Rethinking the Broadcast Control Room
Scholl and Orlin both joined Yahoo! after long stints as CNN producers. It soon became clear that the demands for eight hours of live webcast production would be drastically different from the demands of television.
Thus, streamlining production staff and studio equipment was a primary objective. "I knew Yahoo! wasn't going to have 20 people in the control room. That's not the way we needed to do it," says Orlin. A reevaluation of staffing needs and careful hardware and software selection allowed Scholl and Orlin to hire a lean, multi-tasking production team.
While exploring control room options, Orlin and Scholl approached Play Streaming Media Group (PSMG) to review their PC-based "studio-in-a-box" solution, GlobeCaster. This all-inclusive design allowed a significant reduction in equipment needs by delivering a laundry list of FinanceVision requirements including routers, a point-and-click switcher interface, a digital video editor, a live character generator and dual-channel D1 still-store capabilities.
A minor adjustment was made to expand the available video source inputs of the GlobeCaster by piggy-backing a 32-source router on the system's available eight-input router.
It was also decided to forgo the GlobeCaster's audio features. "In a live mode, it wouldn't work for us to be switching back and forth to the audio mixer. We have sources from all over the place," says Orlin. A multi-channel Mackie audio board substitute's for the GlobeCaster mixer to handle the numerous sources.
For the sake of redundancy, FinanceVision currently employs two GlobeCasters side-by-side in the control room. "If it locks up or has a PC problem, we're one button away from being on the second one," adds Orlin.
Set Considerations
While the selection of the GlobeCaster solved the problem of acquiring, switching and distributing the signal to encoders, the studio design presented its own set of challenges. In order to reduce the burden of the codecs and to provide as rich a streaming experience as possible to the end-user, it was imperative to move as few bits as possible at any given time within the video window.
The quick and simple solution was to paint a purple wall behind the anchor desk, allowing the background to remain static. In the short-term, this technique served its purpose for reducing compression requirements, but lacked style or innovation.
The team soon employed vi[z]rt's virtual set technology to give added depth and visual appeal to the confines of the FinanceVision production environment.
"If you can minimize motion, it'll look better on the Web, and the virtual set plays into that because every bit of that background does not change from frame to frame," Orlin says.
The vi[z]rt software enables Yahoo! to design any 3D set for insertion into the video window on the fly. Although the GlobeCaster supports such keying capabilities, Yahoo! chose to use industry-standard Ultimatte bluescreen compositing technology to remove the physical background and insert the vi[z]rt virtual set images.
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