In addition to making streaming small or alternative events much more easily, having streaming video equipment also has another major use: changing the workflow for pre-recorded video production to save time and money.
I’ve used this successfully for several projects, but this concept really clicked for me when watching an interview with two Youtubers, Rhett and Link, who described how their production workflow for Good Mythical Morning was largely shot live with minimal editing; they aimed to do as much of it live to minimize post-production work.
For videos that have a fair amount of graphics work required, or need to overlay and combine different video sources, post-production is a lot of work. You need to record all of the separate pieces, create all of the separate graphics, then import them all into your video editing software of choice. Then you need to lay them all into a timeline and do all of the editing work before exporting. It’s a lot of effort, and one that often gets pushed onto an editor, which can get expensive. Live streaming equipment enables some of those videos to be produced live without any editing work (or very minimal editing). It has more pre-production setup work, but not nearly as much as post-production.
Let’s look at an example.
I recorded a series of videos for use alongside an assignment in practicum courses. It required students to make an e-portfolio to show their projects and other work to potential employers. Here’s the first video from that series:
These videos were recorded entirely live, in one take. There is no post-production editing in this video. I setup OBS in advance with the graphics that you see in the introduction, for the name lower-thirds graphic, and the “What is an e-portfolio?” and background you see behind the video. It’s recorded using the equipment described in the previous post; the most important pieces here are OBS, the Blackmagic ATEM mini, and a StreamDeck. Using this combination, I was able to trigger all of the switches between graphics during the recording. Each different visual layout is a different scene in OBS. If I messed up, I stopped and started a new full recording.
This would have required over an hour of post-production work if I had needed to set things up in post; several hours more if I didn’t have the visual layouts already set up. But, instead, it was recorded live and immediately uploaded to YouTube, for use by students right away.
Is it as professional as you’d get from a trained editor who does this as a career? No, but it didn’t cost anything to ‘edit’ and was available immediately. Those two advantages enable this use for a lot of different scenarios. Treating a recording as if it were a live event enables removing a lot – if not all – of the post-production work, saving you time and money.
The low cost of production and time savings allows this to be used for recording training or curriculum videos, but can also be used for other purposes; basically any information-sharing video which doesn’t require multiple locations can use this method.
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