Dreamtek designed a workflow with 18 ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISOs supporting hundreds of live sessions, using Blackmagic Cloud Store and Web Presenter to ingest and wrangle data.
Dreamtek video and live event production company has executed a corporate event over three days for a technology client that played out across 20 stages, 18 breakout rooms and 307 live sessions. It featured 950 presenters and 30,000 onsite attendees, with the support of 60 onsite crew members operating 35 flypacks. Working at locations around the world, 22 remote editors created more than 300 videos that were broadcast to a global audience of over 300,000 live and 1 million on-demand viewers.
Jeff Eggleston is the director of studio productions for Dreamtek. Among its services, the company designs and supplies broadcast infrastructure for creative video production, live event streaming and managed services.
Better Than Real Time
While live streaming is one of Dreamtek’s core services, this particular project came with a special request. “The client didn’t want the remote audience to tune in and see the presentations and sessions in real time via a live stream. They wanted everyone to have access to the edited content as fast as possible, but via VOD,” Jeff said.
“We devised a workflow through which we streamed the content to our own custom streaming servers, while our editors worked on it collaboratively in near real time. As we only had very short turnaround times for the VOD content – between a few hours to 72 hours – we had editors across continents working around the clock.”
Dreamtek deployed 18 Blackmagic ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO live production switchers for the line cut – resulting from the on-set director’s choice of camera angles – live streaming and ISO capture of the camera and presentation feeds, in each of the 18 breakout rooms.
“ISO recording of all eight of the switcher’s inputs to separate video files came through very successfully across hundreds of sessions, giving us many options in the edit, and the ATEM Television Studio’s internal 2TBs of storage served as a convenient backup measure in a pinch. Having the ability to remotely inspect the files on each of the ATEMs across the network was very useful,” said Saqib Razaq, Global Head of Technical Operations at Dreamtek.
In the MCR
Several Blackmagic Web Presenter 4K streaming engines were set up per room and used to send feeds for capture and monitoring to the MCR (master control room) via SRT. The Web Presenters include their own hardware encoders, software for connecting to streaming platforms and network connections, and have a built-in Ethernet connection. The Dreamtek staff can connect video sources like live production switchers or their cameras, then connect to the internet using the Web Presenter.
Two spotlight rooms hosting other separate presentations were each equipped with a compact ATEM SDI Extreme ISO live production switcher that was also used for live streaming and ISO capture. Similar to the HD8 ISOs, the ATEM SDI Extreme ISO switchers handled ingest, streaming and recording of multiple SDI sources.
The Web Presenter 4Ks meanwhile facilitated performance metrics and status to the MCR. Their monitoring output graphics include a video view, audio meters with accurate ballistics, trend graphs for codec data rates and cache fill, with a summary of the streaming settings and SDI technical information.
Cloud-based Teamwork
While ingest of the presentations was critical for developing the VOD content, a major challenge was still ahead, mainly because of the scale of the project. Jeff said, “This project was global, both on the production side and on the distribution side. More than 300 pieces of content needed to be shared with our dispersed editorial team and made available to a worldwide audience on demand within 72 hours, some even within a few hours. But – a big part of Dreamtek is innovation. We rarely say no, but we never blindly say yes.”
In the master control room, two Blackmagic Cloud Store 20TB network storage systems uploaded content to Google Cloud Storage, making them accessible to the remote post production team within a few seconds of the end of session capture.
“Our team found the Cloud Stores easy to work with, and the network performance was enough to keep up with the work of ingesting footage from so many different sessions across the three days,” said Saqib. The Cloud Store systems have four high speed 10G Ethernet connections, with an internal memory core that simultaneously saturates all four 10G Ethernet ports up to the maximum speed. The low latency file access also keeps responsiveness very fast due to the memory core’s.
Aftermath
Having completed this project, Dreamtek was hired for subsequent events, for which they not only recreated the workflow but added to it, increasing the project’s scale and scope.
“For the new event, part of a global conference, we also had a team that simultaneously captured 130 red carpet interviews, produced an awards gala and captured high-end sit down interviews with executives, partners and customers that were participating onsite. For these deliverables, since expectations were particularly high, we took advantage of the colour correction and keying abilities in DaVinci Resolve Studio,” said Jeff.
“Such adaptations are possible because Dreamtek is essentially a soup-to-nuts kind of production agency. We are able to apply our 25 years of wide industry experience and knowledge to handling new demands and scenarios. With flexible products like the switchers, streaming engine and cloud storage from Blackmagic Design, we’re able to build out custom workflows to help address all of our clients’ needs.” www.blackmagicdesign.com
