E! UK delivered Oscars Watch Along Party using a compact live production workflow with Blackmagic

The web broadcaster Alex Pettitt used a compact live production workflow consisting of the ATEM Television Studio HD, HyperDeck Studio Mini and Blackmagic Web Presenter.

The prolific web broadcaster Alex Pettitt delivered a Facebook Live Stream for broadcaster E! UK’s Oscars Watch Along Party using a compact live production workflow consisting of the ATEM Television Studio HD, HyperDeck Studio Mini and Blackmagic Web Presenter.

E! hosts Watch Along parties for many high profile award ceremonies, in which celebrities are invited to a luxury hotel to give their instant reactions to all of the red carpet action. The contents are then streamed out live to the broadcaster’s social media feeds, to interact with fans and encourage them to join the conversation.

Alex’s brief for the Oscars was to deliver a slick and entertaining live web broadcast that would help drive viewers to the channel’s linear coverage of the event and continue watching. Given the hotel suite location, E! UK made it clear that space would be at a premium, but that Alex couldn’t compromise on production quality.

‘The production area was just big enough to squeeze in a trestle table for myself and a colleague to work from, so I knew that Blackmagic’s new web broadcasting kit would be the perfect solution,’ explains Alex. ‘At first, I think the E! team were worried that I’d arrived with just a small suitcase, which not only had the live streaming kit inside but also my clothes for the next day! But that quickly turned to amazement once everything was unpacked and ready to go in just a few minutes, and they got to see the amazing quality that the kit delivered.’

Three camera sources were fed into the ATEM Television Studio HD, which was controlled by both software and from its front panel buttons. To save further space, Alex made use of the 7′ Blackmagic Video Assist 4K as his multiview monitor during the production. ‘It was the perfect size to see all of the inputs and the preview/program screens, and as a bonus, we fed the audio from the unit into a mini speaker so the production team could hear the live studio audio.’

Blackmagic Web Presenter

The ATEM’s program out was fed into a Blackmagic Web Presenter to convert the live broadcast to 720p, where it was output over USB to a Mac running OBS for distribution via E!’s Facebook page. A clean camera feed from the AUX out was also recorded in ProRes to SD cards using the HyperDeck Studio Mini allowing Alex to produce additional social media clips and teasers as the night unfolded.

‘The ATEM Television Studio HD is a brilliant bit of kit. Having full control via the front panel and source buttons means you can do everything on the switcher itself, so if you had no room for an additional laptop, you could still deliver a professional multicam broadcast,’ concludes Alex.

‘The switcher performed flawlessly during the web broadcast while the HyperDeck Studio Mini and Blackmagic Web Presenter proved incredibly straightforward and easy to set up and operate. Simply put, we couldn’t have delivered this production without Blackmagic, as it met our budget and space requirements perfectly.’