Expert Tips for Professional Live Streaming Your Major Events

You may or may not have heard, our SXSW activation was a wild and inspiring experience. We celebrated 10 years of Staff Picks, and live streamed some serious talent: hello, Kirsten Lepore, the Daniels, the DeVitos. I ran production alongside our live production team, and we gleaned some useful insights during the process. These production tips are from myself and our head of live production, Joe Bandelli. Thanks, Joe! This advice can — and should — factor in to any big event, so take this and run with it. Be prepared Like, be so so so so prepared. When you think you’ve prepared enough, prepare more. Pre-production is the difference between a successful and a stressful live event. Live streaming is like shooting a movie, except you only have enough time for a single take. You HAVE to get it right, or it’s a wash. Before we even left for Austin, we spent a couple months getting everything buttoned up. First, we made a complete run of show. This gave us a detailed list of everyone we’d need at each event. We knew who to loop in, and when.

Because we included our rollout plans for social media, we were able to write up a list of assets we’d need. Social media was a big portion of these live events, because we pushed three of our keynote events to our community on Facebook and Twitter. We worked closely with our creative team well ahead of the event dates, so they could work toward a realistic, non-insane deadline.

Most of what we requested either went into our videos, or pushed our audience toward those events. We asked for: Thumbnails — we used before and after thumbnails on each video. The before image was heavily designed with information about the upcoming event. We sized these thumbnails for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, so they could be included in our social media efforts. Afterwards, we altered the thumbnail design to include a shot from the actual live event. Expert Tips for Professional Live Streaming Your Major Events

Expert Tips for Professional Live Streaming Your Major Events

Intro and end cards — these are great for boosting audience and engagement. For our intro cards we included some transparency on the background, so we could superimpose it over our live footage in the minutes leading up to our event. Once the event ended we cut to our widest shot, kept it running, and overlaid our end card — again, with a little transparency. This end card provided information about our upcoming events. Expert Tips for Professional Live Streaming Your Major Events

Lower thirds — we made a list of individuals that were appearing on camera and animated minimally designed, easy-to-read lower thirds for everyone. We let them linger between 3-4 seconds and exporting a few seconds of “tail” so that our sequence didn’t loop too quickly.

Countdown reel — we kicked off each event with a short sizzle video that included a countdown. This served up a nice “the event is about to start” sense of urgency, to draw our audience in.

Once we considered what we needed, we knocked those out of the way as soon as humanly possible. We used Vimeo to generate links and tweak privacy and embed settings as well. This was super helpful with social media distribution, and posting on external sites. Getting both the links and the assets ready ahead of time allowed us to schedule any time-sensitive social media posts weeks in advance. It was wonderful to have all of this queued up so we could focus on getting the events right once we landed in Austin. Location, location, location For any live event, you want ample time to test your equipment. You never know what can go wrong in a live environment, and you need to be ready for everything. So, our preparation efforts didn’t stop when we got to the Lone Star State. We immediately got to work setting up.

Expert Tips for Professional Live Streaming Your Major Events Our production crew loving those setup vibes.

We tested our primary and backup feeds. We tested our failover methods, we tested our backup equipment. The more time you have to test all fail points at the event space, the more successful you’ll be when it’s go time. Gear is (nearly) everything If you want your live stream to look professional, you need to treat it like a proper shoot. Our production team used four high-end cameras. We put two on Spider Pods (to be at stage level), mounted one to the rafters for a wide shot, and used one as a handheld, roaming camera. We distributed our crew strategically. We had two people operating the cameras, while a third operated our switcher, toggling between various shots during the show. We also had an in-house audio/visual team handling a mixer, five wireless microphones, and projection, which all were split out and fed into the switcher for a live mix. In all of this chaos, we also factored in some basic production elements: we set up away from the stage, we knew the presentation screen size ahead of time, we checked our internet connections. It’s easy to forget the little things, but sometimes these details can be the most important for a successful show. Along the same lines, don’t forget to allocate space for your encoder, backup encoder, audio equipment, cameras, and so on. Make sure you have enough table space, surge protectors, extension cords, and back-up equipment. Showtime Setting up in advance of your first event allows you to make sure everything is working properly. While you’re in the space, gather a group of people the size of your biggest panel and run through the most challenging moments of your live event.

Expert Tips for Professional Live Streaming Your Major Events

Because we’d done so much legwork in advance, the live events themselves went by Grease Lightning fast and pretty seamlessly. We spent most of that time checking the footage to know which shots to switch between. We also had our social and support teams standing by in case anything went haywire. Expert Tips for Professional Live Streaming Your Major Events

Even with all of our planning, a live event reminds you that entropy is real. Something always goes wrong, and hey, that’s part of the excitement. In the middle of one of our broadcasts, our event space experienced a full power outage. Luckily we had already anticipated this and we were ready to act. We quickly switched to our backup generator, and the show went on without a hitch. It ain’t over ‘til it’s actually over As soon as we ended our streams, Vimeo automatically archived the raw stream files to our account. We kept these videos private so we could scrub through the footage at the end of the day and do some minor fine-tuning. I downloaded the archived videos in full resolution, and brought them into Adobe Premiere Pro. I then trimmed the beginning and end to tighten up the flow, and checked for some good camera angles that we might’ve missed. (Worth noting that you can save all your previous versions, so we didn’t need to worry about losing anything.) When we finished editing, I replaced the file with the final version, and made it public. Expert Tips for Professional Live Streaming Your Major Events

We also wanted to make sure that celebrating the history of Staff Picks didn’t end after one whirlwind weekend. We used these assets in emails, newsletters, social posts, in blogs recapping our events aheam like this glorious production takeaway, and we cut sizzle reels and recaps using the footage. That’s a wrap Live is so much more than a single event. Live streaming is about big picture thinking: beginning, middle, and end. Get all your little video ducks in a row, test everything, test it again, and think about creative ways to get the most mileage out of your events. And finally, don’t forget, your live event might take place on a single day, but you can use that content to engage and grow your audience for days, weeks, even months beyond. Wanna get more eyeballs on your next big event? See our tips on maximizing your live audience.