Transitioning from SlingStudio to Blackmagic ATEM

hi my name is chad jackson i'm the creative director here at cedarville university about three and a half years ago my team was asked to do our first live stream we had done traditional video production but not live and we didn't really know exactly what we were getting into but we did a little research and found what looked like a good low-cost entry-level solution in the sling studio we were amazed at how quickly we were able to get up and running and in just a few short days we were able to put together a very professional level multi-camera live stream we learned a lot through that first event and as we did more and more live stream productions we made changes and made improvements and we ended up having kind of this running joke that we had to try something new for every single stream and after a year or two of this we kind of got to the point where we couldn't push sling any further and we started to move to using a more traditional setup the blackmagic atem switcher my goal in this video is to share some of the things that we've learned through this process i'm not advocating for one setup or the other both are fantastic solutions but they do have some different limitations and benefits that may or may not be important to you this is not a how-to video it's a list of things to consider as you put together or improve your live streaming capabilities and i hope it's a helpful resource so let's start with what's so great about the sling hub in its simplest form you can do a full multi-camera stream with the hub an ipad or mac computer and just a couple of iphones you don't even need any cables the super intuitive control app gives you access to all the inputs audio levels battery levels and signal strength and you'll even find pro level features like built-in capacity for graphic overlays green screen lower thirds video playback and even video replays even more amazing sling has a built-in video encoder so that you can stream your video directly to facebook or youtube or use an rtmp site from the hub having everything in one place makes it really easy for one person to run the entire production if necessary on one screen you can quickly control every aspect of the live stream an exceptionally unique feature of the sling is that it's designed specifically for wireless video signals you can connect either the camera on an iphone or sling's proprietary camera link transmitter units i have two iphone 6s connected right now and you can connect other sources using the sling camera link that's what one of these are any device with a clean hdmi can connect to a camera link a simple dslr a pro level camera like blackmagic's mini ursas or pocket cams or a laptop feed or even a feed from a drone can connect into one of these camera links as long as it has a clean hdmi out now not all of your sources have to be wireless there is one hdmi a port on the hub so that one of your sources can connect directly one of the really cool features is that it can record every input source separately along with the main mix there's a plugin for premiere that allows you to import your recording with all your sources on different tracks and all your live cuts are already placed this makes it easy to go in and fix mistakes or make adjustments after the live stream while the sling has some amazing capabilities we did run into some challenges that required additional hardware or quality compromises the first limitation is that by default the sling is set up to broadcast the live stream wirelessly we tried this in our first stream and our connection was not very stable the fix is to purchase the usbc extender which has a usbc connection and a port for an ethernet cable this connects to the sling and sends your stream out over a wire connection and this addition is highly recommended and it's really disappointed disappointing that uh sling didn't incorporate the ethernet port directly into the hub and while you can get a wired connection for your broadcast you're still limited to a wireless connection for all but one of your sources sling promotes their camera links as having a 300 foot range but we found that there were many factors that can quickly reduce that range if anything blocked the line of sight from the camera link to the hub or the camera link was moving on a mobile rig or if we had a large crowd of students with devices connecting to the local wi-fi network we often were dealing with more than one of these factors which meant that our camera connections were unreliable unless we moved them very close to the hub really this isn't just a problem with sling we have other wireless video systems that run into the exact same issues the only solution that we've found to get the is to get the camera links closer to the hub and maintain a line of sight whenever possible we'd raise the hub up on a stand as high as it'll go and we'd do the same for the camera link if it was stationary and we'd also run an additional cable from the camera link out to get the camera just a little bit further and get a little bit more distance another thing to consider is that while the batteries in the camera links are great we found it was really just one more thing we had to keep track of and maintain mounting an external battery pack was one way we found to keep the batteries charged definitely recommend that but it's just one more thing that has to be monitored another challenge we ran into was audio control sling does give you audio control in the app for each of your camera levels but the controls are built into the app and in a separate window from the source controls so often it was difficult to get to in a pinch and many times we wanted to have a dedicated sound man so to make that happen we went ahead and purchased a small sound board this is the first one that we got and all the inputs go into the sound board and then once they're mixed they go out into the hub one feature of the sling that started to bother me more as time went on was that there's no physical buttons everything is either touch screen or mouse clicks on a digital interface often the placement of the buttons would change based on what screen was up or where the app window was moved to on the monitor the main controls all have keyboard shortcuts so the best way to get physical buttons is to either use those keyboard shortcuts or one solution we found is to use an elgato stream deck that's this unit here and it has physical buttons that can easily be programmed to send keystrokes when they're pushed the last challenge we faced was sling's lack of support they do have a fair amount of resources on their website but they really don't offer a discussion forum and their phone support seems to be spotty we've found that there's a very active sling studio users facebook group full of very helpful professionals who have already answered many of the questions we had i highly recommend engaging in that group to anyone who's using sling or considering that purchase now even after finding ways to grow our sling studio setup we still found ourselves with a growing list of limitations that cannot be avoided here are the reasons we ended up transitioning from the sling studio to the blackmagic atem switcher both the large production version and the smaller rack mounted version our blackmagic a10 switchers have sdi and hdmi inputs and connecting a camera with a cable is almost 100 percent guaranteed to work now yes this does