in dante is a global patchbay i have inputs and every one of my dante inputs can then be picked up by any dante receiver that is in the studio so it creates exactly that type of patchbay and makes for a very quick routing so with dante controller you get that in the digital world as well but that's a a very important point that ability to dynamically patch things is critical especially in a live studio so let's see what else do we have uh so steven steven asked when i'm coming to his house uh so i know that stephen has been uh redoing his studio there as well uh and uh he uh steven has you know multiple shows and uh uh he is is is definitely one of the pioneers in the live streaming space uh so uh everybody directly or indirectly oh stephen stephen a dead of thanks for all the arrows he took in his back for for the lessons that we all can now enjoy as we uh you know as we do our own shows here so let's see so we have uh jp uh okay uh how about a plug-in for headphone jacks so that is something that we actually did we did talk with jeff about and he doesn't have any gear for that but there is a headphone uh a headphone out that will be available for him as the host to start and we will be adding a just a headphone distribution system there the the decision is going to be whether people will hear themselves or not since everybody is in close proximity or whether they will be sort of close backed and or open open back then they'll be able to hear each other talk so there are a few decisions there and that's something that you know when when jeff figures out what would work best for him we will be adding but that is a very good point in a studio especially if you're doing things like with open mics like that and especially you know high quality mics that are not really close mic like this you would end up with a lot of feedback so very good point all of this stuff will need to be uh we'll need to have some sort of headphone distribution system but that wasn't something that jeff had available at the time so uh it's a tbd and we'll probably do an update on that so let's see uh so so ryan of course is uh is sharing that uh i don't have enough time to go and rewire steven's studio so uh yeah i i will actually say uh time time is is not something that's been on my my side recently so uh i will i will be happy to help uh remotely uh any way i can uh and and actually let me let me give a little a little side story for that uh with helping remotely because it was pretty funny uh i had joe who normally uh does the td for our shows joe came with me when we set up the studio and i had matt who uh does a lot of our software development uh uh from from our location here uh he was remote because you know we clearly had to keep the business running and we have a lot of deliverables coming up but when we needed to do certain things where matt mayer had some insight what we actually did was we like propped up a piece of gear and then used the ptz camera to zoom in on that gear and met with teamviewer into one of the systems open studio monitor and control the ptz camera to go and look at what was going on in the gear zoom into different things and suggest things that we may want to do to do settings and other things so it was just it was just a fun interesting tidbit for how you could uh how you could do something here with uh you know remote support for people even when you know it needs more more technical types of uh of input from them especially like detail things for for settings and and things like that so that may be something if you're ever in a bind and you have a ptz camera just stick it in front of a piece of gear let somebody team viewer in studio monitor and control it they can move around your studio and look at different settings and different things so it can work pretty pretty well so uh so let's see uh so so chris uh just made a point says everybody talks about the horrors of dante on the same network as ndi uh i agree that if this were a a much larger setup we definitely would have split this but we like i mentioned we had two limitations the first was that uh you know we we had gear that didn't accommodate uh multiple nics and we also you know from uh from a sources point of view we didn't have a lot of sources we were dealing with so the way we handle this i mean just you know to chris's point which is which is completely valid i don't want to i don't want to dismiss this is we we set up the dante and we looked at the latency and made sure that all looked good we then introduced all of the ndi sources and then tracked again with the latency on dante to make sure that look good and then we did sound and video checks across on on all of them active and everything looked good while it is recommended that you know from ordnate they would recommend doing it it isn't it isn't a hard requirement and we do know people even with much larger setups that are running both of them on the same physical network so it was something that we felt was worth the risk for the simplicity uh we did lay out sort of the best practices uh and you know that sort of stuff is uh you know is certainly certainly very doable in the future so if we needed to add a second switch and we upgraded some of the gear so that it was dual nicked uh that would certainly be something we could do and the other thing is with ndi5 you now have the ability to route ndi traffic to exclusively to specific nics so that would means that we could very easily keep that traffic off of uh the dante network so it was something that we saw as working and a reasonable solution for the number of feeds we had but also something that we weren't latched into that if it turned out that this grew a bit and we needed to to go a different direction that was still an option for us and it wouldn't require extensive rewiring to do that so thank you for that because that i think is a is a very good