FREMONT, CA – American indie folk band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes performed as part of the recent “Sound in Focus” event in LA. Blackmagic Design announced that Santa Monica production company Subtractive Inc. used ATEM 2 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K, ATEM 1 M/E Broadcast Panel and HyperDeck Studio 12G broadcast recorders as part of a live streaming and IMAG setup for a recent Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros concert at Century Park in Los Angeles.
More details from Blackmagic (www.blackmagicdesign.com):
It was presented by KCRW, LA’s local NPR affiliate, and The Annenberg Foundation, which supports the education community through grantmaking, technical assistance and direct charitable activities. This concert series complimented the exhibition “Refugee” at the Annenberg Space for Photography and was live streamed to the KCRW and Annenberg Foundation websites.
According to Kyle Schember, CEO of Subtractive, the ATEM 2 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K and ATEM 1 M/E Broadcast Panel were used for live switching during the show. Six cameras were fed into the ATEM 2 M/E Broadcast Studio 4K, and two feeds were sent out, one for the live stream to each website and the other for the IMAG screens at Century Park. In between the artists’ sets at the show, one of the program feeds was used for live VJing of graphics and event messaging on the LED screens.
“Our favorite thing about the ATEM system was that it was not reliant on a computer,” said Kyle. “Even if our computer crashed we could still switch. That’s a big deal when you are live streaming because that’s not a moment that you want to have a laptop die on you. It gives us one less point of failure, and that’s a key differentiator.”
Kyle also used three HyperDeck Studio 12Gs during the show to record program feeds. He isolated some of the cameras and recorded one clean program feed and one that contained graphics and branding. Noting the HyperDecks’ ease of use, Kyle said that he is able to use them in a wide variety of ways, and that being able to use them for HD or 4K at higher frames is a huge benefit.
“The HyperDecks are great and easy to use,” said Kyle. “We use them even just for playback at events to watch things as we go and adjusting the cameras as necessary based on what we’re watching. But what’s really great is that we can use them to hand an SSD to our client at the end of an event. The file is in ProRes already and we don’t have to sit there at the end of the night transcoding or moving files around. We can deliver the program simply by pulling a drive and handing it to our client. That’s a huge deal.
“The Blackmagic Design products are so compact and portable,” continued Kyle. “The overall footprint of what is required for live streaming becomes so much smaller yet the quality is still very high. The ease of transport and the ease of setup means we can bring them pretty much anywhere and broadcast right away. The products have lot of features in a tiny space, and it makes for an easier all around production.”
