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Video Production

Today's streaming productions scale from impromptu online broadcasts captured via webcam and delivered within a corporate firewall to massive professional multicam productions streamed worldwide. With tutorials,  reviews, and analysis from leading producers, the content on this page looks at preproduction, audio and video capture, encoding, and especially the gear and strategies essential for successful streaming.

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Features

Review: Blackmagic Design ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO, Studio Camera 6K Pro, and ATEM Microphone Converter

The Blackmagic Design Television Studio ATEM HD8 ($2,995) and HD8 ISO ($3,995) are all-in-one HD video switcher/broadcast control panels. On their own they are very capable HD video switchers suitable for studio installations and remote productions. The magic with these switchers is that when paired with other supported Blackmagic gear, they can unlock unique production workflow solutions that are easy to implement and go well beyond what you would expect a desktop video switcher to be able to do on its own.

Review: Magewell USB Fusion

The USB Fusion is a device that can be used in a production environment for local content feeds/sources. It can be used to input various sources such as HDMI devices, webcams, USB microphones, videos, images, screenshares, and other items. The USB Fusion is touted as a tool to make your online lectures and virtual events more engaging and to easily combine numerous sources into attractive live presentations for remote education, webinars, live streaming, and video conferencing.

Review: Skyglass: Movie Effects Camera App

Want to generate and produce videos in dynamic, detailed, and customizable virtual environments using nothing but the built-in video capabilities of your smartphone plus a single subscription-service app? Skyglass Movie Effects Camera App makes it possible, and IEBA Communications' Anthony Burokas explains how.

A Broadcaster’s Cloud Migration Primer

This article offers a primer on how a traditional broadcaster could start to move services to a cloud provider.

Spotlights

The Ultimate Guide to Live Encoding

In today's competitive online video market—where quality of experience is table stakes—ensuring your team has the right encoder for your unique needs is key. Streaming data must be compressed for efficient delivery without sacrificing quality. While most encoders deliver on this requirement, they vary in terms of performance and feature set.

Streaming Media 2023 Trendsetters: LEXI 3.0 - The Future of Automatic Captioning

Experience LEXI 3.0 - the world's most advanced and accurate automatic captioning solution.

Streaming Media 2023 Trendsetters: WisePlay - Playout

NAB SHOW PRODUCT of the YEAR 2023 WINNER WisePlay Playout is designed to meet the demanding needs of FAST and TV broadcasters.

How To Master Remote Production

For the show to go on, broadcasters and Hollywood studios must find a way to enable a live and post-production environment for their WFH teammates. That is, to create the same professional broadcastquality output as would be achieved in-studio with high speed, high capacity networks and expensive hardware and applications.

Columns

‘Bulletproof’ Needs to Be a Standard Feature for Production Gear

There's a lot more imperfect gear on the market than ever before—gear we can't count on from gig to gig. Gear that can't deliver reliable video. Features that work and then don't. Devices that connect and then don't. We've lost core reliability. Bulletproof needs to be a feature.

Producing for FAST? Take it Slow

FAST programming needs space for the commercials. Unless you intentionally craft that space into your show, it just slices into your content randomly, ruining the mood of narrative content and frustrating viewers just as the show was getting to the "good part." Watching YouTube content on a Roku device is like this now. The random "pop" to commercials in the middle of a scene is very annoying.

Why Aren’t You Streaming Your Live Event?

These days, the cost and technological barriers to live streaming are few are far between. Robert Reinhardt outlines some reasons why organizations may still hesitate to live stream their events, and he shows why these reasons are misguided. He breaks down the ways that even events with small budgets can still produce high-quality live streams.

What Else Did We Get Wrong?

Based on what I'm hearing from a wide array of streaming producers, the heightened demand for streaming live events that we expected to be a natural outcome of its COVID-era ascendancy is either evaporating or simply hasn't materialized.

Video Production Companies and Suppliers