The two ācannot run a livestream in the year 2024,ā the Harris campaign snarked on X.
Kamala Harrisās presidential campaign has already proven itself adept at baiting Donald Trump and his supporters using the playground-tested technique of calling Republicans āweird.ā The campaign, which has proven itself to be Extremely Online through TikToks evoking Trumpās lack of āauraā and hearty embrace of the ābratā label, is now provoking its opponent by pointing out how not online Trump is.
Trump is so out of touch, he canāt work the internet, the Harris campaign posits, pointing to Monday eveningās livestreamed interview between Trump and Elon Musk, which was delayed by some 45 minutes due to technical issues.
āTrumpās entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himselfāself-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024,ā the Harris campaign shared on X (formerly Twitter) after the lengthy conversation between the two. The campaignās rapid response team addressed the statement to āthose unlucky enough to listen in tonight during whatever that was on X.com.ā
Zoom is the lowest bitrate of any platform. Itās not a firehouse like traffic out of teams. Itās literally the easiest solution to do this with.
To not, Iāve designed and overseen the implementation of deployments for zoom, teams, pexip, etc, etc, for companies that employ a small country worth of people globally.
āHigh productionā is never easy. But at a certain level, there are additional tools from Zoom (as well as others) that can be used, which even have hooks into production consoles. Mostly cheap ones, but still.
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Sure
The biggest thing to me is donāt share the Internet connection. Get a separate line turned up to handle the session, with a dedicated firewall (commercial grade, doesnāt need to be a palo alto or anything, but a mikrotik, Cisco fp, etc is fine), connected to a switch for just the zoom machines. No meeting connector or any of those shenanigans - the throughput is dedicated to the session. If itās the kind of place that canāt do that, get share the pathway as little as possible, and provide that client endpoint with the highest priority. This is, to me, the most important part.
Production Studio will get used, but itās not really doing any of the lift - itās a full production studio before it hits that machine (which has a matching spec machine right next to it in case of failure, turned on and ready to go as a co-host machine). All itās doing is allowing for some border content, some backgrounds for content, session wallpaper, etc. Glorified OBS at that point.
Feeding it is usually a Ross Carbonite or a Grass Valley, but Iāve also done it with a black magic atem, Roland, etc. At this point, all the production is outside of Zoom, so any lower thirds, virtual studio backgrounds, etc. are all handled there. This way, if there is any issue with the main Zoom Prod Studio machine, thereās a second video feed to the backup (co-host) PC. Thatās the only advantage/reason why I even bother with Prod Studio over just tossing a zoom room on a PC and walking away.
All production hardware is on a segregated network, no outbound internet or routes, especially if using Dante/aes67, NDI, qlan, whatever. Stacked switches if more than one is needed, no simple uplinks (ie: bottlenecks).
At that point not much else matters, grab your shure lavs (if there is density, axient) and a few wires mic backups, cameras at your preference (honestly a lot of BM Ursa/Studio with good cine lenses, mostly primes), and good to go.
Couldnāt tell you about Discord, sorry, donāt really use it.
Just to mention, smaller scale production takes the same tactics, just without a GV/Ross/etc, more likely a BM ATEM or something. But I donāt deal with that too much these days.
More often than not, Iām designing a studio which can also run webinars. For a presidential candidate, they probably did something similar, maybe making use of a few tools not public yet (though I wouldnāt have risked it with an event like this).
Teams can be much more problematic, itās like a firehose of traffic, using whatever you give it. Looks good when you have the bandwidth, making the first statement - not sharing the connection - even more important. Zoom is heavy on the compression, but quite stable as a result.
Recordings should be local, with the session also recorded, so the session can be distributed with the local recording edited in for a better quality result. Remote participants, when I have to deal with that, get a full kit including a local recording system (aja mostly), so the drive can be shipped back with the kit for the finals edits.
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No problem!
Ideally, on-site local crew and a portable kit, preferably two sets in case of issues. Usually a small prod switcher, lenovo tiny (or hp/dell, we just use Lenovo mostly), and a small audio mixer, with wired mics rather than wireless, like an SM7B or an ev re-20. Itās basically a mini version of the same kit used for the main session. Backup machine though is a laptop rather than another PC if itās only one kit.
If there is no one going on site to the remote participant, thereās a session before hand to set it up (a week if possible), a session to test with them and get them comfortable (a few days before), and a session a few hours before the main event start to make sure they are all set.
Edit: Stupid autocorrect
Btw, the short answer on this is donāt expect zoom to be more than it is - conferencing/webinar software. For production quality, do it outside zoom so youāre feeding it what you want, and not relying on their interpretation of what good video production looks like.
Because letās be honest here, they suck at that. As does Microsoft. None of them understand the needs, so itās best to assume they never will.