With more churches looking to expand their presence online, technical directors are spending more time trying to come up with robust, reliable and easy-to-use solutions for streaming events, classes and weekend services. While there exist quite a few high-end solutions that combine hardware, software and content delivery, many churches don't have the budget for those. That leaves TDs typically building homegrown solutions that may or may not perform well week in and week out.
Recognizing this need, Matrox and Telestream have teamed up to produce an all-in-one solution, the Telestream Wirecast and Matrox VS4 Turnkey Solution. It's a bit of a mouthful, but the system has the capabilities to justify the long name. You can buy one of these systems through a certified systems builder—for this review, we looked at a system from Boston-based 1Beyond—and all components are designed to work together and deliver great results.
ROBUST HARDWARE SUPPORT
At the heart of the system is the Matrox VS4 four-input video capture card. It will ingest up to four streams of SDI (with eight channels of embedded audio each), in SD or HD in the most common flavors. If for some reason four channels of video isn't enough, you can add a second VS4 card to boost the input count to eight.
This is an interesting concept. Most of the time, churches will either broadcast the in-house video feed to the stream—which is typically cut for IMAG—or invest in a larger 2 ME switcher or perhaps a second switcher for cutting the live stream. With this solution, you could actually take four to eight video inputs, creating a separate stream mix without additional video hardware. Rather than compromising the IMAG or stream switch, this system gives you the ability to customize the mix for each venue.
The 1Beyond StreamMachine that I reviewed was an all-in-one Windows 7 solution with a robust carrying handle on top. It rather resembled a large lunchbox, and weighting in at eight pounds, it's not hard to carry around. The StreamMachine featured an SSD system drive and two 500 GB spinning media store drives, all on removable caddies. Other configurations are available, and of course, you can put your own 2.5-inch drives in if you prefer.
The back of the machine was fully populated with connections. You have the four BNC connectors for video, DVI and HDMI video out, Ethernet, and a whole bunch of USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports. When I fired it up, the fan noise was a bit loud when I tested it in my studio, but when I set it up in the tech booth, it wasn't really noticeable. We're told that 1Beyond has an option called “Silent Feature” that is much quieter.
The system feels very solid and is clearly designed to be transported. For a portable church that needs to stream, or a multi-venue church where the pastor speaks from different locations, this could be ideal.
POWERFUL SOFTWARE
THIS COULD BE IDEAL FOR A PORTABLE CHURCH THAT NEEDS TO STREAM, OR A MULTI-VENUE CHURCH WHERE THE PASTOR SPEAKS FROM DIFFERENT LOCATIONS.
Telestream's Wirecast software is well known among streaming professionals, and for good reason. It's surprisingly powerful and remarkably easy to use. Video inputs are configured as “shots,” and represented by thumbnails in a bin. A recent update made the thumbnails live video, which is rather like having a multi-viewer built in. Wirecast uses a layered approach for video, and gives you five layers for video, graphics and overlays.
For easiest operation, you configure your inputs, and the operator clicks on the thumbnail to take it to air. In this mode, it's very much like ProPresenter: click and it goes live. If you want to do more advanced switching that involves going from, say, a pre-service graphic to a live shot with an overlay, you can set it up to require clicking a “Go” button before going to air.
This second mode makes it very easy to do fairly elaborate transitions among various layers. For example, you could put the camera shot of your pastor on layer three, and run it full screen. You can build a second version of that same shot that scales the video down and tilts it inward. On layer two you may have the sermon notes, and layer five might hold a background. With a few clicks, the full screen video of the pastor becomes a smaller box on the left with the notes in a larger box on the right, all over a moving or static background that is being played off the computer. The transitions are all very smooth, and dare I say, elegant.
None of this is of any use unless it is easy for non-professionals to operate. And this is an area where Wirecast shines. I figured out how to do everything I just described without once looking at a manual or help file. Setting it all up is easy and running it is even easier. A preview/program view is available, giving you the confidence to build the shots before they go to air. Because so much of it can be run from keyboard commands, an operator could become very proficient indeed.
ISO RECORDING
If the story stopped with great streaming capabilities, we would have a great product on our hands. But oftentimes, we have a need or desire to do some additional post-production on the weekend service for later posting. Recording isolated feeds (ISOs) of each camera is obviously the best way to do that. But it can be rather expensive to have recorders set up to record four to eight feeds. However, the Matrox ISO camera recording tool makes it easy. Simply launch the utility from within Wirecast, which auto detects the inputs; specify your destination, filenames, preferred codec and audio parameters; and hit the record button.
The system will record MPEG2 I-Frame at up to 300 Mb/s in an AVI wrapper or DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50 or DVCPRO HD in a QuickTime MOV wrapper for easy ingest into most NLEs. I can actually see some churches purchasing this system for this capability alone.
MULTIPLE BROADCASTS
Wirecast has built-in presets for most popular CDNs, so configuring the stream is very easy. I had it set up and streaming to my Livestream account in about two minutes. At a broadcast rate of about 2 Mbs, the video quality was very acceptable. We have a 20 Mbs upload connection, and we had no trouble maintaining smooth video at 2 Mbs. I may even boost the rate a little bit to clear up the very minor macro blocking I occasionally saw.
Within the broadcast set up window, you can configure multiple streams to go out to Livestream, UStream, Sermon.net or a host of other options including an in-house server. Wirecast supports Flash, QuickTime and WMV formats for maximum compatibility. It is also easy to record the stream to the local hard drive for archiving or further editing.
Once the streams are configured and the destinations selected, a single click broadcasts to them all.
WHAT ABOUT AUDIO?
The system I received only had audio input capability on the SDI streams (which I couldn't use because we don't yet embed audio on our SDI video), and the PC audio card on 1/8-inch jacks. While corresponding with the manufacturer, I asked about this and was told the system could be ordered with a professional audio card with XLR inputs, or can be outfitted with a USB audio interface.
Wirecast can add audio delay to the audio inputs to adjust for the differing processing paths. It's easy to lock audio to a video source, or separate it out depending on the needs of the production. A software audio mixer lets you combine various audio sources, both from inputs or playback from the machine.
CONCLUSION
While it's certainly possible to home-brew your own streaming solution, it's often fraught with problems. While this system is slightly more expensive than parts you could put together yourself, it's very robust. I appreciated the fact that I was able to take it out of the box, fire it up, make up the connections and be streaming in about 15 minutes, without looking at a manual. We streamed two full weekends worth of services with it—without a single hiccup.
Audio and video quality were excellent and, of course, fully configurable. Aside from a fan that would not be out of place on a hair dryer (an attribute we understand the builder has in fact addressed), this is a great system, one that would certainly be worth looking at if streaming is in your future.
