Since there was no time for testing and everything was done in a rush there were a few mistakes here and there. I’ll go over them here so that if you find yourself in a similar situation where you need to run multiple streams at once you know to avoid these pitholes.

Let’s start with the VMIX stream audio/video patch. In VMIX you have 4 outputs. When you go to settings and select output 1 you can select what source this output outputs. And by press the cogwheel you are asked what audio source this output should use. Now what I didn’t realise in the rush was that this is not the place to set up output 1 & 2 for streams, even though it might say so in the settings page. Where you really want to go, is into stream settings at the bottom row and press ‘quality’ cogwheel. Here you will choose what audio channel that stream should listen to and choose an input. But don’t forget to change them to the second or third stream setting independently! If you have the “Use stream 1 quality” tick on, it will also use the same audio and video channels basically duplicating it. So be careful when choosing outputs and where to choose the output settings. When using multicorder, you need to go to the settings to set them up. When streaming, go to the stream settings. Because it totally makes sense these are not global settings (even though it says so in the settings page)!

If you noticed that one of the reffs sound came through very clearly while others were mixed in the background noise there’s a very good reason for this. I had brought 4 wireless channels w/ beltbacks and headsets. But what I had not accounted for was that they might get into way when dodging the fencers and messing around with the wooden stick. Only one reff was okay to use the headset. For future HEMA streamers: bring lavaliers. They would have been okay. I got to admit, I wasn’t prepared for that one.

Originally I did draw and we discussed that the arenas and cameras should be oriented so that the fencers are on the sides. Due to miscommunication this didn’t happen as you can see from the end product and I utterly forgot about it until someone in YouTube Chat mentioned the camera angles being “unfortunate”. You know that feeling of an inner lightning strike and the urge to facepalm yourself through the back of the skull? That happened.

After the event had closed and everyone were at their hotel/home/bar/car, I was ready to go to sleep. Before doing so I quickly checked that all the streams looked nice and that they sounded okayish. Last thing I did before hitting my head against the pillow was check that the finals got saved and that the stream recording had indeed gone till the end. Being pleased with myself for achieving the impossible I went to sleep. Next morning I wake up to a message saying “Hey, the stream recording cuts at 12h during the womens finals. Anything you can do about this?” Whaat?!? How?? The hell? I had just checked it, everything was okay… opened my phone and having the stream recording still open I could see that yeah, it lasts till the end, 12:44:xx. But in the video listing, it showed 11:55:xx.

At this point some of you might have realized what happened. YouTube has a 12h timelimit for stream recordings, so it if goes over, it gets cut or doesn’t get shown at all. YouTube’s documentation is bit unclear about this. But it takes some time, so while I was sleeping the recording got cut. Now let’s just say for reasons I had not put on the external recordings on in the multicorder. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS RECORD THE OUTPUT(S)!!! You’ll save yourself heeps amount of trouble. I found a way which I’m not happy to go through here to save the recording, since otherwise I would have had to redo all the cuts, all the graphics, resyncinc all the sound manually. A task I was not looking forward to and luckily I found a workaround. Good luck to you my friend who is in the same trouble. According to forums, I’m not the only idiot who forgot this little aspect of YouTube live streaming.