Technical notes from the Virtual Royal Court of Their Majesties Anton and Luned, hosted by the Barony of Storvik. This post is intended to record how I handled the technical aspects of the event.
I was responsible for the tech portion of the Court – specifically, the camera angles, microphone, and general technology in the room. While previous Courts were ably handled by the Kingdom Webminister Melchior, he took a step back on this one to allow Baroness Sophie of Orange and myself to run the show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwOiyDpgeoE
The Setup: Hardware
We hosted the Court in a black box theatre (meaning it is a big empty black box with theatrical lighting). It was helpful to not need to worry about lighting at all.
I ran the theatre on my (fairly beefy) Macbook Pro, which is running a 2.9 Intel i9 processor and 32GB of memory. I have used a similar setup on a less beefy Mac with 8GB of memory, but given the software requirements you may do better with at least 16GB.
A Blue Yeti USB microphone was set on a table just outside of the camera angles for audio. This microphone is nice for this purpose as it has cartiod settings to capture a 360deg range of sound.
I had three cameras set up: two stationary webcams and one higher end Nikon DSLR (anything with a manual zoom, decent focus, and the ability to send out a video signal would do). The stationary cameras were each focused on a ‘zone’ – their Majesties or their Excellencies – and the third camera was on a tripod and could move wherever I needed it.
Pro tip #1: Check if your webcam has software to adjust its settings. Mine are Logitech cameras, so I can use Logitech software (I like Logitech Gaming Software) to control white balance, brightness, gain, etc to make the video look as good as possible.
Pro Tip #2: I had to do a fair bit of fiddling to get my DSLR to function well as a streaming camera. If you are planning to do this, get on that EARLY as you may need to purchase wires and the like to connect things together. Make sure your cords are long enough that you can move your camera as needed.
The three-camera setup allowed me to change camera angles on the fly, without subjecting the audience to watching the angle change. If anyone’s setup allows them to control live camera in-the-room, I highly suggest this type of setup (though in truth two cameras would have been enough to make it work).
I brought an external monitor, which seemed a little extra until mid-stream I turned it to face their Majesties, so they could use it to watch the live feed from the Zoom room – specifically when elevating individuals who had logged in.
I used my Elgato Stream Deck to make changing scenes and cameras easy with a single click. While I have a physical device, they have an app version that works just as well as the physical one and would have been a perfectly fine option.
Finally, Their Majesties had a cell phone logged into the Zoom room and each had a wireless earbud headphone in one ear, so that they could have back-and-forth conversations with people in the Zoom room. You may want enough phones and earbuds available so that everyone on-camera and any retainers in the room can hear what is going on, but this is definitely in the ‘extra’ category.
The Setup: Software
Everything in the theatre was streamed to Zoom, where the indominitible Baroness Sophie the Orange handled sending the signal out to YouTube, as well as the video feeds from anyone not present in the room.
Zoom was running on my computer (pointing to the room that Sophie was managing), as well as Open Broadcast Studio (OBS). OBS’ virtual camera was what Zoom saw coming from my computer.
In OBS, I had ‘scenes’ set up for each of the cameras, with buttons programmed in my Stream Deck to turn on and off title overlays where appropriate.
I used VB-Audio Cables to bring sound from Zoom into OBS, etc. While it’s not free, VB-Audio is donationware and reasonably priced.
I also had some pre-recorded videos prepared and ready to play in OBS, again on button clicks. This was one place that fell a little flat – the files were not well labelled, which led to a small snafu and some lag in getting one to play. It worked out in the wash, though.
A video of all of the award scrolls was prepared to play at the end of the Court, and was also loaded into OBS.
I built tile cards and the text overlays using Adobe Photoshop. You could use any modern graphic software, I am comfortable in Photoshop so that is what I used.
Takeaways
When someone with tech savvy/skills/confidence is available, I think it works quite well to use a multi-camera setup with OBS (or some equivilant) in-room. It does require some extra coordination with that person so that they can be on top of the flow of the Court, ideally taking place before the day of the event so that some rehearsals can be held.
The flow for this setup was OBS -> Zoom -> Youtube -> Populace. I think if I was to host again, I might explore if a setup along the lines of Zoom -> Theatre -> Youtube -> Populace. This could allow more fine-grained control of whose video was shown at what times – for example, when Their Majesties were speaking to someone in the Zoom room, we could show both groups on screen at the same time. It could also allow more control of sound – the Zoom sound could be silenced when it wasn’t ‘live’, allowing conversation and technical support that would not be picked up on the stream.
With any Virtual event, but especially one with as many moving parts as a Virtual Court, planning and preparation are key. The ability to perform as full of a dress rehearsal as possible, with as many of the people who will be involved day-of, is essential to a smooth production. And to be clear: this IS a production. The surface should appear smooth, simple, and as much like a standard Court as possible – but under the surface, we may need to adjust how we think about planning and preparing for Courts (and even who is in the loop on what is planned for each). The very nature of going virtual makes them more of a production than they are in-person, and the organization and planning of production is in part to lighten the stress on those running the event in the moment.
TLDR: Rehearsal is important. Have a rehearsal for any virtual event you are holding, and run through every technical thing you might do during the event. It will make life far less stressful and the event more enjoyable for all concerned.
I look forward to more virtual courts in the future. If anyone wants to discuss the setup further, feel free to reach out to myself through the ‘contact’ form, or contact the Kingdom Webminister.
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