NewTek TriCaster Advanced Edition User Guide - Manual (Page 203)

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your viewers. When video is compressed (as it invariably is for web viewing) you can lose important detail;
compressing a full-screen video down to a quarter or a sixteenth of its size is a lesson in humility!
O THER F ACTORS
Other variables to keep in mind when you’re creating video for the web are contrast and motion. During
video encoding for web distribution, a fair amount of video information and detail can be lost. For this
reason, good lighting of your source video is essential.
Also, web streaming doesn’t handle detail, transitions and motion all that well -- so your best shots should
be close up, and without a lot of movement. Too, audio from cameras and camcorders is rarely as good as
that from external microphones. You should at least use a clip-on lavaliere microphone, if not a directional
or shotgun microphone to be sure you record only the audio you really want. Finally, for high quality
streaming, consider using a 720p session, even when your cameras may be SD and interlaced (there is no
particular benefit to working in SD when your goal is a smaller streaming output.
SECTION 18.8 DIAGNOSTICS AND TROUBLESHOOTING
As technologies go, video streaming is still in its adolescent phase, at best. There are a lot of different
standards and diverse environments to consider. TriCaster gives you the necessary tools, but there are still
some teething problems you may encounter. This section will point you in the right direction to overcome
them.
18.8.1 TESTING YOUR STREAM
When it comes to using your TriCaster in a professional live production environment (i.e., your bread and
butter depends on getting it right, and now - not tomorrow), failure to test beforehand is not merely unwise
- it can be professional suicide.
You should already be aware of the need for redundancy in a professional environment (you didn’t bring just
one camera, did you?) As reliable as any device may be, Murphy’s Law has not been repealed … so you plan
for this, bringing the appropriate equipment, such as uninterruptable power supplies, backup recording
devices (there’s no shame in having a VCR backing up your digital record – ‘low tech’ still has a place in the
grand scheme.)
But you also need to perform onsite testing, to ensure your live stream is working well before ‘zero hour.’
No-one will thank you for excuses, no matter how brilliantly they point the finger at forces beyond your
control.
1. Set up and enable a test program stream from your TriCaster.
2. You can use TriCaster’s integrated web browser, but you may want to confirm using an external
system, too.
Success at this point does not necessarily mean you’re done. You may be able to see the stream locally, but
can someone outside the local environment connect to it over the Internet? The best way to find out is to
have someone at a remote location verify that your stream is streaming properly. If it is, great! Otherwise,
keep reading…