LIVE Business Presentations (Multiple Locations)

[Thomas Leong]

Suggest you google for Video Conferencing and/or Webinars and/or Webcasts.

Good luck,
Thomas Leong

[Colin Leiker]

Hey thanks for replying! I will look into this, but my intention was to maybe have someone recommend some good equipment that is reputable for these purposes. I will do some more research on my own of course, but this is obviously a little tricky for me 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

You’re going to stream the final mix of the show out of SFO.

In SFO you have a graphics laptop, and two cameras at least, feeding signals to the switcher.

Incoming from your remote locations and feeding into SFO’s location, will be two more camera feeds, each from from Milan and Salt lake.

At the SFO location, you need a video switcher for choosing between these sources as needed, delay units and frame synchronizers for making the remote feeds all play nice with the local feeds, and a computer system for encoding the output of that switcher.

An experienced video director and camera crews at each site, collaborating over an intercom system plugged into a phone network, will make sure the right images are chosen at the right time.

The streams from the remote locations will come with a bit of time delay due to the encoding process and the distance. When that remote source is chosen and fed back from SFO to all locations, it will introduce yet more time delay. This is going to make live conversation between the three locations difficult, but not impossible: you will just have to train the people speaking at each location to wait their turn to speak, and not to try to talk over the other person.

It is less like a live phone call, and more like people taking turns on the old Citizens’ Band CB radios. or waiting for a foreign language interpreter to finish a live translation.

The audio guy at each place will have his hands full, going between what’s called a “mix-minus” audio mix, and the house audio mix for the local audience, to keep bad echoes from happening during the whole thing. One way to make that easier is to have the questions shot from a smaller, sound-isolated room off to the side of each location, instead of in the audience itself.

Really, what you’re asking to do is not cheap to do correctly, and the way most pro companies would handle this is to hand it off completely to a live production company with satellite gear and/or high end internet encoders and the rest of that stuff. You hand them a check and they take it from there: your company people don’t need to try and re-invent this process, which is outside their area of competency anyhow.

If the plumbing in your corporate HQ went bad today, they would not have you go out to research and purchase plumbing tools and try to DIY the thing. They’d hire an expert who already comes equipped.

You might try a keyword search for “fly-away” satellite video production services and live location production services.