UAKC has been live-streaming interviews on Facebook. The first one with Subrat Dutta was done to promote Josef – Born in Grace being screened by ICAF. We had a blast doing it, and so we continued, assisted by ICAF, and we’ve been speaking with indie filmmakers about their journeys. The experience has been…eye-opening. Not just from everything we are learning from these immensely talented artists but also from the challenges we have faced. We’ve done almost four so far and battled technical issues each time. (Almost four because the last one didn’t work out, and then calendars haven’t matched).
But before we cover the technical issues, let’s quickly go over the technology that we’re using.
What We Use to Stream
We host our calls on Skype. Skype supports NDI, a streaming technology that treats each participant’s audio and video as a standalone camera. This allows us to monitor each participant in the call individually, as well as position the videos on the screen as we want them.
We create overlays using Canva as well as Corel. Right now, we use 3 basic overlays – a start screen, an end screen, and an interview overlay with the speakers’ names under their video.
To stream the videos, we use Open Broadcaster Software, commonly known as OBS. This is where we create scenes for different parts of our Livestream. Each scene is a combination of graphics, audio, and video. Once everything is connected and looking as we want it to, it’s time to go live!
It should be that simple, but it rarely is.
Technical Difficulties
Each session had its own technical snafus, so it’s worth reviewing them, since it’s possible that we could run into it again or someone else might be facing a similar problem.
001. Live with Subrat Dutta
For our first Live with UAKC, we did it directly through the Facebook app on our phones (because that is the only way to go Live on Facebook with a guest that we could find). After a few false starts, we managed to get into a rhythm, mostly due to Subrat’s fantastic ability to carry an interview.
Using Facebook Live through a phone is the simplest way to do a Livestream. However, it does not have any options to customise the video either. Also, bringing a guest into the call is not guaranteed. Sometimes they can join, and other times, the connection doesn’t happen. It’s frustrating to say the least.
002. Live with Susant Misra
For our second one, we wanted it to be slightly more polished, and set up OBS along with Facebook Live so we could have a nice-looking video with some graphics. We ran some tests before the actual event, and everything worked great, other than some audio lag. We got on a little early and made sure that everything was working. Then we went live.
Or so we thought. We couldn’t stream to the event. So we streamed to our page. First, there was looping audio. So we fixed that and tried again. Now there was no audio. Then we tried to go live directly through Facebook again. We could go live on the event, but our guest couldn’t join. Two more times like that, and we went back to our initial setup, where it looked nice, but we couldn’t stream to the event. And no audio once again!
At this point, an hour had passed and we decided to call it and try again the next day.
The next day’s session went off pretty well, other than the audio quality being very rough. We’re in the process of transcribing it before uploading it to YouTube. Hopefully, that would be soon.
The next session with S Kannan went better than expected. But we’ll cover that and the journey ahead in another post.