DUN A DUN – DUN A DUN!
High School Sports are already a great opportunity to highlight student athletes, teachers or community members serving as coaches and role models, and to bring a large quantity of people together to have fun and support one another. You know what’s great about the current times we live in? We can provide this experience in a digital medium now. Yeah, for years local news and sports networks could cover a live sporting event but did you ever think students and adults would collaborate to bring the same experience to your phone, computer, or television? Well… I did but I’m a nerd.
Introduction
To start off, this whole initiative is a lot to manage. If you’re an educator or coach looking into doing this sort of thing please establish some goals for yourself. Are you going to cover a specific sport, just a few random events here and there, or is this a full time dream to help promote the school, students, and community? Being a teacher in the morning and afternoon, then helping kids broadcast at night, and still having a family at home and free time to do other responsibilities is asking a lot at times. I’m very fortunate that my students tend to be actively involved, self managing, and that I have a few staff members and colleagues helping along the way when I’m not there.
I have the pleasure of having a great colleague, Mark Bartschi, who did a large amount of the software workflow for the school broadcasting initiative. While I can’t fully explain his setup and everything I will highlight the amenities he’s provided to the setup as well as the equipment and gear my students and I manage. I’m doing a quick once over honestly, so I highly encourage you to do further research into the VMix Broadcasting software, XML coding, and other tools. Mark has done a lot of this coding and player/team stat management on his own time and is much more smarter than me in that department. He can even have player photos queue up, so there’s options out there for database access and management during a production.
I also encourage you to look into this initiative as a means of earning additional classroom funding. Mark is very fortunate enough to work for a great company which I won’t disclose, and he’s able to provide modest donations to the class. His career also provides great lifestyle and financial security so he’s able to spend a lot of free time prepping and working with my students and I. He’s managed to build our school’s athletic branding up enough so that we can earn residuals from YouTube ads and other streaming platforms. We’re not rich, but a few hundred bucks here and there helps buy lights, cables, and other accessories for the classroom, as well as upgrading our live production gear piece by piece.
You’re doing a cool thing at the end of the day no matter how much time you invest into this. Students have their highlights online for the world (and hopefully recruiters) to see. Families from out of town, state, or even the country can easily watch and support their student athletes. During the lockdown and pandemic, COVID restrictions prevented family and community members from joining us in person but our live streams provided a safe alternative. Don’t stress about making mistakes, kids falling asleep running the camera, or audio hiccups – it’s going to happen no matter what to the best of us. What’s important is that you’re doing something no one expects a high school production team to do.
The Gear and Setup
Really quick complaint about public education; vendors suck. It’s ridiculous that an expert choosing to work in education has to find loopholes to get what they need is a bit ridiculous. A few years ago I had to find the loophole of purchasing a desktop computer that would run the software we wanted and have some horsepower under the hood for it. Educators are not typically allowed to just order any computer…
BUT… there’s nothing stopping you from ordering “computer parts” in my situation. I built a computer based on my personal experience and research online for video and photography editing, live streaming and encoding, and working for long amounts of time at once. Honestly, a lot of what I just said isn’t really a concern these days. Most computers are pretty solid and can do a heck of a lot more than what we require for live streaming. Just do yourself a favor and avoid the Celeron processors, low ram amounts, and maybe see if it’s “gaming” focused. Gaming computers honestly have the horsepower to do a majority of multimedia work since they’re meant to render and load games anyway.
I went with a Ryzen 5 3400, 32GB of DDR4 Ram, an old AMD 380 (or 390 I can’t remember) gaming graphics card, some SSDs for the operating system and programs, as well as an M.2 SSD for instant replay, and just a normal 1TB 7200RPM hard drive for storing data, graphics, etc. This thing flies and has never given us any issue other than the occasional software crash. I made sure to put an extra fan in, do the thermal paste myself for the CPU, and I clean it out regularly just to keep it cool and maintained.
We put it on a cart usually and roll it back and forth from my classroom to the gym, press box at the football field, and even the patio area by the baseball fields. Space is limited on the cart, sure, and we’ve actually been trying a few different carts out for space and ergonomics. Your mileage may vary but try and find something comfortable for someone to use and have space to do other things if necessary.
The best new toy that accompanies our production gear, VMix, and other resources we have is the Stream Deck XL. We’re able to do shortcuts for commands such as switching cameras, transitioning, and queuing up graphics. We would have to use the mouse and keyboard before we went with this piece of tech and it’s not only much more user friendly to my students but also helps avoid mistakes and makes things much snappier. No time wasted waving the cursor around looking for a button, just press it!
The desktop captures video signals similarly to our production setup in the classroom. The desktop has a BlackMagic SDI capture card with 4 inputs and 1 output. We’ll run SDI cable across the press box or the gym to the computer. Students have learned to secure the cables, along with extension cords and accessories, with tape, cable runners, or even rugs and trashcans. We don’t want anyone to trip or interrupt our broadcast, but we especially want to protect the cables and accessories from wear, tear, and weather. Hey, for you industry folks, my kids are even learning to roll cable correctly!
Showtime and Final Thoughts
Once everything is hooked up, it’s show time. Ideally you want someone on each camera and somebody directing. Mark is usually our main announcer or commentator, joined by local newspaper journalist Neal Fischer usually, but having Mark multitask is not ideal since he’s already mentally focused on the game. Myself or a student will usually jump into the director’s chair. We’ll communicate on headsets with camera operators, cue Mark and Neal for commercial breaks or toss backs, and troubleshoot or brainstorm ideas over the show to improve the quality.
The results speak for themselves. You can visit our Wekiva Sports Youtube Channel and see the work we do as a whole. Many shows are great, some shows have tech issues, but once in a while we capture some amazing moments as well. Comebacks in the 4th quarter, mercy rule sweeps, or special events like senior nights and staff commemorating. I’m really proud of the work we bring to the community, and the world, and hope that it inspires all schools to continuously focus on improving their outreach and supporting their elective programs such as mine. There’s so much more students and teachers can offer schools and families if they have the resources and opportunities that we have at my school.