Thinking about starting show

[mcphillips]

Make sure you totally understand the concept of mix-minus.

[LucaB]

Make sure you totally understand the concept of mix-minus.

Can you give me a little insight?

[BradShoemaker]

Can you give me a little insight?

The extreme basics of mix-minus is basically making sure that your output to a device contains everything but the input from that same device. Otherwise you get the echo reverb that will overwhelm the ears, speakers and everything else... Without it, it would be a neverending loop of the same audio played on top of each other to infinity (or until something broke).

Mix minus comes into play a lot when working with phone callers into your board. It allows the phone caller to hear everything coming from the board except his own voice being played back to him (which would start the loop). To test this theory, get into someone's car who has a hands free device. Then call that person with your cell phone while they use their hands free.... your phone will pick up the audio from the car and begin the wretched sounds of everything looping on top of each other...(not recommended to actually try, but you get the point).

[Spencer Kobren]

The extreme basics of mix-minus is basically making sure that your output to a device contains everything but the input from that same device. Otherwise you get the echo reverb that will overwhelm the ears, speakers and everything else... Without it, it would be a neverending loop of the same audio played on top of each other to infinity (or until something broke).

Mix minus comes into play a lot when working with phone callers into your board. It allows the phone caller to hear everything coming from the board except his own voice being played back to him (which would start the loop). To test this theory, get into someone's car who has a hands free device. Then call that person with your cell phone while they use their hands free.... your phone will pick up the audio from the car and begin the wretched sounds of everything looping on top of each other...(not recommended to actually try, but you get the point).

Great stuff Brad..Thanks for taking the time to provide your insight to our users!

[andrewzarian]

Agree with Spencer that was great stuff

[Micky Keck]

I'm going through this learning process right now. Doing a show is the best way to quickly learn. My basic setup worked fine when I did a show where everyone was in the same place, but once I skyped my co-host in things started to get tricky. Doing the show taught me more in one hour than all the reading I did combined.

Some basic things I learned quickly:
My upstream bandwidth was not enough when a person was calling in via skype.
I need a better process for monitoring my sound level as everything sounded right in my headphones, but only by co-host could be heard on the stream.
Vidblaster can max out my AMD Phenom CPUs without much effort.
Ustream will not save my show unless I click the record button.

But now I have worked though some of those and am on to learning things like graphic overlays and embedding video on my website.

[Spencer Kobren]

WOW cseeman...What a fantastic contribution to the community! It’s people like you who are willing to take the time to share their extensive knowledge of internet broadcasting who will really help to evolve this field. Great job, I’m really impressed. @ Micky Keck...Great tips!

[cseeman]

Micky, the CPU usage with VidBlaster is one of my concerns about it.
I do some mobile streaming from laptops. Sometimes I go to a location whether its a performance event at a club or a talk at a local college. While I have a Quad Core i7, I've had to use a Core2Duo in the past.

With the Core2Duo I've been able to:
Use a Sony EX1 or Canon Vixia camera with a Matrox MXO2 (downscaling to Standard deff in hardware) to Express card.
I can use a DV camera on firewire.
Use a webcam as a host camera. (webcam points to me, the host, behind the computer and the other video cams points to the subject).
Stream at 640x480 or 640x360 at 500kbps.

With an Quad Core i7 I can throw a bit more at it.
I do this with Wirecast.
VidBlaster has some nifty features for desktop use but often enough I use a laptop and still want something that looks like a switched, composited stream. Also Wirecast can handle multiple audio sources (each camera's audio separately) so I don't need to bring a mixer.

Granted Wirecast has a higher starting price and if you need to go live with a trial version, VidBlaster's watermark isn't too intrusive.

I'm bringing this up because streaming from a laptop is a consideration for some shows especially if you need easy location setup.

[andrewzarian]

very well said cseeman.