Here at Zodiac Studios, we often find ourselves working with new systems. And when I say working, I mean pushing the boundaries of what the designers had in mind.
We had a wonderful opportunity to work with Limitless Lights and Sound on Melee 3, an MMA event consisting of 12 fights, presented by OTK.
We had over 120,000 people watching the stream. Overall, our production went rather smoothly. Our camera operators and FOH teams worked in amazing synchronization to deliver a fantastic experience. We encountered some technical issues early in our day, but our team of specialists resolved them before rehearsals. All of our issues arose from the house internet connection. We narrowed down the issue to the modem itself. Our upload speeds of 950MBPS were hindered by occasional system-wide service drops. This can be a show killer for a live stream. To remedy this situation, we routed the stream to a bonded cellular solution. This did create some issues in our network infrastructure. We ended up utilizing an isolated network for local traffic, such as NDI.
Our camera team ran on our standard CCU rack. We had four FB-75 cameras being used as shoulder cameras and a fifth being used on our 21’ jib. Two shoulder cameras were placed on the edges of the cage. These cameras were equipped with 20x lenses. We had two roaming cameras, one with a 20x lens and the other with a 14x. Our jib had a 12x lens, which was a little wider than I had expected but looked good overall.
We ran our CCU rack to both of our Tricasters and our record rack. This way, we could ensure some seamless redundancy in the event of hardware failure. We also used the Tricaster 2 Elite to route our audio mixes to the recorders and the live stream. We had the minor challenge of using a third mix to send back to the audio station for in-house audio. This allowed us to independently control the audio levels for our records and the stream.
When it came to the Flowics graphics package, we found its limit. We integrated Flowics with Google Sheets to make the design process more efficient. We used Flowics’ paginated list feature as a cornerstone of our design process. It allowed us to change our round counter on our timer overlay, change fights, and change sponsor graphics.
The bulk of the overlay came from our client in the form of a .webx file. We then used data from the Google Sheet to fill in various text fields. We also integrated the native Elgato Streamdeck plugin to turn overlays on and off. This is where things started to get a little amorphous. When we turned on an overlay via the Streamdeck, it would pop up on the control window as a “deleted overlay.” Something in this process broke Flowics’ paginated list feature. When an overlay, such as our round timer, was turned on via the Streamdeck, you could no longer use the paginated list feature to change the round timer. This technical issue only happened when the overlay was turned on from the Streamdeck. This created undue confusion.
We also discovered inconsistent animation when using .webx videos. There was quite a bit of variation in when certain objects would fire, animate, and change. Sometimes the text would come in before the .webx video, and sometimes it would come in as designed. We experienced up to a 200ms variation. This was the limit of the Flowics system. I’m sure we would have had no problems with a different cable modem. Nonetheless, in my opinion, using .webx videos from the cloud was a mistake. In retrospect, we should have used a different design process.
On the labor side, I don’t really know what to say. I have the best team. My camera operators absolutely killed it. My replay operator is the best I could ask for. Limitless brought the HEAT as always. My EIC, David Sussman, is one of the most talented people I have had the chance to work with. He is a daily source of inspiration. A special shout-out to Lucas Ames. I have watched him grow as a technician in ways that I never expected. I am so proud to be able to watch these technicians grow in their trade. They rise to the challenge each and every day. They are the true heroes of this story. Without them, I would be nothing.
James Shiplette
Operations Manager
Zodiac Studios
Melee 3 Crew:
