Tutorial: Producing Live-Streamed Events with the Roland V-02HD MK II

Managing the Camera Switch 

Though my production is static picture-in-picture, many productions involve switching from one input to another. For these productions, you need to consider several additional production-related issues. The first is how you’ll switch cameras, which is particularly important if you’re both producing the event and behind the camera.

As you can see in Figure 3, the V-02HD offers both a T-bar for manually transitioning from one input to another, or you can simply press the input button to take it live. Here, the V-02 follows the common convention of displaying the live input in red and the preview input in green. As mentioned, the V-02HD also offers an optional footswitch for switching inputs which adds a nice touch of polish for one-person productions.

The second issue to consider is which transition and the duration thereof. Every producer is different, as is every production. For business productions, in particular, I adhere to the mantra of the “motivated” transition. That is unless I have a reason to emphasize the camera switch, I make it as subtle as possible. For most live events that translates to a 2-3 frame dissolve that softens the visual disruption between the shots, but usually goes unnoticed by the viewer.

Moving to OBS

For this production, I’m running OBS on an M1-based Mac Mini. Once I connect the USB output to the Mac, the V-02HD output shows up as a device that I can configure into OBS, as you see in Figure 5 (below). Note that you have to input both the audio and video separately to get them into the production; you can’t just input the video. I’m using OBS because it’s open-source and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, cross-platform, but you can do the same in most live streaming programs including Wirecast (Windows/Mac) and Vmix (Windows only).

Figure 5. Setting up the V-02HD output as an input into OBS.

Once you have audio and video up on OBS, you configure your streaming and recording settings via the Settings button on the lower right in Figure 5. OBS makes the streaming side simple with highly functional and easy-to-use presets for services like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook Live.

Once you choose the service, OBS displays the screen shown in Figure 6 (below). Click Get Stream Key, which opens your browser and navigates to the service. Login if needed, find and copy the Stream Key from the service’s configuration page, paste it into the field shown and you’re ready to go; OBS will configure your outbound stream to match that recommended by the service, which you can override but probably shouldn’t unless you really know what you’re doing.

Figure 6. Streaming to YouTube Live in OBS

To set up your recording, click the Output button on the left in Figure 7 (below) and choose a recording quality preset. In this case, I’m saving the archive file using higher-quality settings than the streaming file, which means two times the compression overhead, which is CPU-intensive. I’ll have to watch CPU utilization during the event to make sure that I don’t drop any frames.

Figure 7. Setting up the archived recording

The mixer is always live so you’ll start and stop your live stream and recording using the Start Streaming and Start Recording buttons shown on the lower right in Figure 5. You see the CPU % shown on the bottom right of the OBS UI in that figure as well; that’s what I’ll be watching during the event to make sure I don’t overwhelm the system.

As with any production, you should really nail the planning issues discussed at the start of the article before you jump in and start plugging and configuring. The more you think through production mechanics and goals, the better chance you have of achieving them.