YDQA: Ep 47 - "How are drones used for live video broadcasting?"

Hello and welcome back to another episode of your drone questions answered. I'm John Dicko with the drone launch Academy here to find the answers to your drone questions. Today's question is how are drones used for live?

broadcasting today. I have with me returning is Dave Downey president, senior events specialist with BCC live. That's Boulder County communications, Dave. Thanks for coming back.

Dave Downey: Yeah, it's good to be back. Thanks, John.

John Dickow: So when I had you back last time, we were, we were talking mainly about drones and capturing good quality video.

but in our conversation, you talked about how you and BCC live, you do live broadcasts. and you gave us a, brief synopsis of kind of what, what you do, but give us a good summary again, of, what you do at BCC live and how you're leveraging the drone for live video.

Dave Downey: Yeah. So one of the things that we do at BCC live is live productions, live video, live broadcast, whatever you want to call it.

Live streaming is the simplest way, but where we have cameras out in the field at sporting events. we [00:01:00] broadcast those cameras via internet back to a studio. We mix those cameras together. We add graphics, we add in a host or hosts that are in our studio. And then we have a package product that we send out to whether it be YouTube, Facebook, outside watch is another place that we send video feeds to.

And one of those cameras, if not two of those cameras at a lot of events will be a drone. Not all drones work for live broadcasting. We need a drone that has some kind of video output from the controller. a popular drone in my book for live broadcasting would be the Mavic three pro and being HDMI out on the RC controller.

And so the RC, the RC pro controller has an HDMI out, and that allows us to take that wireless transmission from the drone, bring it to the receiver as all drones do. So that's how you see, and then spit that out to an encoder. And that encoder is going to send [00:02:00] that signal all the way back to our studio.

And one of the things that's important for us is to keep things in sync. So if a drone is flying over a cyclist or something like that. And there's a drone on or and there's a camera on the ground that they're in sync. So when we go from the person going around the corner and then we go to the drone shot, they're, coming out of the corner at that point, not going around the corner again.

So all of the timing of all the cameras have to be in sync and getting that. Signal from the drone as quickly as possible and then turning it into what we would call a television signal or hdmi is important. There's other ways to do it as you know controllers can live stream And so you could send it back to your studio that way, but you would add in some extra latency that would bring about that problem of seeing the same action twice or missing some action would even be worse than that.

So a popular drone that we use again is the Mavic three pro. so we want a 10 80 60 signal and it can [00:03:00] do that. And then, like I said, we'll put it into an encoder, which is a live view backpack and that'll combine cellular signals and send that back to our studio in Boulder, Colorado.

John Dickow: Okay. Very cool. And so you're saying you're using an HDMI out of the controller, so that's the person operating the drone or whatever is controlling the drone. Video is starting with the drone, obviously being sent to the controller. so does that mean that the controller is with the rest of your operation, broadcasting operation, or essentially your, your control room or control space?

Dave Downey: So the pilot, is running the controller. And then they just have an HDMI cable that goes around to a backpack they're wearing. So they're fully mobile. in our control room, they're watching what he sees. he sees all the telemetry, height, speed, distance, direction. Barring everything you want to know the control room has a clean version coming through to them That is just the video signal and then the control room really just takes it when they feel like it's appropriate The drones not up all the time.

We when we [00:04:00] expect action or like on a multi lap kind of race, a lot of what we do is cycling, marathons, triathlon. So we know when the action is going to come. So there's a lot of downtime. And then the drone gets up ahead of that. And then when the pack comes through or something like that, we can go to a drone shot.

John Dickow: Excellent. Okay. No, that makes sense. Thank you. Thank you for that. And you're even mentioning sometimes that drone shot is more than just capturing the action on at the event or the sporting event, but it can also make for a good fallback shot in the event something else drops.

Is that

Dave Downey: right? Yeah. So one of the most important things we do In regards to a live broadcast is go shoot what we call scenics the day before. And that's where, let's say you were here in Boulder, Colorado, you would get a shot of the flat irons, you would get a shot of the continental divide. And things like that that don't include the venue because the venue is probably not set up the day before and then on the way into a commercial and you'll see this in the NFL, you'll see this [00:05:00] in most sporting events will throw to a beauty shot of the Continental Divide, why the hosts are saying we'll be right back in a few minutes.

We typically shoot that the day before or a couple days before. And so scenics. are really important part, not just to have them in the bank. if we lose signal or something like that, and it's not terribly uncommon to lose signal in the field through internet disruption or something like that, we can go to these fallback shots.

And nobody knows, nobody knows that the shot of the continental divide was shot on Friday, not live on Saturday.

John Dickow: Okay. that's actually a very good trick. that's a good idea is having that as a backup shot. one question that just kind of popped up to my head what streaming broadcasting platform, and I'm sorry if I sound completely ignorant or stupid in terms of how, you know, because I'm, I'm sure your operation is, is fairly large. It's a professional operation. I do some live streaming for work where I'm kind of using, you know, what we have access to.

And so things like [00:06:00] vNix, when it comes to streaming out and switching, is there a platform you use that is specifically friendly towards, you know, drone feeds or using drones and equipments or transmissions from drones? Or what does that operation look like? How is your setup in terms of like, platform switchers, softwares?

Dave Downey: Yeah, so, you can go, as we mentioned before, straight from the drone and you can live stream directly from your phone or live stream directly from your controller, but in our case, we transcode that signal and we send it back to our studio where then it's decoded. Turn back into a physical connection, which then it's turned back into an SDI connection that plugs into a TriCaster.

Okay. And then the TriCaster, and you mentioned vMix, another great product would work great for this solution also. That's where we mix in graphics, whether it's vMix or a TriCaster mix in other camera shots and stuff like that. Mm-Hmm. . And then package that all up and then send it [00:07:00] back out through an encoder and send it to.

