Morning Announcements
The Story Begins
The Morning announcement live streams can be attributed to many things but the greatest was the failing, all be it very slowly, Public Address system.
The Lance, one of McQuaid's school newspapers (yes, plural) made a call for students interested in video production and being interested I attended. Their goal was to run a live version of the announcements that currently where done on the PA.
The Initial Setup
The first build was very rough around the edges but worked nevertheless. The school supplied us with a modern Lenovo Mini-PC and Camera as well as a microphone. The Lance had found a room in the school to use as a studio prior to my arrival.
The live streams were powered by Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) studio and Controlled through an Elgato Stream Deck+, additionally an open source plugin for OBS was used for some light automatons.
The First Big Problem was getting the PC to handle live streaming. Even with a modern hardware, the PC could not handle the stabler hardware based encoding. Using software encoding works well enough but any changes on the computer threaten to sink this ship.
In a positive, the Canon XA-15 provided to us as a camera has been nothing but reliable. Outputting video over 3G-SDI and runs through an AJA U-TAP SDI.
Next Step
After surviving the school year, plans where made to improve the setup but had to be put on hold as the space we were using was relocated and we were given the boot.