I was asked by SECedu again to help provide some livestreaming services (Zoom), for their 2022 offering of COMP6[84]41 / LAWS3040.

(BTW last year I also helped to livestream the COMP6[84]43 course)

The Situation

Location: ✅

Thank goodness the locations for both lectures were at the same place, in the same building as where the gear is stored

Time: ⚠️

Unfortunately, both lectures had a class beforehand.

Which means that I couldn’t bump-in and set up the equipment until the previous class finished. I could however, leave the HDMI cable (connecting the presentation computer to my video switcher) taped down on the floor between lectures since the lectures were on consecutive days

Again this meant that I had 15 minutes to set everything up :/

Ease of Setup: 🔥

So like back in January (a whole month before the start of the teaching period), I was asked to provide a list of equipment recommendations for a long-overdue upgrade. This would help minimise setup time (just plug ~3 cables in), as well as make it easier for the average person to operate.

So that was 18 weeks ago, and I still haven’t been sent the payment to start procuring the items. (No I’m not buying ahead of time and claiming reimbursement, I’ve had clients who ended up refusing to pay.. even with a contract signed???).

So unfortunately it’s still a big mess.

A bunch of cables connected everywhere, plus additional gear that I had to lend out to them.

I wonder how next term will go (if they’re seeking to livestream courses), as I won’t be available to help out..

Highlights

💾 Capture Card

The university finally bought their own capture card (last year 2021)!
That said we still needed two - one for the camera, and the other for the laptop (else some form of screen casting like NDI or vdo.ninja).

🛒 Trolley

So I made them buy a beach trolley to lug around the equipment.
Best investment ever (well they paid so 🤷‍♂️)

📡 Tin Foil

🪵 Stick.

The tripod arm was wayyyy too short for any long-range operation. Given the delay it’s taking to get the funds for their AV upgrade (that they requested), I doubt I could get a telescoping tripod arm expensed.

Eventually I got used some clamps to bind the sticks to the tripod arm, otherwise the sticks moved around a bit and didn’t provide enough rigidity

Wrap Up

Overall, everything went smoothly for most of the sessions.
Sometimes my laptop (brother’s Dell XPS / Lenovo ThinkPad Extreme X1) would play up though… CPU throttling, the graphics driver crashing (not recoverable until a system restart), random power issues???

Eventually I’ll buy my own performant laptop (or like the MacBook M2 when it comes out???) - but then again, I shouldn’t need to provide high computational power; especially when it could all be solved by SECedu going through with their AV procurement… I’m still waiting.