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[Mac Kerr]

Letting people run their own Zoom session like a casual meeting is like handing somebody a wireless lav and expecting them to clip it on correctly and then remember to turn the pack on.  At some level of professionalism you have to turn it into a real production, which is a new thing for most of us since it's a lot of video. 

There's a Chicago-based company that does mostly high-end online meetings, and they go to the extreme of having a separate Zoom (or similar) session for each major participant.  Think of a rack (or a room) full of computers, each one doing the local end of a one-person meeting.  The video and audio then goes to a big switching and mixing matrix (they use a PM7 for the audio portion) and it's run like a big live sales meeting.

That's the extreme, of course. But it's good to think in those terms, like having separate computers for playback, etc.

This is what we do at my day job. We can have 14 Zoom sessions going to our 50 input 3ME Sony production switcher and our 96 input SSL console. Usually we use 2-5 of those zoom connections as outbound “pool” feeds to supplement the fiber feeds that go to the web steaming service.

We also have access to 10 cameras, 4 PTZ, a couple of fully robotic, and the rest need operators.

I think we had about 5000 attendees online for our company wide town hall this morning ahead of the earnings call with no web stream, zoom only.

Mac

[Tim McCulloch]

What I'd do with powerpoint - have a local machine connected to the ATEM Mini and have the operator connect to it via remote desktop, or use Internet Clicker.

[Dave Garoutte]

The ATEM Mini Pro only streams via Facebook, Youtube, and Twitch, Twitter. It won't stream to Zoom. For Zoom you have to use the USB connection as a webcam on a computer that is running Zoom. I think this is what threw me the most, trying to figure out the routing out of the ATEM and into Zoom. It's the two-way communication through Zoom that I think causes the most difficulties. Trying to figure out how to project a large screen Zoom window so that the attendees in the large room can see and hear it, while also controlling which camera the switcher sends to the Zoom session, seemed to be the difficult part of the whole operation for me.

You have the ATEM Mini Pro connected to a computer by USB to fake the webcam connection into Zoom. Then you have an output from...the Mini Pro? Or the Computer for the Zoom session on the large screen? 

So really, you have to run the Atem control software on the same computer that you run Zoom on...I think? Regardless of where the PowerPoint is coming from.

And then to complicate things even more, I had an external mixer feeding the Atem  Mini Pro audio inputs so that we could have more than just two mics going into the Atem Mini Pro/Zoom.


I guess, I'm trying to figure out where the best place is to feed a large screen/projector for the main room and how to do so? As a second display from the laptop? Or as an output from the ATEM Mini Pro? Or from a Second laptop that isn't connected to anything else except the Zoom session (which means we need two Zoom accounts then)?

Look at BMD streaming bridge for your projector output.  If you are feeding your stream through the USB, then the ethernet port can be used as another feed via the Streaming bridge.  You can plug your projector into the bridge.  This way you don't lose the multiview.

As far as the powerpoint, Zoom prioritizes audio, which can make the pages unreadable, so you need to set that client to video priority.  The frame rate can be set lower also, as the images are basically static.  This can raise the resolution on marginal connections.

[ProSoundWeb Community]