It’s no surprise that student retention rates skyrocket when it comes to hands-on learning (MicroTek, 2017). Hands-on learning increases engagement because it provides the opportunity to interact with subject matter in a way that feels real. When it comes to understanding broadcast television and streaming media, there is no better way to learn. Walking into a student-run production room during the morning announcements is a sight to see. It may sound cliche, but practice does make perfect and the students at Griswold High School in Griswold, Connecticut, get 180 days of practice every year. As an added bonus, the entire school gets updated on important school news, the weather and birthdays (MicroTek, 2017).

I first met the 2018 class of the Griswold High School’s studentrun broadcast club on the 2018 Streaming Awards show. The Streaming Awards are an annual event hosted by the StreamGeeks; we started to acknowledge live streaming productions from around the world. This awards show happens every year and the voting is 100% audience driven. With hundreds of contestants from all around the world, some members of our audience were surprised to see a Paul W. Richards 14 high school news announcement team was hovering around the number one and number two ranks for the popular vote.

Teacher Timothy Moore started the Griswold School Broadcast Club in 1991 and this year the club has 16 student members from grades nine through twelve. The Griswold Broadcast Club reflects the organizational structure of a traditional television production studio which includes a producer, director, technical director, audio chief, teleprompter chiefs, character generators and on-screen talent. An organizational structure like this allows students to come into the program as a freshman and rise through the ranks each year. Moore takes on the producer role during each student announcements production. “It is a student-run organization; I am just here to sit back and watch things go smoothly… and maybe solve some problems here and there when they arise… the students get 180 days of practice each year” says Moore.

The director role is the most important role in the organization and it is generally held by a senior in the club who has excelled through the ranks. This role is held in such high esteem at Griswold High School that a wall in the production studio is dedicated to pictures of past directors. The director must arrive at 7:15, which is 15 minutes earlier than the rest of the team. This role is responsible for checking in with every department head to make sure ABC2 – Accelerated Broadcast Club Curriculum 15 everything is running smoothly and on-time.

I have seen a lot of vMix systems in my career and the Griswold High School morning announcements system is one that makes me smile just thinking about it. The school has managed to involve over 10 real-time student-run operational roles into a single cohesive broadcast workflow.

Throughout the production of their morning announcements show, the club is using three vMix licenses all run on separate computers. Leveraging the power of the schools Local Area Network (LAN), the club is able to connect four computers together into a single video production environment. We will cover networking in an upcoming chapter, but for now, just understand that each computer is connected together through the network and therefore able to interact with each other and share resources.

The graphic above illustrates the major parts of the video production system. The main computer is running vMix and it is controlled by the technical director using a keyboard and mouse. This computer has all three camera sources and the audio mixer connected to it. The second computer is used to display the weathers man’s slides for the day. Using a camera with a green screen, the main vMix computer is able to chroma key the weather man’s background. A ABC2 – Accelerated Broadcast Club Curriculum 21 chroma key is a video production process for removing a certain color from a video feed to make the area transparent. The video camera feed for the weatherman can then be layered on top of the PowerPoint slides coming in from computer two. In this way, the school can present the weather just like you see on TV.

The weatherman has a wireless PowerPoint remote control that is used to advance the slides from the dedicated computer running PowerPoint. This computer is running a piece of software called the vMix Desktop Capture which is able to send the full screen of video directly into the main vMix computer for the technical director to use over the network. You can see the “Confidence” monitors which are in place to show the weatherman what he looks like on camera with his PowerPoint slides behind him. This allows the weatherman to see exactly what he is talking about while remaining focused on his delivery to the camera. If this sounds a bit too technical, or a lot all at once, don’t worry. The online training course is going to review this in detail using the same exact software used here.

See Chapter 5 for more...

Let’s discuss graphic design as it applies to live video production. For our online course, Tess is making a lower-third graphics overlay for a live video production we are planning. A “lower third” is a graphic that is used to display information in the lower third of the screen, generally over a live camera feed. Lower thirds are perhaps the most commonly used graphic in video production and there are multiple types of lower thirds we will review.

Most video production software today have some sort of built-in title generator which allows producers to quickly edit the text that is shown on top of a selected lower third graphic. The lower third graphic is generally a .png media file with a transparent background. For this project, Tess will be using Adobe Photoshop to build a custom image overlay for our event.

