The numbers suggest the dimension of a recent Dreamtek’s project: the multi day corporate event for a major technology client not only included 20 stages, 18 breakout rooms, 307 live sessions, 950 presenters and 30,000 onsite attendees, but also 60 onsite crew members, 35 flypacks and 22 remote editors around the world creating upwards of 300 on demand videos broadcast to a global audience of more than 300,000 live and 1 million on demand viewers. According to Dreamtek’s Jeff Eggleston, change is the only constant…
Eggleston is the director of studio productions for Dreamtek, a video technology and production company that provides innovative broadcast solutions across creative video production, live event streaming and managed services. While live streaming is a core service that Dreamtek provides, this particular project had a bit of a twist.
“The client didn’t want the remote audience to tune in and see the presentations and sessions in real time via a live stream. They wanted everyone to have access to the edited content as fast as possible, but via VOD,” explained Eggleston. “We devised a workflow where we streamed the content to our own custom streaming servers, with our editors collaboratively working on it in near real time. With the aggressive turnaround time for the VOD content, anywhere between a few hours to 72 hours, we had editors across continents working around the clock.”
Live streaming and ISO capture
So, without further ado, here is the whole story shared by Blackmagic Design and Dreamtek:
Dreamtek deployed 18 ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO live production switchers for the line cut, live streaming, and ISO capture of camera and presentation feeds across each of the 18 breakout rooms, with several Blackmagic Web Presenter 4K units per room used to send SRT feeds for capture and monitoring to the master control room (MCR). Two spotlight rooms hosting additional presentations were each equipped with an ATEM SDI Extreme ISO live production switcher also used for live streaming and ISO capture.
“ISO recording was a huge success across hundreds of sessions, and the ATEM Television Studio’s internal 2TBs of storage served as a great backup solution in a pinch. Having the ability to remotely inspect the files on each of the ATEMs across the network was very useful,” said Saqib Razaq, Global Head of Technical Operations at Dreamtek.
“Similar to the ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO, we used the compact ATEM SDI Extreme ISOs for multi SDI ingest, streaming, and recording, and the Web Presenter 4Ks facilitated performance metrics and status to our MCR,” Kashaan Butt, Global Head of Solutions at Dreamtek, added.
While streamlined and successful ingest of the presentations was a crucial step in developing the VOD content, a major challenge was still ahead.
“A big part of Dreamtek is innovation,” noted Eggleston. “We rarely say no, but we never blindly say yes. This project was global in scale both on the production side and on the distribution side: more than 300 pieces of content shared with a team of 22 remote editors spread across the globe and made available to a worldwide audience on demand within 72 hours, some even within a few hours.”
That began in the master control room where two Blackmagic Cloud Store 20TB network storage solutions uploaded content to Google Cloud Storage, accessible by the remote post production team within seconds of session capture being stopped.
“Our team found the Cloud Stores easy to work with, and the network performance was as advertised, making quick work of ingesting footage from so many different sessions across the three days,” said Razaq.
With the highly successful project under its belt, Dreamtek was brought onboard for subsequent events, not only recreating the workflow but adding to it, increasing the project’s scale and scope.
“In addition to executing the same substantial workflow for the new event, we also had a team that simultaneously captured 130 red carpet interviews, produced an awards gala and captured high end sit down interviews with execs, partners and customers that were onsite for the global conference. For these deliverables, we heavily relied on the color correction and keying abilities of DaVinci Resolve Studio,” said Eggleston.
“Dreamtek is very much a production agency soup to nuts, so we’re able to leverage our 25 years of industry experience and apply that knowledge when creating new solutions,” concluded Eggleston. “With flexible and feature rich products from Blackmagic Design, we’re able to build out innovative workflows to help address all our clients’ needs.”