point uh so let's see so jp was asking can you talk about bringing in live callers so there were there were two systems that that are available for that in in jeff's studio uh first he has a phone system which is basically it's a cloud-based phone system they give you a phone number and you run software locally that feeds audio out and takes audio back to return to them so it's it's a very simple system that basically has a queuing system so you could have you know one caller that's live and then another call is in the queue we also have live to air let me see if i got a shot of that so in life to air here which is uh just a the other system for bringing in callers there are two pieces to this uh life to air has something called call-in manager and what call-in manager will do is something very similar to what you have in the phone system but translate it to the web somebody with a browser can connect to a url that would be set up for a show so here for us we have uh colon.studio streaming alchemy so anybody that connects to that url gets queued up to join us on the show and we'll they'll show up in a queue of callers from there you can pick a caller an operator can connect to them send them into live to air and then that video and audio feed will go into the studio when they go on air so it allows you to have the same type of screening and processing you'd have pre going live you know for the call system so you know the the crazies and the others that uh may you know want to call or also people that could have technical issues uh you you you have a step in between that people can deal with them the other thing about the way we we built live to air with call-in manager is that colon manager is a cloud-based service that's run through a browser so you could screen callers from a different location than your studio so if jeff wanted to have somebody in another location handle the incoming callers help them get their devices set and then feed them into the studio he doesn't need another person in that small studio that can all be handled remotely so we tried to work around sort of the the practical aspects of today's style productions and also the realities of you know dealing with people who aren't necessarily experienced with technology using something for a call-in besides a phone so you know in call-in you have the ability to to remotely change their cameras and their devices and their resolution uh you can look at all their technical settings so it gives you as a studio host a lot more control over video callers coming in and it doesn't just have to be used for calling if you were on boarding like in this case we could do four guests here if you were on boarding four people you may want to have somebody have that type of all four guests just come to one url we'll pull you reach in dial you in and send you into live tier on the studio so that's how we handle that type of thing with uh with call in so hopefully that covered what you were looking for so let's see uh maybe mentioned that open back headset it will give you lots of headaches of audio leak and it's a pain with those mics uh yeah i i probably misspoke i i didn't i wasn't thinking so much of open back it was just my slip of speech i was thinking of sort of the mono ear cup with you know a closed back ear cup uh with a with a with a single mono so there was an open ear so thank you for for pointing that you you are correct that sort of you would get you would definitely get bleed from that uh and you know it's really a question of what what would work best but yeah in in a studio with live mics uh close back would would definitely be the way to go for for headsets so thank you for pointing it out matey uh so stephen said is it hard to switch over to dante the thought of it kind of scares me uh i think once you once you use dante there's there's really no going back i mean we do everything with ndi and dante here and the flexibility the simplicity the ability to test things and just reroute them dynamically through a screen on any computer those types of things for both ndi and dante really override for in my mind any of the hesitancy you may have and the other thing is now that you have mixers that take in dante you still get that physical control service so it isn't just all sort of digital you do have a physical control device that lets you adjust sliders and you know tweak you know the the signal path so i i don't know like getting this we've done been doing this for quite a while so i i i can't speak with use my comfort level as a as a reference point here but i do think that it is definitely worth moving in that direction and it will make everything in your studio so much simpler for every time i've you know cursed that running bundles of xlr cables back in a past life i actually did a lot with uh analog recording analog recording studio and i'm talking back in the 80s so uh this uh this is definitely something that i'm familiar with on the analog side and how frustrating that can be uh having that single cable you know power data uh audio video is phenomenal and that's and it is definitely worth figuring out how to get to there and how to make it work in your environment and in your workflow which i definitely understand both of those things are important technically how to implement it but also for my workflow how to make it work for you so let's see for headphones uh midi uh media's recommending the uh betadynamic dt770 pros uh and it's 32 ohms so that that's good yeah i mean the uh the mackie hm400 i think i think we have a mackie hm 400 here so yeah love the love the mackie gear uh for for these types of things i'll have to take a look at the uh at the headphones so for thanks for suggesting that because i'll i'll pass that along to to jeff as well to see if that's something he would be comfortable with so thank you uh so let's see so you have steven's mentioning