Beth Moore Simulcast

[DTV-Engineer]

We also noticed that the audio was quite highly compressed... but I am guessing that it was happening at CCN's main control point, rather than in Louisville. Still, it sounded much better than last year's event.

CCN didn't follow their own schedule, which was worrisome and frustrating. Friday night called for bars and tone from 6-7 Eastern, then a slide show from 7-7:30. We saw bars for only a small part of the first portion, and had the spinning CCN disk rather than the Louisville feed until about 7:20. Given the video breakup we saw on the graphics generators during the test window, this did not inspire confidence. I wound up bringing up the backup webcast feed when it looked like the folks at CCN might not get their uplink switched over to the Louisville feed.

The more serious thing is, both CCN and the folks producing the simulcast feed need to consider how the feed is going to be used at the receiving end -- and pay close attention to how churches will join up and break away from the feed. The slide-show / countdown is great -- if they actually do what they say, and if they can provide a clean feed. But the ending on both Friday and Saturday were just plain ugly: an abrupt switch to bars and tone on Friday night, and just dropping off the satellite in the middle of the closing worship time on Saturday.

As an occasional uplink engineer, I will be blunt: there is absolutely no excuse for having to cut off program content. None. When you book satellite time, you always include time before the start of the event so that the receive sites can get tuned and straighten out the kinks; and you always include pad after the nominal end time of the event. For an important live event, you reserve time beyond the end of the booked window so that if it looks like the event is running even longer than expected, the truck engineer just calls the satellite access folks and extends the window. I've been to about half a dozen Beth Moore events over the years (one as a spectator, the rest in some technical capacity): she runs long. Always. Living Proof / Lifeway / CCN should know this by now and plan for it.

As far as getting out of the live feed... the production truck should continue to supply useable audio and video for at least ten minues after the final "content" ends. This could be a wide lockdown shot of the room with natural sound, or a replay of the announcement loop with walkout music, or just a graphic still with silence. But whatever it is, make it something we can depend on being there long enough to transition back local cleanly. Leave your audience marveling at God's greatness -- not distracted by technical problems.

Okay, sorry... end of rant. It's been a very long weekend. Time to get to work so I can relax.

-- Jeff

[[Director] drew ryan]

Just a couple of things here. I am fairly sure that on Friday Night there was a fade to black, then bars and tone. But, i think you are right. There should have been more consideration to shooting up a graphic or something for a few minutes.

Saturday was our call. We, the local site had been told that the event would end at 1pm. We emphasised that that needed to be a drop dead over and out end time. The reason being is that we normaly start our rehearsal for weekend worship at 1:30 but we pushed it back to 2 to give us time to turn the stage around. So, we needed everyone out of there at 1. Unfortunately that was not communicated with enough strenght and the worship went til 1:15. We barely got our rehearsal started on time and then we had some tech issues of our own that made our rehearsal time go until 20 minutes before worship start. It was not prety on our end. And to top it all off, our worship leader discovered that the removable driver on his in ear cable had fallen off about 30 seconds before worship started. He did the eniter first half of worship without being able to hear much at all.

All of this made for a very frustrated teh crew and a worship team that was a little wore out at the end of Saturday. But, God is still on his throne and he worked in the lives of the people who were at worship even though we did out best to get in the way. Funny think is we keep learning over and over again that God does not need any of us. He chooses to use us to his will and glory.

[DTV-Engineer]

Drew, I feel your pain. Been there, done that, have the tee shirt.

The thing is, your folks could at least see what was coming and deal with the overrun locally in an orderly way. But 700+ remote sites got hung out to dry with no warning, at a particularly intense moment, in a way that looked like a technical failure.

It's not fair to your church to get caught in the middle like that... and it's not fair to everyone participating at a remote site. Realistically, the folks planning the logistics should either have made special arrangements with your church to allow for the historically strong likelihood of an overrun, or else held the event somewhere else where this would not be an issue.

Nevertheless, my original statement stands: having the uplink just dump out is not acceptable. Given that the worship actually continued until 1:15, either the satellite window should have been extended, or else the uplink truck should have done a slow fade to black (or to a graphic) before the window ended so that we could get off the feed in a more orderly way -- and not have it look like a technical failure. CCN / LPL also needs to communicate how they intend to deal with overruns: whether they will extend to deliver the content, or whether they just pull the plug regardless of what's going on.

The folks at CCN are really nice, but our experience with these simulcasts is incredibly poor... and really frustrating to someone who does this stuff for a living.

-- Jeff

[kick-ice]

I was under the impression the the Beth Moore Simulcast was an internet broadcast. Was it not? I ask because the previous threads reflect the need for a satellite receiver which suggests it was not an internet feed.

[waynehoskins]

Originally Posted by kick-ice

I was under the impression the the Beth Moore Simulcast was an internet broadcast. Was it not? I ask because the previous threads reflect the need for a satellite receiver which suggests it was not an internet feed.

It was both: satellite with internet as a fallover link.

Note, of course, that The Internet is not a very good link medium, even as a fallover, for a live broadcast because of congestion and packets arriving in the wrong order (or dropped entirely), not to mention the bandwidth thing (lots of pixels coming very fast).

[DTV-Engineer]

Originally Posted by waynehoskins

...the Internet is not a very good link medium, even as a fallover, for a live broadcast because of congestion and packets arriving in the wrong order (or dropped entirely), not to mention the bandwidth thing (lots of pixels coming very fast).

We went to the backup internet feed at one point because of local thunderstorms, and it looked and sounded surprisingly good. The encoding and streaming delay put it about 30 seconds behind the satellite feed, which was quite handy: when our satellite feed dumped out (coincident with a nearby lightning strike), it meant we picked up the backup with enough overlap that there was no missing content. I don't think anyone in the room would have guessed that it was an internet feed, though that's probably as much of an indicator of the fairly poor quality of the satellite feed (by broadcast standards) as it is on the unusually good quality of the streaming feed.

Actually, the internet can be made to work even for broadcast video... several of our stations take a feed of syndicated programming from our Tulsa facility, using Tandberg encoders and decoders. Of course, our OC-3 internet connection at work gives us a bit more bandwidth than most folks see...

We still had the streaming feed running as a hot standby at the very end, when the satellite just went to black during final worship. I figured it was the storms again, so I switched gracefully to the backup... just in time for our ladies to see them pull the plug again half a minute later. Some things don't need instant replay...


-- Jeff