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Live Streaming a Charity Game
Hi all!
I’ve just discovered these forums and was hoping I could get a bit of help with an audio dilemma I’m having. I participate in Extra Life every year, and each year we ramp up the production a bit as donations grow. This year my site (of several around the world we have participating) is going to be filling several time slots playing a board/card game for a couple hours at a time, and I need to find a good way to mic a group of people playing.
We’ll be standing or sitting around a table, and the total group may rise to as many as 8-10 folks playing at a time.
I know omnidirectional mics will likely pick everyone up, but I’m concerned about room noise and a potential echo from the audio we may need to have audible from the other sites. We’ll also need to reuse this equipment in perhaps a slightly different configuration to mic a smaller group sitting on couches (though we may just go with headsets for those time periods)
We’re looking at purchasing a relatively inexpensive audio mixer for each site that’ll plug into a computer, then transmit over our group voice call, but I could really use some help on microphones to purchase and placement. For reference, we’ll be playing games very similar to the one linked below, and will likely be arranged in a super similar way.
Two mics overhead? One on the center of the table? Wired lav or headworns for everyone?
Need to keep the cost down so we get as much as possible directed back to the charity. Thanks!
Example video – https://youtu.be/QLPrKAKcjmE
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1 Reply
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Yes, an omnidirectional mic hung strategically above the center of the table would seem like the simplest and easiest solution. BUT, as you say, both room acoustics (reflections, echo, etc.) and ambient noise (internal HVAC, external traffic, etc.) are significant factors.
The more echoey the space, the more reflections from table-top, walls, etc, the lower quality of the speech. And likewise, the more noisy the space (whether internal or external), the less intelligible will be the dialog.
If you had a big budget, then you would put a mic on each participant and use an auto-mixer to open each microphone as the participant speaks. A headset mic would be much better than a clip-on lav mic on the collar, etc.
So, following the rule “Quality/Speed/Cost, chose any TWO”, it would be good to experiment with the hardware you can afford in the space designated to see how close you are to the desired level of audio quality.Now, doing a two-way production interactively with other(s) at the other end of the party-line raises the stakes significantly. It was not clear whether you are asking about taking turns during designated time slots, or whether you are actively gaming with other team(s) concurrently. If you are only taking turns, then it doesn’t present any particular problems.
But if you are interacting with others online in real-time that requires echo-cancellation and other sophisticated signal processing.
This kind of automatic switching and echo-cancellation is done in online communication applications like Skype and Zoom and Hangouts, etc. If each site was called into a Zoom conference, that would handle the automatic switching and echo-cancellation that you need. Zoom (or any of the others) don’t know or care if the end-point is an individual or a group of people with multiple microphones and a mixer, etc.
Of course, you would also need to experiment with where you put the speaker so that the participants can hear the other end of the conversation. Perhaps also flying it overhead above the microphone. But guaranteed it will not work without the “conferencing magic” provided by the conferencing services.———————————————————————————
Recording audio without metering and monitoring is exactly like framing and focusing without looking at the viewfinder.
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