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After the Live Stream

Enterprises and institutions are repurposing live video assets to extend the life cycle of their content.

Welcome to the fourth issue of the Pro Video Dealer newsletter. In our second installment, we looked into the rapid adoption of live production by companies, institutions and houses of worship. With new outlets for content, such as YouTube Live and Facebook entering the marketplace, it’s become possible for those with relatively small media infrastructures to transmit lectures, training sessions, corporate meetings, sermons, and similar events in real time to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of viewers or more. But that’s really only the first part of the story.

Another very important aspect of the expansion of distribution platforms involves the management and repurposing of elements from these live broadcasts and webcasts into professional-looking promos, highlight videos, and other short pieces of content for later use. It’s more important than ever for AV integrators to understand this rapidly-evolving space.

When corporate, institutional and religious clients create multi-camera presentations, they will often benefit by capturing ISO feeds from all cameras for maximum flexibility…. so they should think beyond the technology required to stream that live feed and also strategize about how best to capture, store, index, and edit this additional material.

Tools such as Telestream Wirecast software (and Wirecast Gear software/hardware bundle) and NewTek’s TriCaster are both very popular solutions for handling multiple feeds, switching, graphics and playback elements for live broadcast and webcast. Neither is designed specifically to also create edited versions of material but for simple projects, they provide capabilities to select and re-order shots.

More likely, users will want to record the materials and then utilize the capabilities of the major NLE (non-linear editing) software, such as Grass Valley Edius, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Creative Cloud to repackage the material.

Will Waters, director of IP workflow strategy at NewTek, whose TriCaster products have been front and center in live broadcast and webcasts, notes that there are many different ways for content to remain effective after the initial live feed. “Facebook Live and YouTube work differently,” he points out. “For Facebook Live, you have to do something compelling and the attention span you can expect is maybe a minute and a half or so, whereas YouTube audiences are accustomed to longer formats. YouTube says the average video is 12 to 14 minutes.”

If you produce your live webcast with a TriCaster, Waters explains, “Two things can happen: Say it’s something like a TED Talk with three or four speakers. You can produce the multicam live and stream it out and, while that’s happening, you can mark in and out points [for use in a later, re-packaged version] and start pushing that material out to FTP or directly to YouTube. Or you can record the feeds and then output them to some form of storage [We talked about storage solutions in the first issue of this newsletter and then edit with whatever NLE system you’re comfortable using.”

While editing experience is always a plus, organizations can approach the editing phase rather simply, almost as an extension of the live feed, by using the NLE’s multicam function. Avid, Adobe Premiere, Grass Valley Edius, Apple and others all have multicam functions.

“Customized video certainly becoming more popular,” Waters says. “It helps roll out content strategically over time to create more touch points with viewers.”

Andrew Haley, Product & Live Streaming Evangelist at Telestream for the Wirecast and Live Stream products, explains that the tools his company develops are primarily focused on live production but notes that users can definitely employ Wirecast in conjunction with an NLE to create edited versions.

A particularly effective approach for those looking to accomplish this with limited budgets is to invest in Telestream’s Wirecast Gear product, which combines Telestream’s Wirecast software on a Windows machine. By also loading an NLE, such as Grass Valley Edius, a user essentially has a single piece of hardware capable of both handling the requirements of delivering the live feed and subsequently repurposing the elements from that feed (isos, titles, effects, etc.).

You can check out an in-depth look at this workflow here:

This method, Haley explains, is a simple and elegant approach to the type of customers looking for an affordable, efficient way of repurposing content for social media, webcasting, YouTube, Periscope and similar outlets. “We’ve tested Wirecast Gear and the machine is comfortable capturing up to four 720p iso streams to its hard drive.”

Organizations moving into live production territory would be wise to also think through what the most efficient, cost-effective route would be to re-use that content after the initial presentation in order to yield maximum ROI.

Product News

Developments in Video Distribution: Tools That Make Streaming and Mobile Production Possible

NewTek’s New Tech: What These Products Mean for Mobile Production

NewTek Launches TriCaster TC1 for Live Production

Lightspeed Live Capture 2.0 Focuses on Efficient Digitizing of Tape Archives for Improved Access and Longevity

Grass Valley Launches Mync Personal Content Management Tool

Grass Valley’s Edius Comes Out With Version 8.3

User Stories

WGBH Logs In to Facebook Live With Telestream’s Wirecast Gear

International Jazz Day Concert Goes Live with NewTek

How to Repurpose Your Live Videos

How to Repurpose Live Videos

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