Adobe Photoshop is a photo and graphic design tool for organizing multiple layers of visual assets. Creatively, Tess likes to start by drawing out exactly what her vision is on a sketchpad. Using a sketchpad outline, Tess will start to search online for image assets that she can use to build a graphic in Photoshop. An important tool that graphic designers use inside a Google search is the “labeled for reuse with modification” tool. This tool will sort images in your Google search based on whether or not the owner has labeled them for reuse. If they are labeled for reuse, you can use the graphics in your work legally by crediting the original author.

More in Chapter 6

Now that we have created a graphic to be used inside OBS as a lower third, let's create a basic video file in Adobe After Effects. Let’s create a simple 10 seconds video intro file. We will start much as we did in Adobe Photoshop by creating a new file that fits the pixel resolution of our clubs project. Let’s click “New Composition” and you will find the ability to select a custom resolution. You can choose to select a preset for HDTV 1080 video as we did in our last lesson using Photoshop. Lets select 10 seconds for your composition duration. You can choose anything you would like for your background. You could display a combination of videos or images, but to keep things simple we will choose a solid white background.

At the top of After Effects click the “Layer” drop-down menu and select New -> Solid. You can choose any color you like, or skip this step and put a picture or video into your timeline. Adobe After Effects works very well with all kinds of image files and videos that you can mix together into a creative project. To add a picture or video clip, you will first have to drag and drop that file into your main media organization area. This area is generally located on the left-hand side of the program. Now let’s add some text to our composition using the text tool on the top toolbar. Once we have added our text, we can select a color inside the “Character” selection area on the righthand side of the program.

For this example, we will have the text “Accelerated Broadcast Paul W. Richards 36 Club Curriculum” fly onto the screen and fade out. To do this, we need to transform the text layer properties over time. Let’s start by clicking the down arrow on our text layer which will reveal the “transform” tab. Every piece of media can be transformed with After Effects and we will be transforming the “position” and “opacity” properties in this tutorial. To transform a property over time, we need to click the clock icon next to the property to create a keyframe. A keyframe shows up as a little diamond to mark a place on your timeline where the property has been set. Once you create your first keyframe, you can choose a new place in time. To do this click and drag the text until the text is fully off-screen. You will notice that each time you move your text at the new time position, a keyframe will be created. This is how you tell After Effects where you want each transformation to happen in time. We can now drag the time slider back to 0 seconds and press the spacebar to watch our animation. Spacebar is a shortcut to start your animations preview. To tweak the animation, you can move around your keyframes in time or change the parameters that each keyframe represent.

More in Chapter 7

It’s now time to dig into the fun stuff. In this chapter, we will review the basics of video production software. Remember that this book includes a glossary of terms in the back of the book that you can reference as you read through. Let’s start by looking at the most basic of live streaming systems. In this system, we have one computer running OBS, one USB webcam, and one USB microphone.

In this basic live streaming setup, our webcam is connected to the laptop using a USB 2.0 cable and our microphone is connected via USB 2.0 as well. Each of these video and audio devices is considered either an “Input” or a “Source” inside of our video production software. The interesting part about video production software is its ability to mix and match various video and audio inputs together to create a “production.” Given what we have learned thus far in this book, we can take a live camera feed from a webcam and display a custom made lower third graphic over the video. We can also create a custom animated intro video and play that right before our school’s broadcast begins. So, given this foundational level of video production understanding, let’s talk about some of the building blocks we may want to add inside our software to increase the production value.

More in Chapter 8

The S.A.R. High School Broadcasting Club in Bronx, New York was started in 2015 and is now one of the most popular clubs at the school. The club leverages the schools access to Google Apps for Education to provide students with online tools that extend the clubs online collaboration capabilities. Every student at the S.A.R. School has an iPad and a school-issued Google email address. From online scheduling to website management, the school’s Google suite of online tools enables students to work on extracurricular activities in sync with their fellow students and faculty members.

Josh Lewis, the broadcast club manager says “We are a Google Apps for Education school and every student has their own school email address from us. The club can use Google Apps to give students access to shared documents.” Lewis explained to me that the club uses Google Sites to help students get involved with the club’s website development. “After a couple years of archiving all of our videos on YouTube... We also found that there were also a lot of pictures and the school didn’t have an official athletic website. So, we sort of melded the broadcasting and athletics website with team rosters, videos, and game setlists all in one place… Google Sites is free and it’s on our school domain. Google Sites are just like Google Docs where I can share control of certain portions of the site for students to interact with and update.”

