STREAM

04-05-13

STREAM

The Equipment

Okay, lets start with the most important gadgets, which for this project was obviously the cameras. Within the Theatreschool in Amsterdam there is a studio dedicated to movie production, called Beeldmedia. It has it's own cabin with preview monitors and mixers and such. They were so kind to let us break down half their studio and take the best equipment to the Dancetheatre studio downstairs.

Sony EX3 cameras allowed us to shoot in 1080i60 with a good image quality. The (custom built for the studio) multi cables contained HD-SDI, Genlock, Tally and Comm. A Genlock generator synced the cameras to the Panasonic mixer, for seamless switching.

With schools newest projector we projected the stream from Toronto on the backdrop, the dancers had to see themselves and dance with their backs to the audience. Since we didn't want to stream our audience to Torono we hid them with a scrim.

Water

For an effect in the third act there was a monitor on stage with water footage. It started off full screen, so it filled the screens in Toronto. Only when the monitor was moved back the audience would notice they watched a monitor, not a movie played in Toronto.

In earlier stages we would open the performance with this monitor as well, displaying the stream from Toronto. As this didn't add the anticipated value it was skipped, which made my life a bit easier.

Making it visible

Also there is light and sound. As audio desk I had a Yamaha 01V during the test session. As there are quite some audio lines I changed it to a Yamaha DM1000 for the final session. The stream contains 4 lines in, 4 lines out. I made quite a complex rig with Comm going through the audio desk, and for controling different lines to PA and Monitoring, overruling house patch.

We had some mics as well. Michael and Shaun both had a God Mic, which was always on during rehearsals and audible on both stages. For the opening conversation between dancers Kaitlin and Dasha we tried pointing a focussed mic to Dasha from a distance, but as she had to stand to close to PA we changed it to an handheld mic. (With streaming you get really wierd long feedbacks if you're not careful...)

For Lighting I used my favorite desk in school, RoadHog 3 FullBoar. Luckally for me for the final session this came equipped with Hendrik (as it did my three performances before this one :P).

And then.. The MAKO!

It arrived a few days late, since customs had to make an artwork of the case. But we used a HaiVision Mako h.264 Encoder. A 19" rack machine dedicated to encoding a HD-SDI (or VGA) stream to an RTP Unicast stream over ethernet.

Basically you just put video in this box and the box makes sure it is recieved on the other end, really fast (little delay) and high quality. The MAKO was supplied by the involved Ryerson University, who also helped in configuring. Read more about this on pages 5 and 6.

HaiVision is a company based in Toronto with some nice lads. I've met up with them on IBC'12 and ISE'13 where Dave Henkewick (it's all in the name) gave me a quick tour in configuring and troubleshooting, which helped me a lot later on.

See http://www.haivision.com/

Besides video the MAKO can also transmit audio, four lines in, four lines out. We used one in and one out for connecting our Comm systems. Since our school uses a Clearcom Comm system, which is multiplex, we used a Demultiplexer with Null Cancelling. Multiplex uses only one line, containing both in and out, which means you end up sending them their own signal as a discrete echo. Null Cancelling is something to counteract that.

With a Comm Matrix from school I could select my crew or the Toronto crew to talk to. There were 29 crew members in Toronto of which more than 10 On Comm, in Amsterdam 14 with 5 On Comm, so it could get quite crowded.