“Jamie’s recent livestream of my son’s wedding was outstanding! His attention to detail and ability to capture the larger picture allowed loved ones from around the world to fully experience the event, together. A precious gift for virtual guests. The feeling provided could not be captured in any better way. My gratitude is overflowing!” - Robyn Rymer

The Next Best Thing to Being There

We spend a comical amount of time over here at Ceremony DJs preparing custom set lists for all of your interesting, creative and unique events, sometimes learning entire genres and even multiple genres for those of you lucky enough to be our first clients for a given project.

And while part of the magic of a great live DJ set is that it will never happen again, at least not exactly like that, it’s a little bit of a shame that all that hard work evaporates in such a spectacular, glorious, effervescent moment.

In the interest of better preserving all this great music and giving you all something to go home with after your event, we’ve put our heads together to solve the age old problem of putting time in a bottle, while simultaneously bringing you, your event, and our business into the 21st century…

Livestream!

Now don’t get me wrong, live-streaming has existed for a minute and a certain amount of it has been percolating up through the DJ community for some time now, but it really took an international emergency for many of us to really take the time to figure out what this would look like in the context of a real live wedding event.

And if you’re saying to yourself, “Why didn’t everybody think of this sooner?” I’m here to explain the particular logistical hurdles of doing a full event livestream that maybe you hadn’t considered and how we’ve overcome them all with our new multi-camera, multi-angle, full event livestream service!

The Competition

First off, what’s out there already and why. The first people on the scene for the whole wedding livestream service idea were obviously the photographers and the videographers. They have great cameras and equipment, they have the contracts, they are probably already filming your wedding anyway, it makes sense for them to do it.

But even the most experienced photographers and videographers out there will tell you, the problem with livestreaming isn’t getting a great shot - even your iPhone has a 4K lens at this point - it’s battery life and wireless connectivity.

What’s the point of having a terrific image if it blocks out when the wireless signal gets fuzzy or worse completely drops.

And how are you supposed to film an uninterrupted 6+ hour event if your camera battery runs out in less than four hours.

And how can you make it affordable if filming requires a second and third shooter on top of the crew you’ve already got going for normal photos and video?

This is why most of the services out there right now stream only the ceremony. And I’ll completely leave aside the fact that you would have to actually want to hear the music for the entire event to make an uninterrupted, full event livestream bearable. So here’s what we did.

It’s All About The Wireless

First off, we built an entire local access network for your event and hooked it to a dedicated t-mobile hotspot. If you think about it, the wireless conditions at most wedding venues are tenuous at best. More often than not you are getting married under a tree in a field with one bar of wireless signal, and no power or wifi.

Even if you are lucky enough to be in a room with internet and the venue let’s you use their wifi, you are competing with the venue itself’s wifi needs and possibly also competing with all the guests and their cell phones as well. This makes for horrible, unstable livestreaming conditions, even under the best of circumstances.

By providing a completely independent wireless source to the venue, we were able to ensure that no one else at the venue or event would be competing with us for data, which is good, because uploading 6 hours of video uses a lot of data.

Dealing with Latency

Now you’ve got a good signal, even in the worst conditions, but you still need to deal with the delay between the camera filming and the sound in the room running through the board. Even in the best conditions theres about a 1 second delay between the audio and the video when you transmit over wifi. So we hard wired everything.

We ran 300 ft ethernet cables from one end of the venue to the other, so we would have zero latency for the mics on the ceremony and speeches and we ran it all through a 1 gigabit high speed gaming router to ensure there would be next to no glitches or delays.

Solving the Battery Problem

At this point you must be asking yourself, “But how did they maintain all of the cameras fully charged for the entire 6 hour event when the camera batteries only last 4 hours?!” And the answer is a technology known as “Power Over Ethernet.”

If you can imagine, most weddings are taking place in areas where the power situation is almost as bad as the wi-fi. Now, while we could run even more cables to power everything everywhere, it takes time and it’s not really the best solution.

By purchasing cameras that are “Power Over Ethernet” enabled and pairing them with a “Power Over Ethernet Switcher” we were able to hardwire the cameras to the main video production computer with minimal labor while ensuring both a stable signal and steady source of power.

But How Do You Control The Cameras

Now that you’ve got everything hooked up, you’ve got three cameras hardwired together, you’ve got one for the ceremony, one for the dinner and one for the dancing, you might be asking yourself, how did you avoid needing three cameramen?

And the answer is a combination of these great Mevo cameras that allows you to pan, tilt and zoom remotely and an open source program called Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) which allows you to cut between the different cameras, add lower third effects like your wedding monogram and even run pre-recorded video from your family directly into the stream.

So now you’ve got a stable signal, stable power, three cameras you can control remotely and all the sound running through the main board with zero latency. Basically, we have turned your wedding into a live produced TV show.

What’s This OBS?

OBS is the program most of your favorite YouTube stars use to produce their online shows. It’s an open source program that’s been tinkered with and improved over the years to enable it to interface with most of the different cameras and streaming platforms.

This enables you to stream from a desktop computer to any of your favorite social platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Twitch, you name it. We recommend streaming to the music site Mixcloud due to music licensing issues, but you could theoretically stream to all of them at once with a little tweaking.

How Does This All Look?

For our first event we did the project on the house for an adventurous couple that agreed to be our beta-test clients, and it came out great!

I was a little worried that the low light conditions might be a bit challenging but it turns out these Mevo cameras really do have amazing low light capabilities as advertised. You can practically film in the dark and it looks like the lights are on. It’s kind of crazy.

We did a fully custom, new music set for these folks and it was nice to actually get to show that off to the folks at home. We also purchased a Scarlett 2i2 interface for the sound which enabled us to ensure the highest quality sound out of the board into the video production computer.

The sound card box has a little flashing EQ knob that turns out to be pretty handy for monitoring the levels as they go out to the home audience.

But Wait, There’s More

We also threw in a free video projector for these folks so they could project a video message from their family members who couldn’t attend along with a video from the engagement that the groom had filmed, all screening simultaneously at the venue and online.

We hope to build on this at future events by offering our Instagram live feed photo wall as an integration so your guests can take photos during the event with your wedding hashtag and we can both project them live at the event and draw on them as an additional source for the video.

The future!

So What’s This Going to Cost?

In conclusion, we are now offering a full multi-camera, multi-angle, live produced video for less than most people will film your wedding and you get a recording of the whole event and all the music along with the deal.

We still have to pay off the debt on all the gear, but for a limited time only, we’ll be offering the whole thing for $2000, which gets you 3 mevo cameras, 3 300’ ethernet cables, 1 portal 1 gigabit high speed gaming router, 1 power over ethernet switcher, 1 macbook running OBS and 1 iPad to control the cameras.

That’s basically half price what most videographers charge for an 8 minute video or 30% off what they charge for just livestreaming the ceremony.

And you get all the music!

Honestly, this is mostly about the music for us. But you obviously get a video of the entire wedding as well to edit at your convenience.

So don’t wait, embrace the future and livestream your wedding for the 150 people you had to tell they couldn’t attend!

We’ll be doing the same for our wedding this July. We could only afford to invite 30 guests so the family at home will be grateful to play along. We might even video conference them in to do a few speeches. Stay tuned!