The club’s website can be found at broadcasting.SARHighSchool.org. If you go to this address, you will see that this subdomain simply forwards to the Google Sites address set up by the Google Apps for Education suite. The club's website has become the home for all of the sports broadcasts that the club is a part of. 70% of the 40-50 student members for the SAR High School Broadcast Club are actually announcers for sports games. The broadcast club’s website has been organized to make it easy for sports team and drama club members to find access to the broadcasts that they were part of.

More in Chapter 9

Let's review audio visual basics in this video.

It’s time to review how you can tune your video and audio gear for optimal performance. Many times, broadcast clubs have invested in good lighting and creative background sets. It’s also common for broadcast club spaces to have lots of hard surfaces and challenging acoustics. When you start to build out an audiovisual system with multiple cameras and microphones, you need to make sure that each camera matches the entire set and your audio mix for each instrument is well balanced. Let’s start by reviewing some camera basics and then we will dig into a high-level overview of audio mixing.

The first place we want to start with any camera is exposure. In order to get the perfect camera exposure, we need to work with a few core camera settings which include iris, shutter speed, and gain. Ideally, we want to keep gain (also known as ISO) as low as possible because it can cause pixelation. Start by setting up the cameras in your space with the lighting you plan to use turned on. Put your camera in manual mode and reference the 180-degree shutter speed rule which says that your shutter speed should be double the frame rate that your recording/broadcasting in. Getting your camera set up in manual mode is the only true way to ensure that multiple cameras will operate in sync and reliably every time. It may seem easier to set all the cameras to automatic mode, but a simple change in lighting could significantly change the way one camera is set up versus another.

Using the 180-degree shutter speed rule, you can make sure your cameras are creating a smooth looking video. For example, if you are live streaming in 1080p @ 30 frames per second, then your shutter speed should be set to 1/60. The 180-degree shutter speed rule helps to keep your video looking realistic and smooth to your viewers. If your shutter speed is too fast than your video starts to look artificial and object movement looks overly robotic. Humans are used to seeing a certain amount of blur when we see an object move quickly in front of our eyes. I highly suggest setting up all of your cameras in manual mode when you are tuning your camera's exposure. In this way, you can lock your camera's shutter speed and adjust the iris until you capture the ideal exposure.

The iris of your camera is the opening of the lens which lets a controlled amount of light to shine on your camera's sensor. The aperture, also known as the f/stop, controls the opening of the iris. A large aperture (small f/stop number) will create a shallow depth of field. A small aperture (large f/stop number) will create a large depth of field where everything in view is in focus. For recording and streaming live video, our most important goal is to make sure the video looks realistic. With a slow shutter speed that is too low, the objects on the camera will look too blurry as the move. With a shutter speed that is too high, moving objects will look freakishly un-realistic.

Depending on the lighting available in your space many cameras offer additional features for enhancing the quality of the image. To get the most out of your camera's sensor, you will want to create the ideal exposure erroring on the side of slighting underexposed versus overexposed. Photographers call this technique creating a “flat” image because an overexposed image will lose some details as the black and whites are crushed before they reach its final destination. For a photographer, the final destination is generally a photo editing software such as Photoshop. For live video production, the final destination is our video production software and the content delivery network we are streaming to. If you can create the perfect exposure with a slightly flat image, you can enhance the overall video quality in your video production software using color correction tools to create the best possible video feed.

You should have a good quality picture coming into your live streaming software before you start tweaking additional camera settings such as contrast, luminance, gamma and hue. Once you have your exposure set properly it’s time to set the cameras white balance. Some cameras support an auto-white balance option which allows the operator to zoom into a white sheet of paper and press a button that adjusts the cameras white balance automatically. Some cameras, like the PTZOptics cameras, support color balancing based on the Kelvin scale which is a scale of color temperatures used in modern lighting. Many schools still have older tungsten lighting which puts off a very yellow 3200 Kelvin color light. Other schools have plenty of daylight which is more in the neighborhood of 5500-6500 Kelvin.

