Case Study: Courting the Streaming Audience with TriCaster
The lack of infrastructure in the old Buffalo building had Green looking for an all-in-one solution. "There was nothing in the building; everything had to be hauled in. The TriCaster was ideal for this. It replaced a whole engineering rack, a ton of equipment," says Green, who also found that the TriCaster took the place of the Grass Valley switchers he’s used to using. He calls the TriCaster a mobile truck in a box. "Now this little tiny box I can carry on an airplane replaces everything," he says.
The TriCaster is a 10-lb. black box that offers simplified live switching and audio mixing with real-time output to video projection and the Internet. As the name suggests, the TriCaster provides three distinct video output streams—analog video, DV, and VGA or XGA for projection and/or streaming. It has three video inputs (Y/C or Composite) and built-in realtime encoding in the Windows Media format.
The court had several unique requirements for the Buffalo event. They wanted live cameras on the judges' bench and video feeds to an overflow room and a press room, and they wanted to stream to their central server, where the video could then be accessed by any number of people, including law students at the University of Buffalo. And of course, they wanted to archive the video. The TriCaster seemed to fit this bill, but since it was new and the event was important, it was decided that the TriCaster solution would be tested in a rehearsal first.
"We knew there would be limited setup time, so there would have to be a dry run," says Green. These time constraints would be even worse than usual, because given the event's high profile, it would take even longer than usual to get the equipment through the security check.
"We did a dry run of the system from the court house in Buffalo, on April 4, streaming through lines provided by the NYS Appellate IT group," says Green. "Originally, two streams were tested, one QuickTime stream [from a Macintosh] and a Windows Media stream from the TriCaster." The IT group was impressed by the TriCaster's native Windows Media stream, which was "so stable and easy to set up that the IT group decided to eliminate the QuickTime stream and use only the TriCaster for the narrowcast session," says Green.
The court's IT staff was amazed by the TriCaster demonstration during the dry-run test, Green says. "When the IT crew asked ‘How do you make it stream?’ I said, ‘I'm just going to push this button and it will do it.’ And they laughed. They didn't believe me. But I did it and they called on the cell phone to the where the server is and the person at the other end said, ‘We're seeing the video of the courtroom right now.’ And they just couldn't believe it." Needless to say, the IT crew deemed the test a success.
The actual court session was held on April 14, 2005 at Old County Hall in Buffalo. For cameras, Green used two Sony digital broadcast cameras with triaxial cable for signal transfer to the camera control units. "All graphics, camera switching, projection feeds (overflow room) and streaming were handled by the TriCaster," says Green. "Seven judges’ mics on the bench and two mics on the lawyers’ lectern were mixed in a Mackie 16-channel mixer, the output of which fed the 'line in' inputs on the TriCaster. Video outputs were VGA to overflow room projector; Y/C to a Y/C DA for distribution to two Beta SP and two SVHS record decks and a PolyCom system; and composite video to press distribution amplifier (mult box) in an adjoining room."