A lot has been talked about recently about the ability to live stream and record events. This has been something a lot of groups have been looking into.
Spectrum has been working on a paper on how we set it up at the Lone Star regional this year, but I know there are different ways of doing it at different events.
Here is the current
draft of the paper . It still needs a lot of work before the paper is polished but I think the system is pretty good for the cost. We spent a little over $500 total on our setup excluding the laptop (we just used my personal laptop). The original setup was conceived by Clinton Bolinger and the EngiNERDs and they use a system similar to this to do many of the MSC recordings and streams. At Lone Star we had a very poor audio input and we were also streaming over a 4G modem because there wasn't a very good internet connection at the event.
Current features of this setup
- Full field view
- score overlay
- easily add splash screens and graphics
- able to record portions of the stream directly so clipping matches is easy. If you have a fast enough internet connection you can upload archived matches while streaming.
- a lot of control over the streaming bit rate, so streaming on a slow internet connection is possible.
There are still a lot of issues to work out.
What is the best streaming site? I really liked youtube but our stream was taken down pretty quickly. I have heard of other teams/groups getting around the copyright take downs but I'm not sure how this has been done.
What is the best way to get HQ audio at every event into the stream? Is there an easy way to get the MC and announcer mics separate from the music? Are the streams more enjoyable with the music; is it important to keep it?
How do we make the streams more enjoyable for the average fan, parent, or grandparent?
We are different, on purpose, for a reason. No one in FIRST should EVER forget that.
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