Once your white balance is set properly, many professionals will use a color checker card which is a physical card with every color of the rainbow accurately represented. You can zoom your cameras into this card to cross-reference each video feed and make sure every camera is representing each color identically. Here is a step by step guide for tuning your cameras:

1. Set up your lighting. Light the room or subject you want to use.

2. Set the exposure for your cameras with a slightly underexposed flat image.

3. Use a White balance card to make sure your white balance is set up properly

4. Now use a color checker card to make sure your camera’s color is being displayed accurately

5. Zoom your camera in all the way on the White sheet to check the white balance.

6. Use your video production software tools for color correction and final tuning.

One of the key mistakes with color corrections is trying to do all of the color correction and exposure inside the camera. Many times, the highlights can be blown out before they even get into your video production software. Using a vectorscope and waveform monitor can help you see exactly what you are working with. Looking at professional tools like this can help you bring down the range of your camera to make sure that you are not clipping your sensors capabilities. These tools make sure that you are not crushing the blacks or overexposing the whites with the settings in your camera. The waveform monitor specifically allows users to stretch the exposure to the perfect white and black settings.

A vectorscope is a tool that represents the color of your camera’s image. It’s like an x and y graph representation of the color accuracy of your live video feed. At the top of a vectorscope, you have red, toward the bottom you have cyan and there is also a green similar to what you may have seen in color correction software. The vectorscope graph allows you to see the balance of colors coming from your live video camera. To accurately tune your camera, you can put up a color chart in your space and zoom into it with your camera.

The waveform monitor is the counterpart of the vectorscope available to handle brightness and exposure. With a waveform monitor, you can easily see if your image is clipping at the top or if the blacks are getting crushed. The waveform monitor will allow camera operators the ability to adjust the image preferably in the camera first to ensure your image has a good exposure. Using the waveform monitor to influence your camera settings adjustments, you want your camera’s image to be within the lines of your monitor.

Now let’s start our high-level conversation about mixing audio by looking at a frequency range chart above. This chart includes all the instruments of an orchestra next to the human voice. Audio is measured in Hertz which is the “derived unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI) and is defined as one cycle per second” (Wikipedia, 2019). I know this sounds incredibly complicated, but essentially each instrument above can produce audio in the ranges shown on the chart above (Netcom, 2019).

As you create the audio mix for your club’s sound, you want to listen to each speaker individually. Don’t make the mistake of only listening to the speakers through your audio mixer. The job of an audio engineer is to understand what each speaker really sounds like and then tune the audio board appropriately. You should ask your on-air talent to speak for you so that you can listen to their voice in the room because that is what you are trying to recreate in your audio mixer.

Once you have listened to each student voice individually, it's time to create an overall audio mix. Looking at a chart will help you reference where the human voice should fall. Simply knowing that the human voice has a range of 80 Hz- 8,000 Hz can help you significantly when you are mixing your audio. If you have on-air talents microphone is picking up frequencies about 8,000 Hz you can bet that they are not coming from their voice. If you are picking up low-end frequencies below 80 Hz, then you know they are also coming something other than the singers voice.

I want to start this chapter by saying that an entire book should be written about the subject of live streaming sports. In this chapter, I hope to share some foundational principles regarding sports streaming and help broadcast clubs uncover the awesome power of working with sports teams in their school.

Let’s start with the all-important 180 degree camera rule. The 180 degree camera rule for live streaming sports says that you must keep all cameras on the same side when recording a sports game. This rule applies to all sports that have backwards and forwards momentum down a field or area of play. By keeping all cameras on one side of the a basketball court for example, the audience will always know which way the play is moving. If you put even a single camera on the side of the court, viewers will immediately become disoriented. This rule does not apply as strictly, with sports such as Baseball, Cricket and Golf, where the movement is inside a large space that does not feature back and forth movement down a field.

Today we are reviewing a case study from the S.A.R broadcast club who is having a profound impact on the school’s sports teams. The broadcast club now live streams as many sporting events as they can using a PTZOptics NDI camera located in their main gymnasium. The camera allows the broadcast club remotely control the pan, tilt and zoom locations using a PTZOptics IP joystick. Using the NewTek NDI, the club is able to manage everything remotely, and the Athletics Department could not be happier. I had the chance to interview Joseph DaCorta who is the Athletics Director at the S.A.R high school, who shared with me some insights about how both coaches and students are using the live streamed video recordings of their games. DaCorta asked me to sit down with Valerie Gryzlo who is the S.A.R high school’s head coach for multiple sports teams to learn more about how coaches are reviewing the recorded video footage to improve athlete performance and gain a competitive edge against their competitors in the league. Let’s take a look at how the broadcast club is helping their athletics department provide enhanced training opportunities for the athletes and gain a competitive advantage by reviewing past recordings to analyze their opponents before big games when a recording is available.