add more work to run the cables but i tell you the reliability can't be beat plus we never have to worry about transmitter battery levels in addition the sling software is really prone to glitches restarting the app often fixes the problem but it's a scary situation when you're setting up for production and things aren't working properly the blackmagic atem is much more reliable using wired connections allows us to go virtually any distance our standard cable is this 250 foot sdi cable reel and if we need to go further we can always link cables using boosters or we can switch over to fiber this reel has two channels of 1000 feet fiber we've actually run this fiber across our lake to get a camera view from the opposite side and if a cable just isn't possible there still are many solutions for wireless video transmission if you're okay with the batteries and the lag we actually have an icann unit there's holy land mars units that all work great just as well as the sling studio camera links one challenge that comes with wireless transmission is lag this isn't a huge deal in most situations but there is a pretty significant delay in the camera link video feeds which means the person directing cameras is about a second behind the action and using the feed on a screen in the room doesn't really work that well you can see here it's a pretty significant lag now sling did introduce a low latency feature that reduces the delay so that's a possible fix but you have to lower your video quality down to 720p in order to use that feature now with the atem switcher all of our cameras are directly connected so we have virtually no lag in the video feed we can send an output of our feed to screens at the event and the action will be perfectly in sync with what people see on stage one of the biggest frustrations i've had with sling was how all the connections are very fragile and can easily pull out of their ports the camera links use micro usb and micro hdmi and they often broke or became disconnected we kept a large supply of these cables because they just kept breaking as careful as we were even the hub uses an eighth inch headphone jack for audio and a mini hdmi port for output and a usbc for the extender hub you can imagine how easy it is for us to lose our stream by this pulling out all of these ports are prone to breaking and disconnecting the atem switcher uses professional grade ports that all lock into place the sdi ports connect with bnc connectors the ethernet port locks in place and even the audio connections are xlr and those lock into place we rarely have cable problems with the blackmagic setup now when we first got started we typically used two or three cameras but as our productions got bigger we started adding auxiliary perspectives and sources like drones and mirrored computer screens slang advertises that they can accept 10 inputs but in reality they only allow four of those connected inputs to be live and selectable as an option on your screen this became a significant limitation for us our atem switchers can have eight active inputs and we often use up to seven of those inputs in one production now as our productions grew we started to do more and more complicated effects we used different types of transitions we'd use picture-in-picture and bring lots of custom graphics in and while sling can handle all of those capabilities all of the controls have to be done manually during the live production graphics have to be manually selected and changed the picture-in-picture location has to be manually edited if you want to move it to a different location every new source has to be manually selected the blackmagic atem and software has the ability to save all of these settings so that they can all happen at the push of a dedicated button i have a dozen buttons right across here that can be assigned to any presets that i want these saved presets are called macros and i can also use them not only with these buttons but i can use them with the elgato stream deck that we used to use for our sling i press the button and i can change something like the location size and source for picture and picture it can move from the lower right and then i want to move it to the upper right go to the lower left i can have all that pre preset all of this can be created in advance of the production and does create a little bit more work but it reduces the number of things that have to be done live the last thing that i'll mention is that sling was purchased by a larger company called dish and ever since this acquisition there have been little to no improvements there are still bugs in the system that aren't being fixed and new features that are consistently asked for that aren't being added it seems like dish considers sling to be a unique enough product that there really isn't any competition to draw away customers and i'd agree with that sling's still a great product but if you purchase it you need to know that what you're getting has been around for a few years now and likely isn't going to be improved unless something changes with ownership our blackmagic setup on the other hand is virtually limitless in ways it can grow and expand due to the extreme control it provides so if the atem does so much more than sling why not just start there here are some reasons why i'm glad we started with sling rather than jumping straight into the atem the traditional switcher is not an all-in-one solution it's dedicated to mixing your video there is an exception that does have built-in audio mixing but in addition to the switcher you also need a computer running control software a monitor to display the camera feeds video playback and recording devices such as the blackmagic hyperdeck and an external video encoder we use the azure helo to take the video stream and feed it online and all this extra hardware provides lots of more options that can expand capabilities but it also adds significantly to the cost and complexity of the setup a traditional atem setup can easily cost three to four times more than sling all of this extra hardware also means that our setups with the atem could take multiple hours during the pandemic we had a dramatic increase in the number of live production videos to record so that really wasn't an option for us we had to speed things up and for this purpose we put a lot of effort into building this mobile live stream cart everything is already connected and rack mounted and expandable i'll do a walkthrough of that in another video so that you can see it in detail but with this setup three of us can arrive at a classroom and be set up with a two camera shoot the faculty mic'd up in less than 10 minutes and tear down can happen in about five minutes the added complexity also means there's a significant learning curve just getting all the equipment connected and talking to each other is a challenge it's not extremely difficult to learn but there is a lot more to it than sling so be prepared to spend a lot of time studying so that's what i've learned over these past few years doing live streams with the sling studio and then transitioning to the blackmagic a10 i hope my experience helps some of you figure out the best live streaming solution for your needs

Channel: Chad P Jackson

Views: 12,530

Keywords: Sling Studio, SlingStudio, Blackmagic, ATEM, Sling vs ATEM, Switch, Change, pros and cons, hub, cameralink, wireless, wired

Id: JVITYKdlvWI

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 04 2020