OET webcast equipment

Each month, our staff travels to a different school district to conduct a webcast. They share information with school districts about any number of technology topics. I regularly get asked about the components used during our technology webcasts. I’ll do my best to give some details in this blog entry.

We use Windows Media Services, part of W2K3 SP1, on the server side. Our folks recommend 2GB RAM on the server and plenty of disk space for video archiving. We hook our camera up to a workstation that has either a USB or firewire port, at least 1GB RAM and we use the Windows Media Encoder software on that workstation. We also use Wirecast software. This is a fee-based product, but a product like this is a worthy addition if you intend to produce or edit your webcasts after recording. This software is what we use to add the “email questions to…” banner at the bottom of the screen. We also use this for some of the “upcoming webcasts” slides and items of this nature.

As our webcast operators have told me, the audio quality requires more effort than does the video. The camera we use for the webcast is a decent camera, but no different than what you might already have in your own school district:
We use three microphones made by Audio-Technica. The model we use is the U851a. I turned one upside-down to get this photo, though I’m pretty sure they perform better right-side up. 🙂 To the right, there is a picture of the power sources for each of the three microphones. This was during setup and each of these three feeds will eventually be plugged into an audio mixer.

The particular mixer we use is an Azden FMX-32. I’ll include a few different views of this product, but we’re essentially running the three microphones to each of the three channels. Each channel has its own volume, etc. I’ll also include a picture of the side of this mixer. There are different sources and types of outputs and you wouldn’t use them all, but this mixer would need to be connected to an audio source on your webcast workstation. Pictures below of the top, back and side of our particular audio mixer:
I’ll go ahead and include on picture of the side of the workstation. In our case, we use a PCMCIA-based firewire connection. We could use the firewire port built into the workstation or we could even use a USB-based connection. The PCMCIA connection is known to work and perhaps provides a more physically stable connection, as the last thing we need is to drop that connection during the webcast.
I’ll include one final shot of the camera we use, with the external microphone attached. This camera also has an internal hard drive. According to our recording staff, this would give us an absolute worst-case scenario whereby we could still maintain and save a production. The external mic is also an audio source (in case the mixer/mics fail) and the internal hard drive of the camera is also recording the webcast (in the event that we lose connectivity to the server, our stream fails, etc).
I’m not an expert on webcasts and I don’t necessarily endorse any of these products over any others, but I did want to take some time to show the specific components we use for our district webcasts. I hope this is of some benefit. Take care!