I had the chance to interview Joseph DaCorta who is the Athletics Director at the S.A.R high school, who shared with me some insights about how both coaches and students are using the live streamed video recordings of their games. “There are plenty of times that a coach will take the teams into a classroom settings to through up live footage from the games, rewind it back and say hey guys check out the type of defense that they are playing… any particular sporting event that our teams are playing, the can recall video from the live stream and dissect the film and really use it to our advantage” DaCorta told me.

I asked DaCorta if any of his student-athletes are proactively using the of the recorded videos to help secure scholarships with college scouts who may not be able to make it out to view student games. DaCorta told me “Absolutely, one of my Baseball guys actually asked for help from the broadcast club to create a highlight reel. It’s a great way to send out a quick video to a college scout and say hey coach, I’ve been accepted, I’m looking to become a part of the team… and that’s the first thing coaches are going to look at. Let’s be honest, depending on where these students are applying to go to school nationwide, it can be very tough for these scouts to come out and take a look at a students game.”

DaCorta asked me to sit down with Valerie Gryzlo who is the S.A.R high school’s head coach for multiple sports teams to learn more about how coaches are reviewing the recorded video footage to improve athlete performance and gain a competitive edge against their competitors in the league. Gryzlo told me “I usually send the footage to my girls via email, and break it down… I explain what I need them to watch out of the footage. And it really helps me, to help them understand what is going on during the game.” Most importantly Gryzlo told me that “The video footage really helps the athletes visualize everything throughout the game from my standpoint.” Gryzlo also reflected back on her own experiences as an athlete “When I used to play we never had footage of our cameras. We would have to take footage manually, in order to show us what we needed to improve upon. But game mode and game experience are so much more helpful for the kids. Because a lot of these kids are now visual learners and they need to see it… and see themselves to put it all together. It’s almost like having another assistant coach.”

Almost all of the sports teams at S.A.R are reviewing past recordings to analyze their opponents before big games when a recording is available. Gryzlo told me “For Basketball we are looking at the way the defense is run, and watching to see if a player goes a certain way with the direction of their dribbling… for Softball, we break it down to review the way that certain pitchers are consistently throwing… In the batter’s box, the footage may affect where I ask my players to stand when they are up at bat… depending on how the opponent’s team is set up in the outfield… If I know that their defense is hugging the right, I am going to tell my players to move their body positioning into a direction where they hit it to the left side… the video footage really helps when we are strategizing about playing other teams.”

“The first thing we usually do is download our live stream from YouTube. If the video was recorded directly to an SD card this footage will likely be of a higher quality than our YouTube recorded which was live streamed. We can download our YouTube video by going into the creator studio in YouTube by clicking the icon logo in the top right corner of YouTube and clicking ‘Creator Studio.’ Inside Creator Studio we can select the ‘“Video Manager’ and find the video you would like to download for editing. We can click the drop-down menu and select ‘Download MP4’ says Lewis.

Once the club has downloaded the video files, you can drag and drop them into the Adobe Premiere’s “Video Asset Bin.” This is where you can add any files you want to include in your project. Once you have selected the file you are working in the “Video Asset Bin” it will automatically show up in the “Video Preview Selection Area.” If you don’t see the video preview selection area you should check to make sure you are in the “editing” workspace mode. You can then use the video preview selection area to select just the portions of the live stream that you want to include in your highlight reel. This process is just like cutting up a long piece of playdoh. If someone has provided you with time stamps it can be done very effectively. Simply move your timeline slider to the timestamps ABC2 – Accelerated Broadcast Club Curriculum 67 provided and marking your in and out selections using the marking tools is like slicing bread.

As we transition into our more technical chapters regarding audiovisual equipment and workflow, let’s review the importance of audio and video sync. The number one issue I find among newly setup video production systems is an audio and video sync problem. The good news is that most video production systems include a way to compensate for audio and video delay. The bad news is that most people don’t know how to fix it because they are unable to measure how many milliseconds the audio and video is out of sync by.

