In March 2020, I started delivering online training sessions (instead of doing it in person). In these series of blog posts, I describe how I’ve set up what I call my “video streaming studio”, hoping that my experience and feedback can be useful to others.
In this first article, I’ll give some context so that you can understand what I’m doing and what I’m trying to achieve.
The second article will describe the hardware equipment that I’m using: computers, cameras, lights, and so on.
The third article will describe the general software setup. I’m using OBS Studio and I will explain what I do with it, how, and why.
The fourth article will describe how I got that to work on Linux. The first articles can be useful to you no matter which operating system you use (OBS Studio is available on macOS and Windows as well).
Before we dive in, a little bit of context: I’ve been delivering talks, workshops, training, for almost 10 years now, but it’s been my main source of income (as a freelancer) for a couple of years only. I do not have any kind of formal training in audio or video production. This means that I’ve certainly made some horrendous mistakes in my choice of equpiment, software, and how I use them. Take everything I wrote with a boulder of salt! If you have advice, suggestions, questions, or any kind of feedback, you are welcome to contact me, I’d love to hear from you!
What I do
For the last couple of years, I’ve been delivering Docker and Kubernetes training, almost exclusively in person. I’ve done private training (where a company hires me to train anywhere from for 6 to 60 employees at the same time), public training (where attendees pay per individual seat to attend), conference training (where a conference organizer pays me to deliver a workshop or tutorial at their event). I’ve also delivered free workshops, spoke at meetups, and done a small number of online presentations.
When I present to an audience, what people see on the projector is a mirror of my screen. I do this because I constantly switch between slides (that are designed to be presented full screen), a command-line terminal (usually with a huge font, so that it’s easily readable even from the back of the room), and a web browser (when showing demos or looking up extra information or documentation).
I do not have a separate screen with speaker notes, because it makes the switching (to the terminal and web browser) less seamless.
It is certainly possible to deliver that kind of training using only a laptop computer with its built-in webcam and sharing my screen. But it is very hard to keep the audience engaged this way for long period of times, so I wanted to up my game, so to speak.
Past attempts at producing video content
Since in-person training doesn’t scale, I tried a few times to record my classes. I’ve tried studio recording (without an audience, at my own pace) and live recording.
I found studio recording to be extremely difficult given my current skillset. I had to:
- record myself present the course, filming my face;
- record the hands-on sequences, labs, and demos separately;
- edit everything together (adding slides in the process).
At this point, this is not something that I can do. I tried, and I failed. At best, I could produce 15 minutes of content with 2 weeks of work; and the result wasn’t outstanding. It was very difficult to get demos and the voice-over in sync. It required me to write down most of what I wanted to say, and many, many takes; and a very tedious editing proess.
Live recording
Live recording seemed easier, because in theory, I would just have to hit “record” and present the way I usually do. In practice, of course, things are different.
I wrote another blog post about recording workshop videos with almost no budget that describes my experiences and the process that I used.
Streaming
Before the COVID-19 outbreak, I didn’t think I would like (or be able) to deliver my courses online. In March 2020, when it became obvious that in-person training wasn’t going to happen in the near future, I decided to get some equipment and get into streaming and online courses.
Hindsight is 20/20: streaming is a great format, in the sense that it makes some of my previous technical problems go away. Streamers are not expected to pace on stage, so there is no need for a camera operator to keep you in frame. There is also a lot of equipment, software, and platforms available for streamers, so I’m not in uncharted territory.
The expectations are also different. I think about it like music recorded in a studio vs performed live. I tend to be more demanding and notice problems more in recorded music (because the sound quality is also better), while being simultaneously more forgiving, and more easily moved, by live music. I imagine that my audience will also be more forgiving with live content, where the expectations are different: lower expectations in terms of video quality (because we understand the technical constraints of streaming live video feeds) but higher expectations in terms of interactivity (because that’s the whole point of a live streaming). That’s great, because the interaction and Q&A are precisely the parts that I’m comfortable with!
Results
If you want to see what my online talks look like, here are a couple of examples:
(Note that in both cases, the quality is not as good as it could be, because I was streaming to a third person who was then re-streaming it to YouTube Live. I hope to have “direct” streams soon too, with hopefully a better quality!)
What’s next
In part 2, I will describe the equipment that I am using or that I have tried.
In part 3, I will describe my software setup. It’s based on OBS Studio, which is available on Linux, macOS, Windows.
In part 4, I will describe how I got OBS (and associated paraphernalia) to run on Linux. In fact, I even got everything running in Docker containers, and I’ll also explain why.