With modern technology and services, it's now possible to host professional grade webcasts on a small budget. At the University of Pennsylvania, we produce weekly webcasts in our Modern and Contemporary Poetry MOOC. The webcasts are done in regular room on a modest 3-camera setup, comprised of only a fraction of a "professional" studio’s gear.
Canon Vixia HF R500 Camcorder - ~$249.00
We purchased 6 Canon Vixia cameras for studio and field use. They’re compact, affordable and have been very reliable overall. They’re designed with consumers in mind, so the camera defaults to automatic focus, white balance and color. It’s possible to override these settings, though the functionality to do so isn’t great -- However, if you’ve been trained in video production professionally, you’ll probably be interested in fine tuning your look with the built-in functionality that is available. One of the key features to the camera is that it has HDMI-C output, so you can send your live video feed into a capture device; We run a camera output via HDMI-C to HDMI-A cable -> ethernet extender -> HDMI Capture Card into our Mac Pro.
My least favorite feature of the camera is the zoom control. It has variable (the more you push the zoom the faster is zooms) zoom or a fixed zoom speed (one speed no matter how hard you push the zoom button). If you’re going to do any live zooms during a broadcast, you have to have a really precise touch when using variable speed zoom or you have to set a default fixed zoom speed, which insures a smooth zoom but, of course, you’re limited to that zoom speed.
Overall, these cameras capture a far superior picture to that of a webcam or cell phone and work well as a budget friendly, user friendly video camera.
Video camera memory cards
When picking out a camera, it’s critical to see what type of memory card is recommended and / or required by the camera. If you don’t purchase a memory card with enough space and speed for the camera, you may not be able to record full quality video or any video at all. We purchased 6 memory cards on Amazon.com.
Tripods
It may be tempting to purchase a really cheap tripod, but if you expect to do any live panning during a webcast, you might regret it. We purchased a cheap model and panning was jittery. We quickly spent a few extra bucks to upgrade to a better model tripod and can now live pan without embarrassing ourselves.
HDMI->Ethernet convertors / extenders
HDMI cables aren’t really designed to run more than 50 feet; after that, the signal starts to drop out. Using these HDMI->Ethernet convertors / extenders, we can run our cameras up to 150 feet away, though usually they are less than 100.
Blackmagic Intensity Extreme for Thunderbolt HDMI Capture Cards - ~$285.00
With older Mac Pro models, you could purchase internal HDMI capture cards to get the video from your camera into the computer. With the advent of the new Mac Pro, internal upgrades are impossible. As a result, we use Blackmagic Intensity Extremeexternal HDMI to Thunderbolt capture cards to bring in our video.
Mackie Audio Mixing Board
Using this audio board, we can capture up to 6 XLR microphones and 4 1/4-inch stereo sources. Using the “Main Mix Output,” we send an audio signal to our Mac Pro’s built-in line input. The board is equipped with 2 auxiliary outputs which give us the ability to send our audio to powered speakers in the room (Aux 1) as well as to our phone tap device which we use to take phone calls (Aux 2).
Shure SM58 Microphones
A classic, durable and high quality microphone.
Telephone Capture via the Excalabir
This deserves an article to itself, but I’ll give the summary here. Using the Excalibir phone tap, we are able take live phone calls from the world. When a call comes in, the phone rings and someone is able to answer the phone call like normal and screen the call. Once we’re ready to bring their call into the webcast, we press the red button.
How it works? The Excalibir sits between the phone receiver and the phone handset. It has two jacks: a send and a receive. The “send” sends the audio of the caller via a 1/4 jack to our mixer. Using “Aux 2” on our Mackie audio mixing board, we send the signal of our microphones to the caller via a 1/4 inch cable to the “receive” jack. Using Aux 2 instead of the main mix or a headphone mix is key because we can turn exclude audio of the phone call from being sent back into the phone by turning down Aux 2 on the phone’s audio channel, thus avoiding an audio feedback loop.
Mac Pro
What more can really be said about a Mac Pro? We push this thing hard every day and it has delivered excellent results for 4 years. We capture 3 video feeds, run and record our video via Wirecast, facilitate a Google Hangout and even playback audio files all at the same time.
Wirecast by Telestream
Wirecast is piece of software that allows for managing, recording and broadcasting video feeds. For us, it serves a critical role of providing a way to incorporate our high quality video cameras into Google Hangouts. Natively, Google Hangouts only supports USB webcams and a few firewire cameras. However, using the “Virtual Camera” output feature in Wirecast allows us to feed any Wirecast-compatible camera feed into a Hangout.
There are a couple of free alternative applications that can do virtual camera outputs such as ManyCam. In my experience, these free alternative applications are not as intuitive, high quality and polished as Wirecast, but they do function.
Google Hangouts on Air
Free(!) and easy platform for webcasting to the world. Further, it has some good features and use cases that I dive into in “Does Google Hangouts on Air “Make the Cut” as a professional webcasting platform?"
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