In my experience, the audio is almost always processed by your computer faster than the video. This makes sense because audio is a much lower bitrate bandwidth stream for your computer to process compared to video. In order to properly diagnosis a possible audio and video sync issue, it is important to understand some of the most common root causes. When you plug an audio or video device into your computer via USB, the device will use drivers to connect and transfer its data stream to the operating system that your live streaming software is using. Your computer has different ports and there are varying speeds at which these input ports can process data. Because audio is generally a low bitrate data stream, most USB audio interfaces only use USB 2.0 for connectivity. Higher bandwidth devices such as a 1080p HD video camera may use USB 3.0 connections which can support data transfer speeds up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0.

More in Chapter 15

Now it’s time to review how to properly produce a show from the perspective of the technical director. A typical morning announcements show is essentially an orchestrated process of capturing the show's content with your audiovisual equipment. In order to do this, the technical director has to make decisions about how and when to transition between the available video and audio sources. The goal of a good technical director is to produce a cohesive storyline. As you transition between one scene to the next, it’s important to think about the viewer's experience as they follow along with your production. Choosing the appropriate transition moments and using the correct transition type, will be essential in capturing your audience's attention and making the technology flow seamlessly.

Producers can use transition effects to complement their production capabilities. A good transition transparently leads the audience through one scene to the next. The best transition is one that keeps the audience captivated by the content. In a perfect world, the transition happens as if the viewer naturally selected it. In order to do this, your production should flow in a way that feels natural to viewers. Be careful not to use fancy transitions that could take away from the main message of your content. Let’s review the four most popular transitions used in video production. In order of popularity, these would be the cut, the fade, the fade to black and the stinger transition.

More in Chapter 16

Available internet bandwidth can make or break your next live event. Many schools may want to consider broadcasting their schools' events internal to their own local area network. There are multiple ways schools can deliver a live or live to tape morning announcements show without having to live stream to a CDN (Content Delivery Network) like YouTube. But for the sake of education, let’s review the bandwidth, bitrates and resolutions required for live streaming and recording video.

Bandwidth is measured in bits and the word “bandwidth” is used to describe the maximum data transfer rate of your internet connection. When we measure this speed, we are talking about megabits as they relate to time. One megabit = 1,000 kilobits and generally, we will talk about megabits per second which is the amount of data you can stream every second. Your internet speeds are measured in upload and downloads speeds. Megabits are used to measure the size of the bandwidth pipeline between your computer and the internet.

More in Chapter 17

The purpose of this chapter will be to provide a basic understanding of how IP networks are set up as it applies to video production. To help students start at a crawl and eventually make it to a run, we will be focusing on the NewTek NDI IP video production standard mentioned throughout this book. NDI is a paradigm shift that will increase what is possible in all things live video. You may find it helpful to reference the video production diagrams used by the Griswald Elementary School in chapter 4. In this chapter, explain the IP networking setup that allows live streaming and video production systems work together over a local area network. Using standard networking infrastructure NDI will enable us to connect multiple computers and devices together as if they were all physically connected with video cabling. If you want to get started testing out NDI right away, you can download a free set of NDI tools at newtek.com/ndi/tools.

Let’s talk about the basics. Ethernet cables connect each device to a network switch which acts as a hub inside your LAN (Local Area Network). A local area network (LAN) is a group of computers and associated devices that share a common communications lines or wireless links to a server or router. Every device you have on your network has an IP address which Wikipedia calls “An Internet Protocol address… a numerical label assigned to each device”. An IP address generally looks like this 191.168.1.100 but it could also look like this 216.3.128.12.

Let’s take a look at an example IP Address Table. It’s important that you are organized when it comes to managing the 254 IP addresses available on a single IP range.

IP Address

Device

192.168.1.0

This is the network number that identifies the network as a whole

192.168.1.1

This is assigned to the router

192.168.1.2-254

These addresses may be assigned to devices on your network

192.168.1.255

This is the broadcast address. Anything sent to this address is automatically broadcast to IP addresses 1-254

Now let’s look at an example broadcast club network. As you consider implementing an IP based video production setup, you will need to consult with your information technology department. If the IT department is unsure whether you can leverage the existing network for IP video, you may need to set up your own dedicated network. Either way, it’s important to understand how this technology works in the example below.

For this example, we will segment out several parts of the network for devices that are used for video production such as cameras, video production systems and computers powering confidence monitors. Every device on our network will have an IP address which will help other devices communicate with one another on our network. There are two different ways that we can assign devices IP addresses. They can be assigned a static IP address manually or a dynamic IP address automatically. Static IP addresses never change, and therefore they are much better for managing an IP address table on your network. Dynamic IP addresses are assigned by your router using DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol). DHCP is ideal for devices that periodically connect and disconnect from your network. A prime example of an IP connected device that uses DHCP is a smartphone. When your smartphone connects to WiFi, it automatically gets an IP address from the network. It’s considered best practice to assign static IP addresses to the most important devices on your network used for video production.

