-->
Save your FREE seat for Streaming Media Connect this August. Register Now!

Modern Times: Getting Live Video Right Demands a Special Skillset

Article Featured Image

The Mirage Factory, Gary Krist’s absorbing narrative history of early Los Angeles, includes a fascinating chapter on the transition from silent to talking films. Even for silent movie directors and actors who survived the transition to talkies, the adjustment was an awkward one. Pioneering filmmakers like David Wark Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, and Charlie Chaplin had spent the last two decades “lifting the silent film to unprecedented levels of expressiveness and technical mastery.” Most of their innovations had no place in early talking pictures.

Exploding demand for talkies marooned these directors on oppressively audio-centric sets, their fluid storytelling and camera techniques straitjacketed by primitive recording technology, their whirring cameras encased in glass, and their actors riveted to spots near hidden microphones. Balletic leading man Douglas Fairbanks “took a look at the wires and cables and microphones and sound dampeners cluttering up the set” and lamented, “The romance of motion picture-making ends here.”

For many video producers, the transition to streaming delivery must have similarly limited the agility of their existing production styles and workflows, introducing new requirements and technological demands alien to their prior experience. As UFC director, Live Event Production, Tre James explained on a panel at last November’s Live Streaming Summit, “Not a lot of people understand live.”

“Live,” in the words of James’ co-panelist, BCLive’s Brett Collins, demands a “never-look-back skillset” that many producers never develop. But sometimes it’s just a matter of technology getting out of the way. Innovative mobile production and streaming technologies, many highlighted in this issue’s inaugural Streaming Media Producer 25, have liberated live producers. Increasingly, if you can get the shot, you can share it with the world in real-time.

Talking pictures came around too.

[This article appears in the April/May 2019 issue of Streaming Media Magazine as "Modern Times"]

Streaming Covers
Free
for qualified subscribers
Subscribe Now Current Issue Past Issues
Related Articles

Qosifire Review: Testing the Live Stream Monitor and Debugger

There's no wiggle room in live video, so insuring quality is paramount. Qosifire offers an affordable and customizable way to monitor and debug live streams.

Buyers' Guide to Live Transcoding 2019

Whether it's enterprise, ecommerce, news, or gaming, it feels like everyone is rushing to go live. Here's a guide to services that will get any company streaming now.

The Streaming Media Producer 25

The inaugural Streaming Media Producer 25 highlights companies that make gear that not only demonstrates promise or prowess in a single stage in the process, but fits well in a kit that makes your live production workflow work.