Continued from Live
What a whirlwind and a steep learning curve… After all the preparation and testing I did at the office, I was nervous until the cameras were shut off. The IBEX sessions went off successfully, but not without speed bumps.
I left for NJ on Monday morning after loading all the gear into the truck. It’s about 3 hours to Toms River from our house so I was up there shortly after lunch. We spent day one doing the pre-shoot which consisted of filming the installation of some components which would be discussed in the Wednesday morning session. That seemed to take forever and I collapsed into my hotel bed at 9.
I was up early to edit the previous day’s work and do the final prep before heading over to the shop (Ocean County Technical School). I needed to have all the shots worked out and complete the setup to run a few streaming tests before we could head home for the day. That too… took forever and it was even later when I finally crawled into bed.
The next morning would be an early start since we went live at 830. I got to the school and got checked in before 7 and was grateful for being able to leave most of the gear set overnight. We opened the broadcast at 815 and to my pleasant surprise, everything was running great (that is until it wasn’t). I couldn’t be quite sure how much bandwidth an HD stream really consumed, but it exceeded what my “unlimited” plan provided. So about 45 minutes in it went from 8500 kbps to 600. Ugh. I managed to switch to the backup hotspot, but the session had about 7 minutes of glitchy video. Live and learn.
Session two followed a set change and several hours to prep surrounded by curious teenagers who now think their instructor is a movie star. We introduced some new elements with separate video feeds for multifunction displays that were donated by Garmin and Simrad along with connection to the new Evinrude G3. What a sweet setup. I was really pleased how that session worked out. No glitches in the stream after working out the bandwidth issues with the head of school IT. I also managed to run some picture in picture sequences to add some professional touches for the audience in Tampa.
I can’t describe the level of relief when it was all wrapped and I was headed back to Annapolis. It was several month of prep all concluding in one day. Whew.