that he knows what his next investment uh challenge will be yeah uh i think you once you make that switch the the investment in in dollars versus the investment in time and so you know when you're working in this as a business those two are fungible uh i think you'll find that the the time saving with with setup maintenance uh and flexibility for making changes dynamically will definitely be worth it in the long run for you so uh let's see okay so we also have another question uh ryan was asking how long was the project as a whole in labor hours so uh that that's a good question because it's uh we started probably at i'm i would guess about 11 a.m on monday and we would typically work from there through till about uh 7 7 30 at night and we did that for five straight days you know there was obviously you know some breaks in there so we probably had like eight hours of dead time in there where we you know either went out for lunch got a coffee did something like that but uh so in total we are probably talking about 50 hours for everything and that's from going to lowe's and buying the wood you know to actually building the desk to doing all the physical assembly uh and then the the installation and configuration you know for everything that we were able to do do there so it was ve i don't know you know at least for us that was a very very tight timeline to to get all of that in uh and you know there if we were doing this sort of for ourselves this would have probably been something that we would have done over a three week period where we would have set this up you know had had all the build done then you know sort of layered it in for time for the physical install and then time for the wiring and then time for configuration and setup and testing so you know definitely definitely was a tight timeline for us uh probably if we did this as a business and and had more experience that we could have done it far more efficiently uh the other thing is we we weren't sure before we got there exactly what equipment we'd be working with we knew some of the pieces that were there pre-existing and there were other things that we didn't know anything about like the capital ip we we we knew that was the the device but we didn't really have any deep knowledge of it and had no time with it before so there was a learning curve on some of the devices that we had to work with as well so you know it's uh that was what it took us but uh definitely if if you have feedback we're we're always interested in in things we could have done better so you know this show for us is as much about learning and sort of sharing as a community as it is about us talking about things that we already know about so please we're very open to to any feedback you guys have that would be very helpful to us and probably a lot of other people as well all right so uh so steven said should have listened to me and booked the month yeah well uh the the point i think the point the more salient point is that uh we don't do this as a living so uh you know that's that's not the sort of thing we would normally uh have time to to carve out and do so you know uh jeff is just a a great guy so we we definitely want to do everything we could to to help him and get things jump started for him to to get back on air and if you haven't listen i mean jeff jeff has a natural talent for talking with people uh he's done things where he's hosted uh shows at nab uh and you know that's something which is an art form especially when you're dealing with lots of different guests coming in and talking about lots of different subjects so certainly uh certainly something that would be uh you know we all could learn from because it's it's it's it's a native skill so you know i'd love to see see him get back on air and start to uh start to produce shows again out of his new studio so we're looking forward to seeing that happen so uh if there are any questions let's get them in because uh if not we're we're gonna wrap this up uh as i mentioned this this was done over the course of a week it was the reason we uh we weren't able to do the show last friday part of the experience here because we we knew we were going to have to do construction is we had to bring a lot of tools and other things with us so we ended up making the decision to drive that was probably not something i would do again easily uh you know what google maps tells you it's like 14 and a half hours of driving uh not not not real world time i mean i need more breaks than that and you know i got to split the driving back there you know back and forth with joe but you know we were basically you know like two and a half days of driving each way uh to cover this so you you start the week tired uh and you come back even more tired uh and the other point that i'd probably make is uh is uh it's hot in florida in july so uh you know you know it's hot but when you're when you're in there and you're and the humidity is up and you have that sort of half rain every day which is just uh so it's a it's different weather than i'm used to here in new jersey and it can get hot in new jersey here's but uh that's that's an altogether different weather experience so uh so uh matey just uh thank you yes he said it's uh he enjoys the livestream it i can tell you missing last week's live stream uh it hurt i i you know you felt like you you you lost the connection with people and so uh i thank all of every one of you guys for for showing up and uh you know being part of this community that's something that i look forward to every week and i'm very grateful that you make the time for it so if that's everything then thank you we will be here next week same time same social channels so until then take care be well bye

Channel: The Streaming Alchemy Show

Views: 806

Keywords:

Id: 4A5NRefHfGE

Length: 81min 50sec (4910 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 07 2021