Without getting too complicated into networking jargon, you can have up to 254 devices on a single network which can all communicate on the same IP range. The network above as a whole is defined as 192.168.1.0 and the router would usually be assigned the very first address as 192.168.1.1. Your router is generally given to you by your ISP (Internet Service Provider), and this device may include a built-in network switch, a firewall, and a built-in Wi-Fi access point. Therefore, many routers today will allow you to connect devices to your network right away such as a smart TV, your smartphone, and perhaps a few computers. For video production, you will likely want to purchase a dedicated network switch which will allow you to plug multiple devices into your network. Your network switch is connected to your router with an ethernet cable. Remember that ethernet cables can become a bottleneck in your bandwidth access and we will always be selecting ethernet cables that match our networking infrastructures bandwidth capabilities. If you are planning to power your cameras using Ethernet cables, you will want to make sure to purchase a network switch that supports PoE (Power Over Ethernet).

The great thing about IP based video production for so many schools is that you already have a network in place. If you have internet at home, then you may even have a home network that might make more sense to you by looking at the above diagram. You can open up a whole new universe of possibilities, where the network you already have has become the preferred method of video routing across your facility. Need another camera shot? Just run a single Cat5e cable to an NDI camera, and you will have high-quality video, a camera you can remotely control, and power solved in an instant. Want to send PowerPoint slides from the pastor's computer on stage back to the video production computer? No problem, everything is connected to the same network.

This is where the rubber meets the road. Unlike SDI and HDMI cabling, ethernet can provide power for cameras using a PoE source, such as a PoE switch. It will simplify installations and eliminate the need for additional outlets where you would have had to hire an electrician in the past. And unlike traditional RS-223 control cables, ethernet can also be used to control cameras and devices within your favorite video production software. You can even use an IP joystick without requiring direct analog control cabling to each camera like before. Now for some of the technical knowledge surrounding network infrastructure and setup.

Now it’s time to understand the bandwidth requirements on your network infrastructure for IP based video distribution. Just like the category cabling we mentioned early, networking equipment has bandwidth limitations. Most commonly installed networking equipment has a bandwidth limit of either 10/100 or gigabit. Unfortunately, if you have 10/100 networking infrastructure, you cannot use it for IP based video production. There isn’t enough bandwidth on these older networking systems to support video transmission. The good news is that gigabit networking equipment has become the industry standard and there is a good chance this is the type of technology you already have installed. A gigabit network switch with a full throughput backplane can send 1,000 megabits of data to each device on your network. You should never use 100% of the available bandwidth on your network because you need to reserve “headroom” to avoid network congestion and failure. Network bandwidth headroom recommendations can vary widely but generally; most IT professionals recommend 30% - 60% depending on what the network is utilized for. You should consider consulting your network administrator before adding IP video traffic on to your local area network. Newtek suggests “NDI traffic should not take up more than 75% of the bandwidth of any network link” (NewTek, 2016).

There are many different types of network switches that can support various levels of bandwidth. While gigabit is the most popular, today you can purchase 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches that provide 10,000 megabits per second of transfer speeds. As time moves forward, access to higher bandwidth devices will become more and more common. It’s incredible how far we have come already, and things are move faster than ever before.

Now let’s take a moment to understand the bandwidth options we have so that we can optimize our network for the video sources we want to use. Since we are using the NewTek NDI as our example IP video production solution, let’s look at the two main types of NDI video: NDI and NDI HX. NDI is considered the full bandwidth compression version which can take a 3 gigabit, fully uncompressed video signal, and compress it down to 125-200 megabits without producing noticeable digital artifacts. This type of compression is what makes IP video production possible on a gigabit networking infrastructure. The compressions effect is “unnoticeable” to the human eye and completely un-noticeable once the video reaches its final destination. Since the destination for much of our live video sources is a content delivery network like Facebook and YouTube, we know that the video is going to be compressed anyway via RTMP before it reaches our end viewers. The compression technology today is good that the benefits of uncompressed video are only reserved for the highest end television video production studios and Hollywood producers.