You know, you can't beat YouTube. It's free. It's robust. You're not going to overload servers at YouTube, but a lot of customers want things behind a paywall or so your, end points can really be decided by your customer. And then unless you're self producing or something like that, your customer will say, here's where we want it to go.

But I think vMix would be a great solution to bring in a drone stream. And then. As I told you, we're worried about latency. Latency would be simply defined as the time between the, sensor on the drone captured the live action to the time we're getting it, and we need that down under a second at the most.

If that's not something that's important to you, you could probably, you RTM feed, RTMP feed straight into vMix or the TriCaster or something like that, which might add two or three seconds. But it might not matter, like understand what your action is. If it's for scenics and [00:08:00] over the top venue shots where it's not really going to matter.

You know, let's say you're taking a top down shot of a football game, but you're not showing the plays. You're just showing the stadium and the crowd. Well, that could come in three, four, five seconds later and it wouldn't matter. But for what we do, we need all those cameras to be within about 50 milliseconds.

So, that's a fraction of a second, obviously.

John Dickow: Yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense, especially, you know, you're doing sporting events, you don't want to miss a beat that's a serious setup. I'm going to challenge you once again I just want to give you an opportunity in case we've missed any crucial points here when it comes to drones and live video.

Dave Downey: Yeah. If I was, if I was going to be getting into any kind of live broadcasting or anything like that with drones, one of the things that constantly catches people off guards is batteries and how long can your drone stay in the air? You know, if you're doing a 10 hour broadcast. You know, you're going to need 10 to 15 batteries.

You know, yeah, you can have ones charging while other ones are up in the air, but typically the [00:09:00] drone needs to come down every 30 to 45 minutes. And do you have another battery ready to go? Is it just a touch and go swap out the battery? It goes back up and you don't miss any action. But frequently when we started using drones for live broadcasting, we'd have lots of drone coverage in the first half of the broadcast.

And then we'd be spent on batteries. And as you know, as everybody knows out there with drones, it gets expensive. You know, to have 10 or 15 batteries is a lot of money and you would never need that many batteries for post production stuff where you can shoot a little bit in the morning, shoot some more later.

You know, you wouldn't, you don't typically need to be in the air for five, six, seven hours at a stretch. And again, in 30 minute increments. How many batteries do you need? How quickly can you charge them? How many chargers do you have? Because when you buy a lot of these packages, it comes with a charger that maybe holds three batteries if you're lucky.

so one of those, two of those and understanding. How long your battery lasts [00:10:00] and how quickly it's going to charge. it sometimes makes everything else seem easy if you get that figured out. Yeah.

John Dickow: I mean, that's got to involve some planning, some strategy in terms of you know, shortening that timing. If, if you got to switch batteries or switch drones in order to switch a battery

Dave Downey: and switching drones is, is a silver bullet there that, having two drones and two controllers, you're, then you're just switching an HDMI, cord from one controller to the other, and you can basically fly the one drone up, station it right next to the other, bring the other one down and have, the slightest little dip in signal there while you're on another camera shot.

So if you can afford it, but again, Even us and all the way up to ESPN, you know, money's an issue. And so you have to balance what can this broadcast support? You know, a lot of broadcasts can't support five drones or the next level up, if we're talking about drones that we use would be an inspire. And so you just went from four grand to 14 grand.

[00:11:00] and you get some more things and you get some better optics and stuff. But for what we do, turning it all into 10 80. We can keep those costs down with like a Mavic or something like that.

John Dickow: Excellent. I know from a little bit of experience working in the live space could be cumbersome, could be risky You're always problem solving. You're always, reconfiguring thing and trying to mitigate risk. and you can even say, this is advice for me, somebody who does live streaming in a smaller operation, for somebody who, has to go through those challenges and maybe the first few times or, on a semi regular basis, things break down, things cut out. What advice, do you have for, somebody like that to, to keep going and keep working forward?

Dave Downey: Yeah, practice. I see this all too often that people are like, well, if it's not college football or the NFL, that's not me, I'm not interested.

And that's not a great attitude to get experience. you can go live stream the dog park from your drone to get practice and learn about the intricacies [00:12:00] and cell phone traffic and battery power and all these things and getting that experience. However you have to get it is critical. And I think that's something we've been good at.

That when we see a job that this is going to provide us with experience, we consider that like that, that plays into the role of the finances and everything of the job. Like how bad do you want it? If you really want it, then go out and do it, make some sacrifices to get the job, get the job, get the experience and build a portfolio five years ago.

I would have said to you, yeah, I fly drones. I shoot video, but I wouldn't have been able to say we do it live. And now I can say we've done it live dozens and dozens of times. And here's what we know. So go get that experience is, you know, you brought up vMix, download vMix, practice with it, download Wirecast, practice with it, live stream studio, like learn these.

Live broadcasting pieces of software and then just go and do it. Somebody [00:13:00] wants it. Live streaming is not going back in the bottle. It's just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.

John Dickow: Absolutely. No, I really, really appreciate this. Even at a personal level. I appreciate that. So thank you, Dave. And, and thank you for once again, coming on, sharing your knowledge, sharing your experience, in the really cool work that you do.

And I hope that, further down the line, we find another topic we can chat about. It's always a pleasure having you on this podcast, to pick your brain.

Dave Downey: Yeah. And thanks, John, for what you're doing, like getting this info out to people is indispensable. if you just take one little tidbit away from today, that's the experience that I was talking

John Dickow: about.

Excellent. I really do appreciate that. And Hey, to our listeners, to our viewers, if you have a drone question, send it our way. You can send it over on ydqa. io, type it in there. We'll see it. Or if you're part of the drone launch, connect community, type your question in there. We will find someone to answer your question until then.

We'll see you in the sky.